Deng Xiaoping

Deng Xiaoping: The Man Who Unmade Mao's China

In October 1920 a sixteen-year-old from a Sichuan village stepped off a boat at Marseilles with eighty schoolmates and no money. Over the next four years he fitted parts at a Renault factory, laboured at the Le Creusot iron and steel plant, shovelled coal as a locomotive fireman and washed dishes in restaurants, barely earning enough to survive. Fifty-eight years later the same man would hold the fate of a fifth of humanity in his hands and decide, against every doctrine he had spent his life defending, that China would have markets.

A Sichuan Boy in a Renault Factory

He was born Deng Xiansheng on 22 August 1904 in Paifang village, Guang'an County, Sichuan, and took the name Deng Xixian at school. He graduated from Chongqing Preparatory School in the summer of 1920 and left for France on a work-study programme. Between shifts he attended middle schools at Bayeux and Chatillon, and read Marxism under the guidance of older Chinese radicals in Europe, among them Zhou Enlai, whose protection would matter enormously half a century later.

He joined the Chinese Communist Youth League in Europe in 1922, became a full Party member by late 1924, and in 1926 studied at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow before returning to China in early 1927. It is worth pausing on that education. Deng learned communism in a French factory and a Soviet classroom, which is to say he learned both the theory of industrial society and the physical reality of it. Very few of his colleagues had done both.

The Revolutionary

His first independent command, the Baise Uprising in Guangxi in 1929, failed. He survived it, and survived everything afterwards. He took part in the Long March while serving as General Secretary of the Party's Central Committee, then spent the war years and the civil war as political commissar to the commander Liu Bocheng, one of the most effective partnerships in the Red Army. In 1949 he helped direct the assault on his home province of Sichuan, and Chongqing fell on 1 December. After the founding of the People's Republic he governed the whole Southwestern Region as First Secretary.

He rose because he was useful and because he was loyal. He backed Mao's Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957 and was rewarded with the general secretaryship, running the Party's daily business alongside President Liu Shaoqi. Then the Great Leap Forward produced catastrophe, and Deng and Liu quietly began repairing the economy with pragmatic, incentive-based measures. Their competence was noticed. So was their heresy.

Twice Destroyed

When Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Deng was denounced as a bourgeois element. The cost was personal in the most brutal way: Red Guards seized his son Deng Pufang, tortured him and threw him from a fourth-floor window, leaving him paraplegic. Deng himself was sent to work in a tractor factory in rural Jiangxi. He was treated less savagely than Liu Shaoqi, who died in detention, but he spent years in internal exile.

Zhou Enlai brought him back in the early 1970s as executive vice-premier, and Deng immediately set about restoring order to a wrecked administration. The Gang of Four saw the threat. When Zhou died in January 1976, Deng lost his shield and was purged a second time, accused of political mistakes. He was seventy-one years old and had been destroyed twice.

Mao died later that year. Deng did not seize power; he assembled it. Through the late 1970s he outmanoeuvred Mao's designated successor Hua Guofeng, encouraging in 1977 an opening that permitted criticism of Cultural Revolution excesses, which conveniently discredited the men who had risen through it. By 1980 Zhao Ziyang had replaced Hua as premier, and by 1981 Hu Yaobang held the Party leadership. The most powerful man in China never took the top formal job.

The Farmers Who Started It

What followed was the largest deliberate economic transformation in history. Deng adopted the Four Modernizations, an agenda inherited from Zhou Enlai covering agriculture, industry, science and technology, and defence, and packaged the reforms as Gaige Kaifang, reform and opening up. He gave it doctrinal cover with the formula socialism with Chinese characteristics, and defended it with a sentence that quietly detonated forty years of orthodoxy: "Planning and market forces are not the essential difference between socialism and capitalism."

In practice it meant the household responsibility system, which let farming families keep and sell what they produced above quota; the revival of rural markets; material incentives instead of political exhortation; and a turn toward light industry and export-led growth. It meant Special Economic Zones, above all Shenzhen, designed to import foreign capital and technology on terms the Party controlled. Britannica's summary is exact: Deng abandoned many orthodox communist doctrines and set about incorporating elements of the free-enterprise system into the Chinese economy. He also continued the one-child policy, an intervention in private life on a scale no other government has attempted.

Hong Kong, Washington, and 1989

In 1979 he became the first leader of the People's Republic to visit the United States, meeting President Carter; Washington duly recognised Beijing over Taipei. In December 1984 he concluded the Sino-British Joint Declaration, returning Hong Kong in 1997 under the formula one country, two systems, with the territory's capitalist arrangements guaranteed for fifty years. A comparable agreement covered Macao. It was a genuinely novel constitutional device, invented to solve a problem no existing theory could.

Then came the limit. After the death of the reformist Hu Yaobang in April 1989, pro-democracy demonstrations filled Tiananmen Square. On 20 May, as chairman of the Central Military Commission, Deng declared martial law. The army cleared the square; estimates of the dead range from 400 to 7,000 depending on the source. International condemnation followed, and Deng's own standing was damaged. Conservatives used the crackdown to stall the reforms.

He answered them at eighty-seven. In the spring of 1992 he made a southern tour through Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shanghai, publicly restarting the reform programme with the slogan that to get rich is glorious, and placing supporting articles in Shanghai's Liberation Daily under the pen name Huang Fuping. Jiang Zemin came down on his side. The tour worked, and China's boom resumed.

Why Deng Is Called a Genius

The faculty in question is not intellectual brilliance. Deng wrote no significant theory, coined no system, and would have been embarrassed by the suggestion. What he possessed to an extraordinary degree was strategic patience combined with ideological ruthlessness in the service of results, and an ability to hold two incompatible things together long enough for one to change into the other. He kept the Communist Party's absolute monopoly on power while dismantling almost everything the Party said it believed about economics, and he did it without civil war, without a public repudiation of Mao, and without losing control. Nobody else has performed that operation successfully; every European communist state that attempted comparable reform collapsed.

The second element is sequencing. He began with agriculture, where results came fastest and where success bought political capital for the harder fights. He fenced experiments inside Special Economic Zones so that failure would be contained and success undeniable. One country, two systems was the same instinct applied to sovereignty. This is the intelligence of an engineer, not a philosopher.

The counter-case is severe and permanent. He ordered the army against unarmed civilians in 1989 and killed hundreds at minimum. He had earlier been an enthusiastic executor of Mao's Anti-Rightist Campaign. The China he built carried, by his own succession's admission, unprofitable state enterprises, deep regional and urban-rural inequality, and pervasive corruption. He lifted more people out of poverty than any individual in recorded history and shut the door on political freedom behind them. Both facts are his.

Legacy: Ashes at Sea

He died in Beijing on 19 February 1997, aged 92, of a lung infection complicated by Parkinson's disease, months before the Hong Kong handover he had negotiated. Where Mao's body was embalmed and displayed, Deng was cremated and his ashes scattered at sea, exactly as he had asked. It was a final, deliberate refusal of the cult, from the man who had spent his life being broken by one and then quietly took it apart.

Achievements

• Educated at Moscow Sun Yat-sen University and Communist University of the Toilers of the East
• Worked as politician, journalist and diplomat