This book took me a while to read and was slow at times but was a great summary of Deng Xiaoping’s life, which happened to coincide with the bulk of the major events in China over the past 100 years, from the Long March to Tiananmen. The book really picks up at the end when Deng, in his 70s, finally comes to power and urgently pushes the government, industry, and society at large aggressively toward freer markets and capitalism. I was shocked at the speed of some of the shifts, especially in places like Shenzhen:
In 1979, Shenzhen, just over the border from Hong Kong, was a town of some 20,000 residents, but two decades later the population of Shenzhen city, which now stretched to some of the former rural areas nearby, was approaching 10 million and still growing rapidly.
Deng is a very impressive person and a political survivor through many periods in which he was cast out (but not completely destroyed) by Mao. It raised many questions in my mind about the inevitability of the capitalistic shift that Deng oversaw, and that has led to so much prosperity in China and beyond. Was it the result of Deng’s singular efforts and genius, or was it low-hanging fruit from decades of political incompetence under Mao? I think both are probably true, but no one has perfect answers, and that’s why it’s worth reading books like this.
I think one thing as a Westerner reading this book that was notable was that there is not really any first-hand account from Deng about his experiences. He didn’t have a journal, private correspondence or anything like that. These sorts of firsthand accounts seem much more present in Western history, and so it gives us a sense of various leaders’ inner thoughts. But in this book, I’m left guessing.
What did Deng actually think?
Highlights
Time in the wilderness
Like Churchill, de Gaulle, Lincoln, and other national leaders who fell from high positions and then spent time in the wilderness before returning to high office, Deng found that the time away from daily politics enabled him to achieve clarity about major, long-term national goals. It is hard to imagine that after 1977 Deng could have moved so deftly and forcefully had he not had a considerable length of time to ponder the nature of the reforms that China needed and how to achieve them.
Pushing at the margins
But Deng had been criticized during the Cultural Revolution for being too bourgeois, and in 1975 there was not yet a consensus about opening markets and learning from capitalist countries. So he did what he could to push at the margins. He promoted an expansion of foreign technology imports. He accepted the view of fellow officials that China should not borrow money from foreigners, but the country could make “delayed payments” when foreigners sent goods or capital to China. In addition, Deng supported giving material incentives to workers by offering to pay not according to need, but “according to work.”
Reopening the universities
Some 5,780,000 people who had reached college age within the last decade, many of whom were still working in the countryside, took the test that fall, but there were then only 273,000 slots at the universities. In 1977 and 1978, then, only some 5.8 percent of those who took the examinations could actually be enrolled. For the first time since the Communists ruled China, class background was not a factor in selecting those to be admitted to university. Enrollment was entirely based on merit as measured by examination scores.
Fixing the reason people leave
At the time, Guangdong was suffering from a real security problem: tens of thousands of young people each year were escaping to Hong Kong. When told of the problem during a visit to Guangdong in 1977, Deng explained that the solution lay not in tightening border security with more fencing and more border patrols but in improving the economy of Guangdong so young people would not feel that they had to flee to Hong Kong to find jobs.
By 1978, there were several hundred million people who were underemployed and yet, because socialist societies theoretically eliminated “unemployment” (shiye), even the term “unemployment” was then too sensitive to be used. If urban youth did not have work, they were “waiting for assignment” (daiye).
Deng in Japan
In the 2,200 years of contact between China and its island neighbor, Deng was the first Chinese leader to set foot in Japan. He was also the first to meet the emperor of Japan.
When a reporter asked about ownership of the Senkaku Islands, the audience became tense, but Deng replied that the Chinese and Japanese held different views, used different names for the islands, and should put the issue aside so that later generations, who would be wiser than those present, could solve the problem.
From his trip he concluded, “We must firmly grasp management. Just making things isn’t enough. We need to raise the quality.”
Taiwan and the long view
In the mid-1980s, Deng still had a thin reed of hope for resolving the reunification issue before he “went to meet God”: his personal relationship with Chiang Ching-kuo, his classmate at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow in 1926.
Deng welcomed the visitors from Taiwan and their business ventures, seeing both as possible steps toward eventual reunification, even if not in his lifetime. As he observed, “If we can’t reunify China right away, we will do it in a century; if not in a century, then in a millennium.”
I keep track of all my favorite books on Asia here.