Zhou Enlai -The Early Years by Chae-Jin Lee

I'm still fascinated by the transformation of China in the last century. I think Japan had every reason to think that they could play the same role that the conquoring Mongols/Manchus/Jin and earlier warlike neighbors had played as rulers of the Central Kingdom -- that just didn't seem able to govern itself.

But some kind of surprising idealism erupted -- managed, at least in some part -- by that elegant intellectual, Zhou Enlai --- so the story of these founders of the PRC interests me.

But if this book has a use -- it's as source material for others that will follow -- since no attempt at understanding is made beyond the idea that Zhou was a good Confucian boy turned gentleman. How his youthful idealism adapted to the cold calculations of power -- and murder --- this story is left for others to tell.
And .. there isn't an attempt to get inside the mind that chose communism over the other ideologies that were available.

It's just the story of a bright, studious, shy young man whose clan identifies him as the hope of his generation and gives him the best education available -- though he is distracted -- and eventually consumed -- by the political unrest in the last decades of the Qing Dynasty.