 Zhou has been depicted as unconditionally submissive and extremely loyal to Mao and his allies, going out of his way to support or permit the persecution of friends and relatives in order to avoid facing political condemnation himself.After the founding of the PRC, Zhou was unable or unwilling to protect the former spies that he had employed in the Chinese Civil War and the Second World War, who were persecuted for their wartime contacts with the enemies of the CCP.Early in the Cultural Revolution, he told Jiang Qing "From now on you make all the decisions, and I'll make sure they're carried out," and publicly declared that his old comrade, Liu Shaoqi, "deserved to die" for opposing Mao.