A Survivor’s Tale

Building on files from Russian state archives and interviews with his wives, children, and dissident leaders, this book serves as a useful corrective to panegyrics such as Ezra F. Vogel’s Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (2011), which focused almost exclusively on Deng’s economic reforms, and Michael Dillon’s Deng Xiaoping: The Man Who Made Modern China (2014), which bent over backwards to find excuses for his crimes.

Born in the hamlet of Paifang in Sichuan Province to well-educated, landowning parents, Deng had a privileged upbringing. Pantsov and Levine detail his student years in Paris in the early 1920s, where the French inclination to view Chinese students as sources of cheap labor made him join the Communists and form a useful friendship with a slightly older Zhou Enlai. Then on to Moscow for some ideological fine tuning. Here the Chinese Communists were told to join the Kuomintang, the nationalist movement, and undermine it from within. Thus, in classic undercover mode, we find Deng in 1927 disguised as an antiques dealer in Shanghai, wearing luxurious gowns and fancy hats and enveloped in a cloud of expensive cigarette smoke.

On Zhou’s recommendation, Deng’s first chance to turn his newly acquired theories into practice was as emissary to the wild southwestern Guangxi Province in 1929. To explain communism to the Zhuang tribe, whose language did not contain the concept of “inequality,” was uphill work. And as most of the local peasantry regarded Han Chinese with great suspicion, Deng made few converts. So “agrarian reform took the form of a series of robberies and murders, an orgy of armed banditry.” (Or put another way, “there was no mass movement of peasants.”) Such was the fiasco that only his link to Zhou allowed Deng to recover. This prompted the first of many self-criticisms, which he developed into an art form:

What brought Deng to Mao Zedong’s attention was a 1931 party conference in Ruijin, where Deng voiced his support of Mao’s argument for guerrilla warfare against Chiang Kai–shek’s forces rather than sticking with the Soviet doctrine of offensive warfare. And as one of 20,000 survivors of the 1934-35 Long March, Deng proved himself to be a resourceful battlefield commander. After the Communist victory in China’s civil war, Deng wrote the plans for operations that crushed the Tibetan Army, and went on to repress “bourgeois elements” in southwest China, after which he was summoned to Beijing in 1952.

“Papa,” his daughter Nan asked, “in Sichuan everyone called you the head. What will they call you in Beijing?”

“The foot,” Deng replied—and a heavy foot he turned out to be.

The authors’ handling of the panic among the Chinese leadership and the deteriorating relationship between China and the Soviet Union after Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 “secret speech” denouncing Stalin is especially vivid. (As an exasperated Khrushchev later told the Chinese ambassador: “If you want Stalin, you can have him in a coffin. We’ll send him to you in a special railway car.”) By exposing Stalin’s cult of personality and supposed infallibility, the speech struck at the very core of the Communist idea—and of Mao’s rule. In response, Mao resorted to his favorite method of smoking out party enemies by inviting a manly exchange of opinions on the issue, or to use one of his favorite metaphors: “Let everything repulsive crawl out completely, since if they come out only halfway, they can hide again.” Uncharacteristically tone-deaf about what the occasion called for—a complete and unequivocal submission to Mao—Deng first tried to fudge the issue by stressing that engaging in idolatry was a bad thing, of course, but had not Maoism always recognized the role of the inspiring leader in history?

In Mao’s ever-vigilant mind, this waffle earned Deng a black mark. But Deng quickly got with the program in the party purge and Mao’s subsequent “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend” campaign to root out counterrevolutionaries by luring intellectuals to speak their mind. In both efforts, Mao was the initiator and Deng “the main executor” (in the authors’ words). A half-million Chinese were hauled off to labor camps.

Beijing’s break with Moscow left Mao free to launch his very own brand of socialism, the Great Leap Forward, demanding quantum increases in steel and grain production so that “in the future, all women would walk in high heeled shoes and wear lipstick.” Everyone, Deng included, “was hurrying to jump on the utopian bandwagon.” But of course, the idea of having farmers produce steel in their backyards was madness, and during 1958-62, an estimated 45 million Chinese perished from famine. Despite growing doubts, Deng continued to sing the praises of the Great Leap Forward until a 1961 inspection tour convinced him that collectivization doesn’t work. The following year he approved the so-called Family Contract System, by which peasants could keep whatever they produced above the norm.

At a meeting to discuss the agricultural catastrophe, a defensive Mao confessed that “I don’t understand many issues of economic construction.” But he quickly counterattacked by demanding self-criticism from the participants: “A frenzy of confessions followed, every man turning himself inside out.” What struck Mao as an especially unforgivable transgression was Deng’s later comment that “it doesn’t matter if the cat is black or yellow, as long as it can catch mice, it is a good cat.”

This gave Mao nightmares about a “Chinese Khrushchev,” so it is little wonder that Deng became a prime victim of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, Mao’s comeback campaign targeting “capitalist roaders” in the bureaucracy. Encouraged to “bombard the headquarters,” young Red Guards hauled Deng before revolutionary committees where he was forced to abase himself. Deng’s children were required to condemn their father and work in the countryside. His son broke his back in a suicide attempt and, for a long time, was denied medical treatment.

At this point, most people might have given up; but Deng fired off another abject letter to Chairman Mao, begging for something to do. Mao’s actress-wife Jiang Qing had demanded Deng’s expulsion from the Communist party, but Mao chose to slowly return him to government: He was simply too efficient to lose.

In the post-Mao era, when it came to outmaneuvering rivals and pushing his economic reforms, Deng resorted at key moments to Maoist tactics by bypassing the party apparatus and appealing directly to the masses: “We do not have the right to refute or criticize the masses. . . . And there is nothing to be afraid of.” Deng’s famous Democracy Wall recalled Mao’s old invitation to Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom.

But once the economic reforms were pushed through, the clampdown arrived. Thus the electrician Wei Jingsheng, who had called for democracy in China on the Democracy Wall, got 15 years in prison. And with Mikhail Gorbachev (whom Deng characterized as “very stupid”) coming, Deng had no intention of unleashing the kind of chaos he saw in the Soviet Union. Hence the order for the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre.

So there was no secret liberal in Deng Xiaoping waiting to burst out, only a butcher with certain pragmatic elements. Deng’s reforms have produced impressive growth, but the foundation remains shaky. The problem is that, if you ditch Mao, the Communists lose their claim to govern. Hence the insistence that Western notions of democracy don’t apply in China. Like Deng, the current Communist Chinese leaders want to survive at all cost.

Henrik Bering is a journalist and critic.