Titans of History

DENG XIAOPING

1904–97

It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.

Deng Xiaoping

Deng was the paramount leader of China who transformed Mao Zedong’s revolutionary communist state into today’s resurgent superpower, ruled harshly by the communist oligarchy but empowered by a free-market economy. Deng’s new China was soon strong enough to challenge America itself. Gritty, practical and sardonic, Deng was both a brutal Maoist enforcer and a survivor who endured wars, purges and palace coups to emerge as the ruler who has set the path of the world’s most populous country. His nicknames describe him perfectly: the Steel Factory and the Needle Inside the Ball of Cotton.

In many ways, his reputation is underestimated: while Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev oversaw the peaceful end of Soviet communist rule and the dismembering of the Soviet empire, he had wanted to keep the Soviet Union in place and reform it. Instead it fell apart; communism lost power—and Russia endured a decade of instability until prestige and order was restored by the authoritarian sovereignty of Vladimir Putin. Perhaps the most influential political titan of the late 20th century, Deng succeeded in guiding China toward his vision where his fellow communist leaders failed.

Born in Szechuan province in 1904, Deng was converted to Marxism as a young man: leaving home at sixteen, he studied in France and after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, in Moscow. Returning to China in the late 1920s just as the right-wing Kuomintang (KMT) under Chiang Kai-shek turned on its communist allies in 1927, Deng threw in his lot with the communists—and Mao Zedong personally, a loyalty from which he never wavered. When the KMT embarked on its campaigns to destroy the communists, Deng endured the Long March under Chairman Mao Zedong.

For decades, Mao and his fellow communists lived a life of constant warfare with external enemies, internal purging and feuding—it was a rough school. Deng, who served as commissar and often effectively as commander of many Red Army units, was one of the veteran communist leaders along with his friend and patron Chou Enlai who gradually came to accept the total power that Mao, that master of manipulation, mercilessly and cunningly imposed with secret police terror and constant murderous purges. Mao himself liked and trusted few and tormented even his closest allies, but it seems that he respected Deng’s evident competence and toughness.

After the Second World War and the civil war between the KMT and the communists during which he distinguished himself as a commander/commissar, Deng was one of the leaders of the communists who watched Mao declare the new People’s Republic in 1949. He ran his home province Sichuan for several years, overseeing the killings and beatings of tens of thousands of so-called landlords—usually smallholding farmers. When 10 million in the province died during Mao’s merciless Great Leap Forward, he praised its management.

Mao brought Deng to the capital as a vice-premier, promoting him as the general secretary of the Communist Party in 1957: he sent half a million intellectuals to labor camps.

But as Mao came under attack for his dangerously radical policies in the late 1950s, Deng was allied with President Liu Shaochi, who appeared to challenge Maoist supremacy. Deng was never anything else but a Marxist and an extremely ruthless communist potentate but he was also pragmatic, a manager. It was in 1961 that he famously said in a speech that “I don’t care if a cat is black or white. It is a good mouse if it catches mice.”

In 1965, Mao launched his vicious, vindictive and destructive purge of China, the Cultural Revolution, designed to restore his own personal dictatorship, communist radicalism and liquidate the new party elite who had dared to challenge his absolute power. President Liu and many others were destroyed in this terrifying purge that threw China into chaos, supervised by Mao himself. Premier Chou Enlai managed to survive by cravenly agreeing to all Mao’s brutal measures. Deng was fortunate: though he was sacked and sent to work in a factory as an ordinary worker, and his son was thrown by Red Guards out of a window and rendered paraplegic, Deng was not tortured or humiliated, a decision that had to come from Mao himself.

Mao’s chosen successor was his chief ally in the Cultural Revolution, the talented but neurotic and vain Marshal Lin Biao, the vice-chairman, who, in an attempted coup, was killed flying toward Russia. As the old chairman, now aging, ailing and senile, but still omnipotent, called a halt to the Cultural Revolution, he recognized that the country needed stable management. Lin Biao was dead; Chou was dying of cancer so Mao looked to Deng.

In 1974, Deng was brought back as first vice-premier and effective ruler of the country. But as Mao deteriorated, his wife Jiang Qing along with the rest of the radical faction she led—better known as the Gang of Four—realized that Deng represented a real danger to their plans to take power after the chairman’s death.

Once again, Deng was purged. His old ally Premier Chou Enlai succumbed to cancer and Mao himself died, succeeded to everyone’s surprise by a little-known provincial boss Hua Guofeng. Deng, the leader of the political and military veterans, trusted by both Party and Red Army, led an effective coup against the Gang of Four, who were arrested, tried and imprisoned.

Henceforth he quickly emerged as the leader of China, effortlessly pushing Hua aside. Though he never felt the need for a full Maoist cult of personality nor for the full list of titles such as president, chairman or premier, it was soon clear that Deng was in charge, rechanneling the revolution to preserve absolute one-party communist control but freeing up the economy: “To get rich is glorious!” he supposedly declared. Backed by his protégés such as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang and others, Deng, semi-retired, guided China from behind the scenes, enjoying only his position running the country’s chess federation—and the chairmanship of the Party Military Commission which commanded the army. Under his guidance, China negotiated the return of Hong Kong and Macao and emerged as a new military, almost imperial, superpower as its economy boomed. But in 1989, the Soviet Union tottered; eastern Europe regained its freedom; the Iron Curtain was raised. When communist rule was challenged by thousands of students in Tiananmen Square, Deng faced the end of the party’s monopoly on power and, it was ultimately the decision of the paramount leader to crush the protests with total ruthlessness. The China of today—a harsh police state under a communist Party monopoly with an increasingly international imperialistic and economic reach—is Deng’s China.