Deng Xiaoping: The Man Who Took Modernity To China

October 3o, 2011

www.nytimes.com

by David Barboza (10-21-11)

In 1979, just when Americans were beginning to reflect on the ascent of Japan, the Harvard sociologist Ezra F. Vogel (right) wrote his best-selling book, “Japan as Number One: Lessons for America.”

Now 81 and retired from Harvard as a professor emeritus, Mr. Vogel has written an equally compelling study of the rise of another Asian superpower. In “Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China,” he chronicles the life of China’s paramount leader during the 1980s and ’90s and his determined push to open up and modernize the world’s most populated country.

“My book ‘Japan as Number One’ played a role in educating Americans about Japan,” Mr. Vogel said during a recent interview at his home here, a few hundred yards from the Harvard campus. “With this book, I thought I could write something new that would educate Americans about China.”

The book, published last month by Harvard University Press, has already been called a monumental biography of Deng and the most comprehensive survey to date of China’s spectacular but rocky road to economic reform.

Some reviews, however, have accused Mr. Vogel of devoting too little space to Deng’s iron-fisted rule, including his 1989 decision to allow the military to use deadly force against demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.

But other scholars say that Mr. Vogel’s new volume offers a deeply textured portrait of Deng and the reforms he championed. “It’s a major accomplishment,” said David Shambaugh, a leading China scholar who teaches at George Washington University. “This book pushes our knowledge of Deng further. And while much of this information is not necessarily new, this is the first time we’ve seen it all in one place, analyzed with scholarly detachment.”

Deng, of course, was one of the giant political figures of the 20th century and has been credited with setting China on a path that helped lift hundreds of millions out of poverty while reshaping global trade patterns. But only a handful of biographies have been written about the man, among them Richard Evans’s 1993 “Deng Xiaoping and the Making of Modern China.”

Historians have largely focused on Mao, the revolutionary commander-philosopher who led the Communist takeover in 1949. But scholars have begun to conclude that it was Deng (1904-97), Mao’s diminutive and long-suffering lieutenant, who deserves credit for truly reshaping China after Mao’s death.

Few scholars were better positioned to write a biography of Deng than Mr. Vogel, who retired from teaching in 2000. For decades Mr. Vogel had studied China, Japan and the other dragons of East Asia. He traveled to Guangdong Province in southern China in 1987 and 1988, when China began opening its special economic zones to foreigners, to study the reforms.

He had also covered some of this material in his groundbreaking 1969 book, “Canton Under Communism,” a study of Guangdong’s capital in the time after the Communist takeover.

Mr. Vogel, who worked for a decade on this huge biography, spent a year brushing up on his Chinese-language skills with a tutor. (Most of his interviews were conducted in Chinese without an interpreter.) He talked to people close to Deng, including two of his daughters, as well as relatives and aides of Communist leaders like Chen Yun, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, who had worked with Deng. He also talked to former Chinese President Jiang Zemin, who rarely grants interviews.

Mr. Vogel visited Deng’s birthplace in Sichuan Province, as well as remote Jiangxi Province, where Deng was exiled during the Cultural Revolution; consulted all of Deng’s official writings; and was given access to newly released documents from United States and Russian archives.

Mr. Vogel compresses the first 65 years of Deng’s life into 30 pages, offering a sweeping overview of his journey from being the son of a small landlord in Sichuan to his transformation into a Communist revolutionary living in France and Russia, and then on to his role as military commander and, later, Mao’s vice premier.

Deng loosened state controls over the lives of ordinary people, opened the door for Chinese to study overseas and, Mr. Vogel explains, he retreated from Maoist doctrine and Communism without ever really saying so. He lured foreign investors to China and tapped outside expertise to jump-start a largely moribund economy, setting the stage for China’s three-decade-long economic boom.

Much of this happened, Mr. Vogel explains in minute detail, despite stiff opposition from Communist Party elders, some of whom feared the reforms were too aggressive, and others who viewed them as bourgeois liberalization.

Mr. Vogel also writes about Deng’s darker periods, like his role in the “anti-rightist campaign” during the 1950s, which harshly targeted scientists and intellectuals and set the stage for the Great Leap Forward, which led to mass starvation.

And he makes clear that in June 1989 it was Deng who ordered the military action to end demonstrations in and around Tiananmen Square, a course that led to the deaths of hundreds of people and incited international outrage.

The political scientist Richard Baum, a professor emeritus at University of California, Los Angeles, said the book offered an enormous amount of new material about Deng’s leadership and internal power struggles in China during the ’70s. But he also said that those achievements were mildly diminished by sections that read like “an uncritical paean to Deng’s character.” Other critics have been harsher, saying some passages read as if they came from Communist Party headquarters.

During an interview Mr. Vogel defended his work. “This is unfair, because in some places I’m very critical,” he said, noting: “A lot of Americans’ view of Deng is so colored by Tiananmen Square. They think it was horrible. I have the same view. But it’s the responsibility of a scholar to have an objective view.”

With this book, Mr. Vogel said he tried to put Deng’s life in context, to show him as a survivor, obsessed with social and political stability and economic progress.

“Who in the 20th century had more influence on more people?” he asked. “He took 300 million people out of poverty. They’d been trying to do it in China for 150 years, and they couldn’t. And he did it.”

The result is an exhaustive, 876-page study of Deng’s life that includes his multiple falls from power and his final comeback, when he assumed the top position in 1978; the book offers new details into how Deng pushed aside Mao’s chosen successor, Hua Guofeng.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 22, 2011, on page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: The Man Who Took Modernity To China.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/22/books/the-impact-of-deng-xiaoping-beyond-tiananmen-square.html?pagewanted=1&ref=books

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