The role of Zhou Enlai, to this day lionised in the West, was the most craven. After abjectly repenting for having warned the party against "rash advance" in 1956, the prime minister spent the rest of his career as Mao's faithful executive tool. In the Great Leap, a few brief murmurs of concern apart, he fell into line. "Once Mao's most powerful lieutenants debased themselves," Yang comments, "no one else would dare challenge his views." It follows that Zhou's personal responsibility for the calamity is enormous.

Liu Shaoqi, the country's president during the Great Leap, was initially even more enthusiastic than Zhou, especially about the attack on the family, but unlike the prime minister he later developed qualms. "History will record the role you and I played in the starvation of so many people, and the cannibalism will also be memorialised," he told Mao when the Chairman was forced to retreat in 1962.

Particularly unsavoury were the personal spats between Liu's wife Wang Guangmei and Mao's consort Jiang Qing: Jiang tried to sabotage the circulation of a speech by Wang implying criticism of her husband, and cried tears of rage after another by Liu himself: "After Stalin died Khrushchev made a secret report, and now you aren't even dead and someone is making an open report."

Liu's punishment was to be hounded to death in the Cultural Revolution. And it was Zhou, his comrade for many decades, who was to sign his condemnation — his death warrant, in effect — as "traitor, inside agent and scab". I don't recall Zhou's association with cannibalism featuring in John Adams's modish opera Nixon in China, where he emerges as a sagacious and conciliatory figure, the Wise Man from the East.