When Chinese historians are able one day to ply their subversive trade without control or censorship, their judgment will surely be that their country should revere Deng Xiaoping way above his predecessor Mao Zedong. Mao led the Communist party to victory over the Kuomintang and the Japanese, and united China in the 1950s. He then plunged his country into the famine and bloody mayhem of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Deng carefully put the pieces of the smashed nation back together again and launched China on its recovery to become assuredly once again the world’s largest economy.
Ezra Vogel’s massive biography assembles the case for Deng (1904-97) with narrative skill and prodigious scholarship. Vogel, for many years a Harvard professor, published the bestselling Japan as Number One in 1979. His principal academic interest then turned to China and he spent some time in the late 1980s studying economic reform in Guangdong. The sources and acknowledgements he cites in this book indicate the breadth of his contacts and study, though when required to stray outside the world of conventional western Sinology he is less sure-footed. His knowledge of British and Hong Kong politics, for example, is pretty sketchy.
The book is not hagiographical but it does occasionally read a little like the Deng family’s authorised biography. Warts are mentioned from time to time but the overall picture presented usually discounts the blemishes. While we learn once again that Deng’s time as a young emigrant worker in France in the 1920s left him with a lifetime love of croissants, his later military exploits in the civil war are dealt with pretty summarily. Moreover, Deng’s rule in the south-west of China, including his native Sichuan from 1949-52, gets just a page and a half. It was sufficiently brutal to earn Mao’s approval. Larger landlords were attacked and killed. One day we will presumably learn more about Deng’s methods at this time; they were plainly not for the squeamish.