In 2023 I read this remarkable book by Ezra Fogel. I recommend you read it for yourself but I tried to be a bit detailed for people who would not want to go through 900 pages.

Of the few men and women in modern history who can truly be described as transformational leaders, it is quite rare that you have two of them in succession in one country. In the USSR there was Vladimir Lenin and then Joseph Stalin, and in China we had Mao Tse-Tung and Deng Xiaoping. And the fact that China’s communist party has had successful transitions while the Soviet Union collapsed is, in my opinion, a testament to the leadership quality of Deng.

Born in 1904 to middle-class parents, Deng Xiaoping was a nationalist from an early age, participating in anti-colonial protests from elementary school. He won a scholarship to study in France but never got the funding needed to complete a degree. Back in China Deng joined the communists in their struggle against Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang, and then against the Japanese, and then back against the Kuomintang until the eventual victory of the communists under Mao.

Deng served loyally under Mao until he was proscribed along with several senior officials during the cultural revolution. While him and his family was out of favour with Mao, his son was paralyzed after being denied a surgery from doctors who were afraid of getting into trouble with the most radical young advocates of the cultural revolution. This experience hardened Deng’s disdain of the cultural revolution as well as strict adherents to revolutionary theory.

After the end of the cultural revolution, and with Mao in his later years, Deng was recalled to work with the party especially on international affairs. Him and Zhou Enlai formed a 2-man team trying to restore former officials to their position while the radical members of the politburo (nicknamed the Gang of Four) accused them of being rightists. In his advanced age, Mao was most concerned about his legacy and despite his belief that Deng was the best person to lead China, he was exasperated by Deng’s refusal to publicly acknowledge that the cultural revolution was a good thing. This led him to eventually settle on Hua Guofeng as his successor.

Hua Guofeng was a believer in opening China to foreign investment and embracing science and technology. Unlike Deng however, he did not enjoy the support of many communist party elders, and his determination to protect Mao’s legacy at all costs put him at odds with party members and intellectuals who were seeking to be rehabilitated from their condemnation during the cultural revolution. By 1980, Hua was out and Deng was fully in the driver’s seat.

Deng’s objectives were to open up & modernize China, to normalise relations with the USA, to keep the Soviet Union (and Vietnam) at bay, to rationalize the size of the military, and to secure a stable succession to a new generation of college-educated party leaders. He faced hurdles at every turn from party conservatives, especially from party elder Chen Yun, whose warnings that the economy could not take the pace of investment and growth proved prescient with the high inflation of the late 1980s.

Deng’s flexibility and commitment to pragmatic solutions are quite remarkable for a life-long revolutionary. He brushed aside cautious party members who were afraid that the market reforms he was introducing could undermine the standing of the party. He courted intellectuals, encouraged students to leave China in droves to study, significantly reduced censorship, broke up farming collectives into smallholder household farms, downsized the army, and established academic performance as the ladder for a career in the party. Most remarkably, he did not seek a cult of personality or absolute power to the extent that Chairman Mao had held. And he gave up power to Jiang Zemin while he was still healthy enough to have continued.

Deng’s commitment to reform and opening gave people the impression that he secretly wanted to turn China into a western-style liberal democracy. However, that could not be further from the truth. Deng studied the USSR’s collapse and surmised that the failure to pursue economic reforms before political reforms was a big mistake. His objective was to strengthen the communist party’s hold over the country by using economic liberalization to drive people out of poverty. And in the darkest chapter of his leadership, during the 1989 Tiananmen protests, his brutal crackdown discarded every perception of him as a political liberal.

At over 900 pages Ezra Vogel has undertaken quite an impressive work on Deng’s life. The book is much more about Deng than about China’s transformation, as his extraordinary life swallows the majority of the text. Ezra leaves out a lot of his own views on Deng’s actions till the end, where he is largely sympathetic to the man and his mission. And given China’s meteoric rise it is hard, with the benefit of hindsight, not to be astounded by Deng. And yet, we should heed Deng’s own words to judge him for what he was, as a human with both achievements and faults.