DENG XIAOPING AS PAST AND PROLOGUE

Recurring in time across China’s history has been the story of the rise and decline of successive dynasties. Since the 1900s, Chinese historians have strenuously attacked this traditional way of looking at history as violating any claims in China to development and progress. They feel that such an idea lies behind the concept of “an unchanging China,” which has been so damaging to foreign assessments of China’s development. Such historians have looked for the deeper rhythms of economic growth and change, territorial expansion, developments in the arts, and environmental factors as examples of what we should be studying instead. Nonetheless dynasties have risen and fallen across well over three millenniums, and it is not completely absurd to depict the People’s Republic as the latest manifestation of this historical phenomenon.

For the historian, therefore, Deng’s death raises a different but also absorbing set of echoes and parallels to the past. The 15 years between 1978, when Deng returned to power after two major purges that failed to remove him from active contention for the leadership, and 1993, when his health obviously began to fail, have left him an ineradicable role in future accounts of China. These parallels seem to fit fairly neatly into two molds. One, familiar from several earlier dynasties, is the role of the man who has the delicate task of consolidating the work of an ambitious, tough, erratic though canny, and self-aggrandizing reunifier of China. Mao Zedong, like a select number of earlier Emperors, played the unifier’s role in drawing China together again in 1949 after a half-century of nightmarish domestic turbulence, civil war and foreign invasion. It fell to Deng Xiaoping, again like certain historical precursors, to take this mixed legacy and secure the positive aspects of the reunification in both its territorial and its economic dimensions. Deng, like these predecessors, could be completely ruthless in pursuit of these goals. He could also be vindictive and two-faced. But like them, he made China more prosperous, made restitution to a significant number of the victims from the founding phase, showed a certain flexibility in moving to recruit new bureaucratic talent from those who had not been in the original band of the “faithful,” and released the harshest of the constraints that had been imposed on writers and artists.

In a different historical sense, Deng replayed many aspects of the role of Chinese and Manchu statesmen during the waning years of China’s last dynasty, the Qing, in the second half of the 19th century. Profoundly conscious of the advanced technological power of the West, these statesmen sought ways to graft elements of foreign technology and organizational skills onto their own economic and political infrastructure, so that they could achieve the delicate task of strengthening their country rather than undermining it from within. This selective and gradualist approach allowed China to keep at least a measure of faith that it was somehow preserving its own inner value system even while using the West in a host of developing areas. During this 19th century period–as during the 1980s and into the present–the effects of this attempt on the worlds of political culture were profoundly ambivalent. It turned out to be impossible to relegate foreign ideas to neatly circumscribed compartments; and by the end of the 19th century the pressure from the world of ideas had led to strident and insistent demands for new structures of justice, new realms of freedom for aesthetic endeavor and the dissemination of information, and abandonment of autocracy for either a genuinely circumscribed constitutional monarchy or a popularly based republican form of government. Under these and other pressures, the last dynasty fell in 1911.

Deng Xiaoping has left his successors with as delicate a balancing act as did these statesmen of a century ago. China now, as then, is a colossal country with a huge population, difficult to control from the center, uneven in economic growth and development, with wealth concentrated on the eastern coast. Regional interests and power bases are strong; there are massive disparities of income, and a decreasing willingness to contribute a requisite flow of taxes to the center in Beijing, since that center is often seen as both corrupt and ineffective. Periodic assertions of central police power can cow citizens recurrently but not remove deep-seated centers of unrest. At the same time, ebullient economic growth in many regions and sectors of the economy fuels a certain optimism, an optimism bolstered at the present by the incredible windfall of Hong Kong, which will return to Chinese-mainland control in July of this year. Behind the rhetoric of homage and mourning now under way in China, all those currently holding senior office–and the many who are unimpressed by these leaders and would dearly love to serve in their stead–will be sharing at least one thought in common: How on earth will we keep the lid on all this now that Deng is gone?

Jonathan D. Spence teaches modern Chinese history at Yale University and is the author of 10 books on China.