Infamous Tea & Honey show
Ezra Vogel’s detailed and exhaustively researched biography of Deng Xiaoping has been rightly praised for its close reading of his life and attentiveness to nuance in a political landscape that can be opaque to historians, particularly foreign ones. It’s written with remarkable clarity and thematic consistency, and it makes complex political machination understandable. It’s worth noting, though, that it’s definitely one for the hardcore China history buff.
Vogel takes us through Deng’s life from the start, through his time in France when he became a sort of apprentice to Zhou Enlai to becoming a battle-hardened combatant back in China, still in his 20s, on to exile and eventually power. What’s clear is that Deng was a man of exceptional intelligence, a man who trained himself as a revolutionary to memorize rather than commit information to paper, and for the rest of his life delivered hour-long speeches without notes. He was also incredibly resilient – he was purged three times, and most notably spent his exile of four years in rural Jiangxi resting and preparing for the time when he would be returned to the political fray.
Vogel, a retired Harvard professor with a rich bibliography of scholarship on China and Japan, writes with rigorous attention to detail and a commitment to explaining the motivations of the main players, towering figures like Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai. Yet he doesn’t pretend to write from a lofty, disinterested position. He greatly admires Deng, flaws and all, and deals even with his actions that most dismayed the outside world with rigor and fairness.
Deng was a cunning political player who seems to have legitimately spent his life making decisions in what he saw as the best interest of the people of China. He navigated an ideologically delicate and potentially unstable period after Mao’s death deftly, putting himself in position to reform without repudiating. Ultimately, as ‘reform and opening up’ began to change the country in amazing ways, he was in a position of enough strength to make it clear that: “Planning is not the same as socialism, and markets are not the same as capitalism. There is planning under capitalism, and there are markets under socialism. Socialism is not poverty.”
Vogel argues, however, that Deng was not an architect with a grand design, but rather the “general manager who provided overall leadership during the transformation,” the man who urged leaders to “experiment, to take risks, and to not be afraid of making mistakes; when you make them, just correct them.” There was never a cult of personality around Deng.
His dynamism and personal touch when it came to foreign affairs was impressive too, with his groundbreaking visits to Japan and the US leading to an overnight change in the way China was perceived abroad, and in the latter case opening Chinese eyes to a standard of living they could aspire to in the future. He was as ruthless as any other world leader though, sending troops into Vietnam when he felt it had goals of, with Soviet support, becoming the dominant player in the region. Deng always made it clear that China wanted peace and was ready to learn from other countries; but was proud and could not be intimidated.
We have him in part to thank for the rapid development of Shanghai too. He always regretted not making Shanghai one of the Special Economic Zones in the early 1980s, and in the period between his retirement and his so-called Southern Tour in 1992, made it clear that he supported the plans for Pudong to become a financial center. “It is of prime importance to develop Shanghai. That city is a trump card.”
This doorstop of a book is going to be a keystone text for a long time to come, and as a detailed document of Deng’s life will be hard to better. It can be dry and it demands close attention, but for the most part it’s fascinating and rewarding. And in the end we can’t differ with Vogel when he asks rhetorically, “Did any other leader in the twentieth century do more to improve the lives of so many? Did any other twentieth-century leader have such a large and lasting influence on world history?”