Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (6 page)

Mao Zedong, a charismatic visionary, brilliant strategist, and shrewd but devious political manipulator, led the Communists to victory in the civil war and in 1949 unified the nation and eliminated most of the foreign-held territories. The military forces he had accumulated during the civil war were sufficiently strong that with the Communist Party's organizational discipline and propaganda, he was able to establish in the early 1950s a structure that penetrated far more deeply into the countryside and into urban society than had the imperial system. He built up a unified national governing structure led by the Communist Party and, with Soviet help, began to introduce modern industry. By 1956, with both peace and stability at hand, Mao might have brought wealth and power to China. But instead he plunged the country into an ill-advised utopian debacle that led to massive food shortages and millions of unnatural deaths. In his twenty-seven years of rule, Mao destroyed not only capitalists and landlords, but also intellectuals and many senior officials who had served under him. By the time he died in 1976, the country was in chaos and still mired in poverty.

When Deng ascended to power in 1978, he had many advantages that his predecessors lacked. In the mid-nineteenth century, few people had understood how deeply the new technology and developments along the coast were challenging the Chinese system. In the last years of the empire, the reformers had little idea of the institutional developments required to implement progressive new ideas. At the time of Yuan Shikai and Sun Yat-sen, there was no unified army and no governmental structure capable of uniting contenders for power. And after coming to power, Mao, who had no foreign experience, could not receive help from the West due to the Cold War.

By the time Deng came to power, Mao had already unified the country, built a strong ruling structure, and introduced modern industry—advantages that Deng could build on. Many high officials realized that Mao's system of mass mobilization was not working, that China was lagging far behind the foreign countries in science and technology, and that it needed to learn from the West. More fundamental change was called for, and Deng could rely on help from disgraced former senior officials who had been removed from power but not eliminated. These returning revolutionaries stood ready to
unite under the leadership of Deng and the Communist Party, providing a ready resource of skills and energy, a useful transition to a new generation better trained in modern science, technology, and administration.

In 1978, because of the Soviet Union's aggressive behavior following the American withdrawal from Vietnam, Western countries were receptive to helping China loosen its ties with the Soviet Union. With the global expansion of trade that followed, China had access to new markets and advanced technologies—Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Singapore—and nearby examples for how latecomers to the international scene could modernize quickly. And unlike the Communist countries of Eastern Europe, China was already completely independent from the Soviet Union, which meant that its leaders were free to make decisions based on what they believed to be China's best interests.

Yet all the favorable conditions that China enjoyed in 1978 would have been insufficient to transform the huge, chaotic civilization into a modern nation without a strong and able leader who could hold the country together while providing strategic direction. Deng was far better prepared for such a role than Yuan Shikai, Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, or Mao Zedong had been. It was he who would finally realize the mission that others had tried for almost two centuries to achieve, of finding a path that would make China rich and powerful.

In pursuing this mission, Deng's role changed fundamentally from one period to the next. Before 1949, he was a revolutionary, and after 1949 he became a builder helping to create a socialist state. From 1969 to 1973, during the Cultural Revolution, he used his time while banished to the countryside to reflect on the need for change. Then, during 1974–1975, while Mao was still alive, he was allowed to help bring order to China, thereby laying the groundwork for what he later achieved. When he returned to work in 1977 he became a reformer, first under Hua Guofeng, and after 1978, as preeminent leader.

While hosting a delegation of U.S. university presidents in 1974, Deng said, “I have never attended a university, but I have always considered that since the day I was born, I have been in the university of life. There is no graduation date except when I go to meet God.”
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Throughout his life, Deng kept learning and solving problems. In the process, stepping stone by stepping stone, he guided the transformation of China into a country that was scarcely recognizable from the one he had inherited in 1978.

Deng Xiaoping was born in 1904 in Paifang, Guang'an county, Sichuan. Though born to a small landlord family in a rural village, his village glorified the example of a relative, Deng Shimin, a member of the Deng extended family who had become a high official in imperial China and risen so high that he had written secret memos for China's top leaders.
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The village was renamed “paifang” (“memorial arch”) since a memorial arch had been erected in Shimin's honor after he returned there in 1774. The accomplishments of Shimin and his brothers were truly extraordinary. At a time when only a few thousand people each year passed the imperial examinations, and in a country inhabited by over 300 million people, Shimin as well as two of his brothers all passed the difficult test. In fact, Shimin went on to pass the second examination and then the third, the top level, and was appointed a high official in Beijing.
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In his brief autobiography, written when he was in Moscow in 1926–1927, Deng Xiaoping wrote that his father had had dreams of Xiaoping, too, becoming a high official—dreams that perhaps had been reinforced by Deng's mother, since some of her relatives had also passed examinations and become county magistrates. In imperial China, many families with a very bright child, especially families in which another relative had become an official, were willing to sacrifice to educate that child in the hope that he too might become an official, bringing honor and wealth to the family. Xiaoping was such a bright child, and although Deng Xiaoping's father, Deng Wenming, spent little time with his son, he made great efforts to further his education.

Deng Xiaoping's father participated actively in affairs beyond their village, but gave little attention to matters at home. His first wife died without children and he then married Xiaoping's mother, two years older than himself, when he was sixteen years old. She gave birth first to a daughter, then to Xiaoping, then to two more sons and another daughter, who died at age ten. Wenming added to the family a third wife who died shortly after giving birth to a son, and then a fourth wife, Xia Bogen, who gave birth to three daughters. Deng Xiaoping's father, at his peak, owned nearly forty
mou
of land (6.6 acres) and had several laborers who helped with the farm work and with raising silkworms.

Over his lifetime, Wenming's fortunes declined. He was head of the secret society, Gelaohui, in his village, but he spent most of his time in the nearby market town, Xiexing, a little more than a mile from Paifang, in the county capital six miles away, and in Chongquing. In 1914 he became head of the county police office. At one time, Wenming owned a small restaurant in Xiexing and was one of the elders supporting a school there that his son, Xiaoping, attended. But because he gambled and lost, he had to sell some of his land and almost went bankrupt, and due to bad relations with a higher official, he fled to other localities. Still, he continuously helped with Xiaoping's education.

Deng Rong reports that Deng's mother was very devoted to her son Xiaoping. Deng Xiaoping later recalled that he greatly respected his mother, who died in 1926 at age forty-two, for her efforts, with an absent husband, to look after the family. Mao Zedong was rebellious toward his father. Deng did not rebel; he was simply distant. In later years, Deng Rong would recall that her dad never talked about his own father who died in 1936.

When Deng Xiaoping was growing up, it was not clear what kind of schooling would best prepare a child for the future. The imperial examinations had been abandoned the year after Xiaoping was born, and Xiaoping was only seven years old when the 1911 Revolution brought an end to imperial officialdom. Yet the school system to replace Confucian training was just beginning. So like many of the more privileged youth in Chinese villages of the day, Xiaoping began his education at age five with standard Confucian training at the home of an educated relative in Paifang. The next year he transferred to a larger school in Xiexing, where he continued the study of the Confucian classics and cultivated his skills in memorizing texts. At the time, in Guang'an county, which had a population of over 200,000, there was only one public primary school to train promising youth in modern subjects. He
must have learned these subjects well: when he was eleven, Xiaoping passed the highly competitive examinations to enter the upper primary school and with his father's financial support boarded there, in the town of Guang'an, six miles away from Paifang village. At age fourteen, he also passed the entrance examinations to Guang'an's one public junior middle school (comparable to an American high school). By age fifteen when he left that school to go to Chongqing, he had acquired a good grounding in the Confucian classics, in modern subjects including mathematics, science, history, and geography, as well as reading and writing the Chinese language.
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Some progressive schoolteachers heightened Deng's sense of patriotism; already, in 1919, at the tender age of fourteen, he took part in the demonstrations as part of the May Fourth Movement. The movement began when Western leaders, who were assembled at Versailles to define the shape of the postwar world, decided that the eastern portion of Shandong province, formerly a German concession, would be passed on to Japan rather than returned to China. Students at Peking University and Yenching University were outraged, and on May 4, 1919, they took to the streets of Beiping (renamed Beijing when it became the capital in 1949) to demonstrate not only against the Western powers for disregarding China, but against the Chinese government for being too weak to stand up for China's interests.

News of the May Fourth demonstrations spread quickly to universities and to some high schools throughout the country, helping to fan the flames of a new awareness of international developments and a new popular nationalism among China's educated youth. Guang'an was much more in touch with outside developments than more remote areas of China: the Qujiang River, more than a hundred meters wide as it ran through the county seat at Guang'an, was connected by two other rivers to Chongqing, some sixty miles away, and Chongqing was only five days by steamer from Shanghai. Xiaoping, a precocious teenager, joined the movement and with other students demonstrated on the streets of Guang'an. He also paraded in the anti-Japanese boycotts in Chongqing in the fall of 1919. The birth of Deng Xiaoping's personal awareness of the broader world coincided precisely with the birth of national awareness among educated youth. From this moment on, Deng's personal identity was inseparable from the national effort to rid China of the humiliation it had suffered at the hands of other countries and to restore it to a position of greatness, to make it rich and strong.
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Deng Xiaoping's nascent understanding of the wider world was to expand further when Deng Wenming found an opportunity for his son to go abroad
for more education and training. During World War I, when many young Frenchmen were off to fight the war, there was an acute labor shortage in French factories, and tens of thousands of Chinese laborers were recruited to go there to work. At the time there were virtually no scholarships available in Western countries for bright Chinese students. An exception was offered by a national organization established even before the war by some prominent Chinese who hoped to enable Chinese students to go to France for “diligent work and frugal study”; they would work part-time to earn a living as well as attend French universities part-time to study modern science and technology. France was then known in China for its high level of culture and it became the favorite destination of Chinese students going overseas. A rich businessman from Sichuan who had studied in France established a special scholarship fund to enable Sichuan students to take part in the work-study program in France. A year-long preparatory school was established in Chongqing, and Xiaoping took the entrance examination, passed, and spent the 1919–1920 school year there preparing to go abroad. At the end of the year, a few scholarships were made available to help some students travel to France. Xiaoping, never particularly skilled in foreign languages, did not pass the French-language examination; his father Wenming paid for his passage. One of Xiaoping's classmates, an uncle three years older than him, made the journey with Xiaoping and remained his constant companion during their first months in France.

Birth of a Revolutionary: France and the Soviet Union, 1920–1927

When in 1920 the sixteen-year-old Deng Xiaoping boarded a steamer from Chongqing to Shanghai on the first leg of his journey to France, he was the youngest of eighty-four students from Sichuan to participate in the student-worker program. His journey itself would prove formative. During his week-long layover in Shanghai, Deng Xiaoping saw white people treating Chinese, in their own country, as if they were slaves. And when the refurbished cargo ship
Lebon
, which transported the group to France, stopped in Hong Kong, Vietnam, Singapore, and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), similar interactions between white masters and local laborers left a deep impression of unfairness on Xiaoping and the other youths on board.