Michael Dillon - Deng Xiaoping: The Man who Made Modern China by Michael Dillon

MICHAEL DILLON was founding Director of the Centre for Contemporary Chinese Studies at the University of Durham, where he taught Modern Chinese History. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Asiatic Society and was Visiting Professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing in 2009. He is the author of China: A Modern History (I.B.Tauris).

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Copyright 2015 Michael Dillon

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ISBN: 978 1 78076 895 3

eISBN: 978 0 85773 539 3

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Contents

A well-paced, and judicious account, well written and very easy to read. Its strength is in giving equal weight to the various phases of Dengs career, rather than focussing too much on the post-1978 period. It also captures something of the complexity and contradictoriness of Deng.

Kerry Brown, author of The New Emperors

Through this fascinating and clearly written biography of Deng Xiaoping, Michael Dillon shows us how different Chinese power politics works from our economic and political world. Economic liberalisation that seems capitalist to the extreme, is combined with state interference and ideological conservatism. In this respect Xi Jinping can be seen as a straight continuation of Deng Xiaopings reform agenda.

Barend Ter Haar, Run Run Shaw Professor of Chinese, University of Oxford

List of Plates

Dengs birthplace in Paifang

The Deng museum in Paifang

Deng in France, 1921

Deng (top row, second from right) at the Chinese Socialist Youth Group conference, Paris, July 1924. Zhou Enlai is in the front row, fourth from left

Deng delivers a report in Yanan, September 1937

Deng and his wife, Zhuo Lin, in the Taihang Mountains

Deng and Liu Bocheng of the 129th Division

Deng, Chen Yi and their families, Shanghai, 1949

Deng and Liu Bocheng, Chongqing, late 1949

The CCP Congress report on the Gao Gang and Rao Shushi case, March 1955

Deng and He Long engaging in manual labour at Ming Tombs, 1958

Deng at Daqing oilfield, 16 July 1964

Deng and Zhou Enlai at Beijing airport, April 1974

Deng at a memorial ceremony for Zhou Enlai, January 1976

Chinese Communist Party 10th Central Committee plenum, 27 July 1977

Deng and Peng Zhen, 1981

Deng on an inspection tour, spring 1983

Deng the calligrapher, spring 1984

Deng at Wuhan railway station on the Southern Tour, 1992

Deng in Shanghai on the Southern Tour

Deng playing bridge, 1990s

Acknowledgements

In Montargis I am grateful to Mme. Dr. Peiwen Wang, President of the Association Amiti Chine Montargis; M. Stphane Poisson, Chef de Cabinet du Maire; and the staff of the secretariat and office of the Mairie for assistance with material on the presence in the town of Deng Xiaoping and other Chinese students on the workstudy programme. Joyce Dillon shared the search for traces of Deng in France and prepared the index. Jan van der Made, of Radio France International, very kindly made available to me his reports from Beijing for Dutch radio on the death of Deng.

In addition to having one of the best collections of recently published academic books in Beijing, All Sages Books (Wansheng shuyuan) on Chengfu Road in Wudaokou was the perfect place to read and reflect on modern Chinese history and the life of Deng Xiaoping and his contemporaries over lunch or coffee. The advice and assistance of staff at Xinhua Books in Wangfujing was also invaluable. In Sichuan, material relating to Deng and local history came from the Deng residence (Xiaoping guju) museum in Paifang and Xinhua Books in Shapingba, Chongqing. As always the British Library and the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds were valuable sources of older material.

At I.B.Tauris I am once again grateful for the assistance of the editorial, production and marketing staff and the anonymous readers. Lester Crooks encouragement and constructive criticism since the inception of the project, and Joanna Godfreys support and advice are much appreciated.

Preface

Dengs China has never achieved the currency that Maos China enjoyed in the 1960s and 1970s, but there is little doubt that the resurgence of the Chinese economy that began in the 1980s could not have taken place without the commanding presence of Deng Xiaoping. Mao was never the sole dictator of Maos China, as is sometimes suggested (although he may well have wished that he could be), and neither were the reforms that followed his death in 1976 solely the work of Deng. Deng had been one of Maos greatest supporters for many years, both before and after the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power in 1949, but it is for his differences with Mao that he will be remembered rather than for the common ground that they shared. Deng was far from being the onlie begetter of Chinas post-Mao reforms: other senior communists, notably Zhou Enlai, Chen Yun and Zhu Rongji, played important supporting roles, but Deng secured the political support of the Communist Party and, without this, the economic reforms could not have begun. An understanding of Dengs life and work is essential if we are to comprehend the reasons behind both the success of the economic reform programme that he promoted so vigorously, and the impact on China of the limitations of his political vision, especially his obstinate resistance to any meaningful political reform.

The age of revolution and civil war, in which Deng Xiaopings personality and political views were formed, may have ended, but the age in which he came to exert a powerful influence on China, the age that began in 1976 with the end of the Cultural Revolution and the death of Mao Zedong, is still a work in progress. Deng Xiaopings long and eventful life began in 1904 in the rural depths of Sichuan, a populous but isolated province in south-western China, in the dying years of the Qing dynasty. It took him finally to Beijing and the leadership, in fact if not in name, of the Communist Party and the Chinese state at a time when he was able to bring about historic changes to the economy and society of his country, changes that are still determining its direction well into the twenty-first century. Dengs status in the party and the government was never precisely articulated, and foreign observers began to refer to Deng as the paramount leader of China. This was not a title used by the government or the Chinese Communist Party, but a form of words which recognised the fact that he appeared to rule China although he had not replaced Mao Zedong as chairman. Even if he was acknowledged to be the most senior political figure, Deng never had absolute control of policy, as is demonstrated by his tour of the south in 1992, at the age of 88, to defend his economic reforms.

He formally retired from active politics in the autumn of 1989 and spent much of his time playing bridge, one of his lifelong passions. He insisted that his only remaining position of authority was as honorary chairman of the Chinese Bridge Association one of the few instances where he used the title of chairman. In reality, as an honoured elder statesman, he continued to be consulted and exercised a degree of influence from behind the scenes although to what extent is debatable until his death in Beijing in 1997.