Deng Xiaoping: The Comeback Comrade

Standing amid the lush bamboo groves and rice paddies of northwestern Sichuan province, the U-shaped farmhouse is typical of the local architecture, with a wooden frame, stucco walls and a gray tile roof. Ten families have subdivided the 16 rooms of the 100-year-old structure into 32 cubicles, and its courtyard is dotted with drying pepper bunches and ears of corn. In the center of these crowded communal quarters stand three rooms unused except by the 60 or so visitors who turn up daily to see the birthplace of Deng Xiaoping. But even the smattering of photographs and old furniture on display in the farmhouse’s “cultural center” constitutes more of a memorial than China’s leader would like. When asked how he wanted his ancestral home in Paifang used, Deng replied, “Just keep it as it was, and let the peasants live there.”

To say that Deng does not relish self-promotion is an understatement. He has never held any of the official titles usually associated with national leadership. “People wanted me to be Chairman of the party, but I told them I was too old for that,” Deng recently told a TIME-sponsored Newstour. “Then people wanted me to take the post of President, and I said no, I wouldn’t do that.” The Chinese press refers to him simply as “paramount leader.” But that modesty is hardly for lack of a life that has been interesting, both in the usual sense of the word or in that of the old curse (“May you live in interesting times”).

Deng’s long career has been a biographer’s dream, a tumultuous charge through war and revolution, exhilarating political triumphs and equally humiliating downfalls, personal achievements and family tragedies. Through it all, drawing on seemingly limitless reserves of energy and wily resilience, the tenacious 4-ft. 11-in. politician has managed not only to endure but to prevail. Today, one year into his ninth decade, he stands at the zenith of his power as leader of the world’s most populous nation and as progenitor of what he proudly calls its “second revolution.”

Deng’s sweeping vision for China is all the more remarkable for his lack of intellectual pretense. Unlike the late Mao Tse-tung, his mentor and eventual nemesis, Deng has never claimed to be either a scholar or a Marxist theoretician. Nor does he possess the studied mandarin sophistication of the late Premier Chou En-lai, another longtime comrade-in-arms. Not that Deng lacks for a keen intelligence or a world view. But what he has consistently sought to impose is a preference for gradual rather than sudden change and for pragmatism over doctrine. In discussing China’s second revolution recently, Deng said, “If it could enable people to improve their lives gradually, then I think the policy itself is a sure guarantee of its continuity.”

Such logic has repeatedly been challenged during the convulsions that have shaken China in this century. No one has proved more adept than Deng in staging tactical retreats, sometimes going so far as to make public confessions of error in which he almost certainly did not believe. He is, moreover, a dedicated Communist who does not question, publicly at least, the basic tenets of Marxism-Leninism. Yet in his patient but dogged style, Deng has continually tested the doctrine’s outer limits. Says Rong Yiren, chairman of the China International Trust and Investment Corporation: “He is convinced that the basic principles of Marxism-Leninism are correct but also that the ideology should develop along with the society.”

The eldest son of a well-to-do landowner, Deng grew up in a period of violent unrest, climaxed but not ended by the revolution of 1911 in which Sun Yat-sen brought down the imperial Qing dynasty. When Deng was about 15, his father enrolled him in one of the best secondary schools in the city of Chongqing. A hardworking student, Deng followed a curriculum that enabled him at 16 to enter a program providing an opportunity to work and study in France. Despite an anti-Western wave then simmering in China, Deng and many others of his generation jumped at the chance to go abroad. “We felt that China was weak, and we wanted to make it strong,” he later told the New York Times. “We thought the way to do it was through modernization. So we went to the West to learn.”

When Deng and 88 other Chinese arrived in Marseilles in late 1920, they found jobs scarce and funds even scarcer. Nor was there any opportunity for formal schooling. Deng worked for a time at a Renault factory and at a rubber-footware plant in Montargis, south of Paris. Though he wore Western-style clothes and acquired a lifelong fondness for croissants and bridge, he associated almost exclusively with other Chinese, among them Chou En-lai.

Deng’s increasingly leftist ideas quickly brought him into contact with radical politics. Like many other Chinese students in France, he joined the French Communist Party, where he learned basic Marxist theory as well as the Internationale. (The Chinese Communist Party was not founded until 1921.) Later, as a member of the Chinese Socialist Youth League in France, Deng was assigned to mimeograph its journal, Red Light, a task he performed with such zeal that his fellow activists nicknamed him “Doctor of Mimeography.”

In 1925, Deng left France to study at Moscow’s newly established Sun Yat-sen University. He and other Chinese students attended classes in Marxist social evolution, the history of revolutions and basic military training. Among heroes of the Russian Revolution who came to visit were Leon Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin. Whether or not it made an impression at the time, Deng’s six-month stay coincided with the end of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, which included a return to some private agricultural production and denationalization of much small-scale industry.

Back in China, Deng, frequently living underground began a long series of political and military assignments for the Communists, that carried him gradually, if not always smoothly, to higher ranks. His earliest misstep, resulting in a brief period out of favor, was to ally himself with a party faction that favored basing the drive to power on rural rather than urban insurrection, then a departure from orthodoxy. The leading advocate of that strategy was none other than Mao, who was working in another province at the time and therefore was spared the humiliation Deng suffered Deng was rehabilitated in time to join the Long March to northern Shaanxi province beginning in October 1934, and continued to support Mao’s approach, eventually becoming political commissar of the 129th Division of the Eighth Route Army. A U.S. military observer who met Deng during this period, Marine Corps Major Evans Carlson, remembered him as “short, chunky and physically tough, with a mind as keen as mustard.”

As a leader in the war against the Japanese, Deng began to experiment with some of the incentive techniques that are at the core of his second revolution. In 1943 he launched a campaign called the “great production movement,” aimed at boosting local harvests. It included a system of “rewarding the hardworking and punishing the lazy” by paying bonuses to model producers. Another feature was “contract work,” committing users of public fields and rice paddies to turn over an agreed-upon production quota to the authorities and allowing those farmers to keep anything that exceeded it. According to a recent article in the Chinese journal Modern History Studies, Deng himself joined an army team in tending a wheat field.

In the Communists’ postwar struggle with Chiang Kaishek, Deng joined in planning strategy for the Huai-Hai campaign, which drove Nationalist forces south of the Yangtze and helped push them off the mainland to their Taiwan redoubt. A lull in the fighting permitted him to travel briefly to Peking for the ceremony at Tiananmen Square celebrating the founding of the People’s Republic on Oct. 1, 1949. Soon afterward, Deng was named political commissar of China’s vast Southwest Military Administrative Region and was based in his high school city of Chongqing. For the next three years he directed the region’s transformation to a Communist society, including land redistribution and campaigns aimed at checking corruption, bureaucracy and waste.

His success in Chongqing led to a summons to Peking and an almost dizzying ascension in the hierarchy. Already a member of the Central People’s Government Council, he became secretary-general of its Central Election Committee and helped draw up plans for the reorganization of the central government. Made a Vice Premier in 1952 and a Politburo member in 1955, Deng began appearing in public with Chairman Mao and Premier Chou. When Mao visited Moscow in late 1957, he drew Soviet Leader Nikita Khrushchev aside and pointed to Deng. “See that little man there?” Mao said. “He’s highly intelligent and has a great future ahead of him.”

In February of the preceding year Deng had been in the audience when Khrushchev delivered his celebrated “secret speech” denouncing Stalin’s excesses. The parallels between Stalin’s personality cult and Mao’s increasing use of self-glorification seem to have made an impression on Deng. At the Chinese Communist Party’s National Congress seven months later, Deng openly warned, in Mao’s presence, that “serious consequences can follow from the deification of the individual.” It was an extraordinary act of temerity, even for a rising star.

Mao may have tolerated the criticism because Deng remained a loyal supporter in other matters. When Mao launched his Hundred Flowers campaign, encouraging intellectuals and professionals to offer constructive criticism of the party, he created a political crisis by unleashing much deeper resentment than he had counted on. Deng fully backed Mao in a retaliatory purge that sent thousands of educators and artists to jail and banished hundreds of thousands more to the countryside. Indeed, for all his departures from standard Communist doctrine in the economic realm, Deng has never veered from orthodoxy when it came to maintaining the party’s political primacy. China must always remain a “socialist democracy, people’s democracy,” he said in 1979, not a “bourgeois democracy, individualist democracy.”

Deng also supported Mao’s Great Leap Forward in 1958, which called for enforced nationwide collectivism on the farms and a buildup of steel production in backyard furnaces. The campaign proved disastrous, producing a series of prolonged famines that starved some 27 million people during the years 1958 to 1962. By 1961 Deng and President Liu Shaoqi had realized the enormity of the miscalculation and set about correcting it. At a tense party plenum that Mao did not attend (so that Liu, Deng and others could gainleader ship experience prior to the Chairman’s death), they announced measures reinstating private farming plots, peripheral industries like hog raising and more extensive free markets. In industry, managers and technicians were to take over from party bureaucrats. On a limited scale these programs foreshadowed Deng’s second revolution. Mao was furious when he learned of the change in direction, demanding coldly, “Which emperor decided this?”

Defending the need for such liberalization, Deng coined the line that has become his thumbnail credo: “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.” He also began suggesting that an individual’s value in modernizing China lay less in his “redness,” or Communist ardor, than in his “expertness,” or technical skills. Though his own formal schooling ended early, Deng has repeatedly stressed that his vision for building a new China was bound inextricably to education and research.

As relations between the longtime comrades continued to deteriorate, the aging Chairman fell more and more under the sway of his wife Jiang Qing and her ultraleftist allies from Shanghai. At first Deng dismissed their growing influence as a passing phenomenon. “Young leading cadres have risen up by helicopter,” he later scoffed. “They should really rise step by step.” By 1966, however, the radicals had gained the upper hand and, with Mao’s backing, plunged China into the frenzy of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Deng attempted to backpedal politically, apologizing at a public meeting in Peking for having taken “a bourgeois line.” He added, “My recent errors are by no means accidental. They have their origins in a certain way of thinking and a certain style of work which has developed over a period of time.” That admission satisfied Jiang Qing and the fanatical Red Guards only temporarily. In 1967 Mao’s wife openly denounced Deng as a “culprit of the counterrevolutionary capitalist line,” leading to his dismissal from both his party and government offices. He was, however, allowed to retain his party membership.

For Deng and many other political moderates, the Cultural Revolution was a nightmare. With his wife Zhuo Lin, Deng was exiled to southern Jiangxi province, where he was forced to perform manual labor in a tractor factory and wait on tables in a mess hall. Members of Deng’s family were also punished for his political sins. His younger brother Deng Shuping, a city official in Guiyang, was hounded mercilessly by self-appointed Red Guard officials and in despair committed suicide in 1967. His elder son Deng Pufang, a 22-year-old student at Peking University, was crippled for life when he was denied medical treatment for a broken back, sustained in a fall caused by Red Guard tormentors. His daughter Deng Rong and younger son Deng Zhifang were banished to the countryside in the northern province of Shaanxi.

Though not in physical danger himself, Deng was eager to protect his family. He eventually was allowed to bring his children to live with him in the two-story brick home to which he had been assigned. He spent his free time reading, listening to the radio and keeping fit. Deng Rong later told Author Harrison Salisbury (The Long March) that her father paced restlessly around the house’s courtyard every afternoon. “Watching his sure but fast-moving steps,” she said, “I thought to myself that his faith, his ideas and determination must have become clearer and firmer, readying him for the battles ahead.”

In 1973 Deng astonished everyone by showing up at a Peking banquet, using his old title of Vice Premier. It was soon clear that he had been rehabilitated to take over the day-to-day running of the government from Chou, who was succumbing to cancer. Deng also assumed operating control of the party and the military. Chastened at first but then with growing sureness, he helped Chou map out the ambitious Four Modernizations program, announced in January 1975.

But Jiang Qing and three other leftists loyal to Mao, who became known as the Gang of Four, retaliated. In April 1976 they ousted Deng from all his offices, leaving him in the political wilderness for the third time in his career. This time he was in physical danger for a period. Deng was rescued by Military Region Commander Xu Shiyou, an old friend, who provided shelter at a resort near Canton.

Mao’s death in September 1976 and the arrest of the Gang of Four a month later cleared the way for Deng’s return to power the next year. Once again he was required to sign a letter of contrition, which he did largely for expediency. Says Parris Chang, professor of political science at Pennsylvania State University: “Deng is a man who knows when to bow and bend.”

For a man who has spent most of his life in the thick of politics, Deng has remained unusually close to his family. Since the death of his father in 1938, his household has included his stepmother Xia Baigen. He helps support an aunt and uncle, 86 and 83, respectively, who still live at the old Sichuan family home in Paifang. After the Cultural Revolution, he arranged for his son Deng Pufang to receive medical treatment in the U.S. He is now director of China’s Welfare Fund for the Handicapped. Deng Zhifang, 34, is a graduate researcher in physics at New York’s University of Rochester. Deng’s three daughters are married. The oldest, Deng Lin, is an accomplished artist who has exhibited her paintings in New York City. Deng Rong and her husband He Ping, both Chinese foreign service officers, served in Washington from 1979 to 1983. Deng has at least two grandchildren, on whom he is said to dote.

Deng relaxes by swimming and indulging his passion for bridge. He and his wife hold a regular Saturday game at their home in the Western Hills area of Peking, usually with Vice Premier Wan Li and Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang. Deng has a fondness for pomelos, a grapefruit-like citrus fruit grown in Sichuan, and he sometimes places special orders for them. He is also a world-class smoker, lighting one Panda-brand cigarette after another in his meetings and audiences. Deng recently declared to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, “Mine is a hands-off policy, I let other people do things.” On the visible evidence, that is just another sly Deng understatement. –By William R. Doerner. Reported by David Aikman/Washington and Jaime A. FlorCruz/Paifang