At the very heart of Gao’s book lies an absorbing question that has occupied numerous Chinese thinkers since the time of Confucius in the fifth century BCE, namely how to understand and deal with the moral ambiguities and practical inhibitions that arise if we choose to serve a tyrant.

–Quote from Jonathan D. Spence’s Remarks on Gao Wenqian’s book Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary: A Biography