That doesn't necessarily have anything to do with how smart Zhu Long is. It could simply be that Zhu Long has something the Chairman needs that can't be duplicated elsewhere and which the Chairman can't get by forcing the issue on Zhu Long. The Chairman is a businessman, and while the Operative is valuable to him, it's not worth going to war over, so he plays nice because that's just the simplest and least costly option. Zhu Long could be dumb as a box of rocks and that principle would still apply.
It's like getting into a club. I'll pay the cover to get past the 7', 300 lb. bouncer not because he's necessarily smarter than me, but because it's not worth getting into a fight over.
True, but I'd imagine in the world of shadows and intrigue that Zhu Long and Pike generally operate in, intelligence in the leader and primary decision maker correlates heavily into their power.
I could be completly wrong about them, I just imagine them as incredibly intelligent individuals on par with the highest tier. After all, their main comic comparisons are individuals like Rha's Al Ghul, Lex Luthor, and the Mandarin, all of whom are genius level intellect or higher. It is just my opinion though, and I've got little to base it on besides gut feelings about their place in the world.
I always thought comics seperated out mere genius against a sort of hyper genius level. Batman and Professor X might be a geniuses on their own, but then there's people like Lex Luthor and Tony Stark and Reed Richards who are on a completely different level altogether.
I feel like Chairman and Zhu Long and Wraith are at that peak-human-intelligence scale, but characters like Tachyon and Baron Blade and Parse are on a superhuman level.