FOR some 50 years, a modest, self-effacing Chou En-lai, the "gentleman Comrade," the "mandarin Communist," unfailingly deferred to the quixotic, domineering Mao Tse-tung, the towering Helmsman of the People's Republic of China. As in life so on the occasions of their deaths in 1976, Chou was once again overshadowed by his larger-than-reality companion and leader. When, on January 8, Chou En-lai succumbed to stomach cancer, which was discovered in 1972, and his ashes were scattered over the country, no monument was built to his memory, and the man who spoke his eulogy was purged a week later. In contrast, after Mao Tse-tung died on September 9, an entire nation of some 900,000,000 people stood at attention for three minutes in respect; his body will be preserved in perpetuity in a crystal sarcophagus, housed in an appropriate memorial setting, and all the media of China have sought to outdo themselves in professing their sense of loss.

With China, and much of the world, absorbed with the drama of the passing of Mao, the significance of the loss of Chou En-lai is easily underestimated. Furthermore, regardless of the outcome of the succession struggle, Mao's heirs will doubtlessly continue to glorify his memory, proclaiming his sanctions for their every act, and thus for the foreseeable future, political incentives in China will work to exaggerate Mao's and depreciate Chou's contributions to the building of the People's Republic of China.

Yet, paradoxically, it is possible that Chou En-lai's vision