Chen Jian authors Zhou Enlai: A Life, the first archive-records-based and comprehensive biography in English of China’s premier for twenty-seven years. He offers a nuanced portrait of Zhou’s dilemmas-ridden life as a revolutionary, an eminent and pragmatic statesman, a diplomatic giant, and, in the final analysis, a person with his own vision and aspiration who did much to make China, as well as the larger world, what it is today.

Chen Jian is Distinguished Global Network Professor of History at NYU Shanghai/NYU, Hu Shih Professor of History Emeritus at Cornell, and leading scholar of the Cold War and modern Chinese history. Among his many publications are Mao’s China and the Cold War, China’s Road to the Korean War, Critical Notes on the Political History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (in Chinese), and The Great Transformation: China’s Road from Revolution to Reform (co-authored with Odd Arne Westad).