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One of Chou's special assignments: to organize an insurrection among Shanghai's workers. With other veteran Communists, he sneaked into the city, secured arms and training grounds, and succeeded in organizing some 600,000 workers into terrorist bands. When Chiang discovered that the Communists intended to seize power for themselves at the expense of the Nationalists, he swept into Shanghai without warning, disarmed Chou's workers and arrested the ringleaders. Chou, with his talent for landing right side up, managed to escape. The Nationalists put a price of $80,000 (Chinese) on his head. Chou continued to work in the underground, took refuge in expensive hotels, grew a beard, eventually contrived a trip or two to Moscow.
Suavity at Chungking. "You always struck me as being an effeminate type," one of his old schoolmasters said to Chou once. "How is it you could become a Communist?"
"Remember," Chou answered, "you gave me some advice once in school. On cold winter mornings, when I could not bring myself to get out of bed, you advised me to bounce right out, and soon I would feel warm for having had the dash of cold. I found in Communism the same experience. It was chilly at first, but much warmer now because of the chill."
Chou quickly warmed to Communism's climate. After a year in Moscow, he returned in 1929 to join forces with China's new Red boss, Li Lisan, an old friend of his Paris days. Chou strung along with his strategy of armed revolt by city workers, but when Moscow switched to Mao's strategy of organizing a peasant army, Chou managed to switch, too. Chou went to work teaching the new army the political tricks he had long ago taught the Nationalists in Whampoa.
In 1936, when the Communist power in China was at the lowest ebb, Chou's smooth talk and persuasive manner captured a fighting force of 150,000 men right out of the Nationalist fold. This was the army of the "Young Marshal" Chang Hsueh-liang, whom Chou converted thoroughly to the Communist cause. In a daring coup, the Young Marshal kidnaped Chiang Kaishek, hoping thereby to put a stop to the fighting. Chiang's eventual release, engineered with typical tact by Chou on orders from Moscow, resulted in one more marriage of convenience between the Nationalists and Communists in their common fight against Japan, gave the Communists a valuable breathing space in which to consolidate their forces.
During the next nine years, while the two parties alternately talked peace or made open war on each other, Chou spent much of his time in Chungking, China's wartime capital, smoothly persuading China's U.S. allies (particularly the newsmen at the Press Hostel) of the Communists' good intentions. In Washington last week, General Wedemeyer remembered Chou as a "charming individual." Chou lived in the poorest section of the city in a house with a dirt floor and rude peasant furniture. His manner was all modesty and humility. Later in Nanking, his blandishments worked well enough to convince General Marshall, who spoke of "friendship and personal esteem" for Chou, that "there is a definite liberal group among the Communists . . . who would put the interests of the Chinese people above ruthless measures to establish a Communist ideology."