DENG XIAOPING: THE LAST EMPEROR

He was a very small boy, but the village elders remember him distinctly because his family was descended from a mandarin, the most famous citizen of the humble settlement of Paifangcun until, well, until the very small boy came along. The eminent ancestor had passed the torturous series of civil examinations to prove he was a master of the Confucian classics and thus fit to serve the Emperor in faraway Beijing. And the boy’s forefather did just that, at the very height of empire, when the Sons of Heaven, as the Emperors were called, could afford to sneer at the Western barbarians begging to trade with their Celestial Kingdom.

By the time the boy was born, in 1904, the empire was moribund, preyed upon by the very foreigners it despised. But the boy was remembered not just because he was a good student like his ancestor but because he liked to turn somersaults. He would roll out of his family compound, into footpaths and away into the countryside and then back home again, turning and turning and turning. And his life would be one of many somersaults: away from home, never to return, over the seas, into politics, into war, in and out of danger, in and out of power, and finally into the role of emperor of a nation that could once again afford to sneer.

His name, in the beginning, was not Deng Xiaoping. The eldest son of the county sheriff was given a two-character name that meant “first saint,” perhaps a reference to his father’s Buddhist piety. Only later, in France, did Deng Xiansheng become Deng Xiaoping, the two new syllables a prescient nom de guerre, literally meaning “little peace,” an augury of both tumult and relief. In 1920, at the age of 16, Deng left his rural home deep inland in Sichuan for the port of Shanghai. There he learned basic French and won a scholarship for a work-study program in France. “We felt that China was weak, and we wanted her to be strong,” he later said of his generation of students. “So we went to the West to learn.”

In France he learned to love the game of bridge, developed a passion for croissants and became a soccer fan; he once pawned an overcoat to buy a ticket for a match. But Deng had landed in a France mired in a deep postwar recession, with few opportunities for a student to support himself with part-time work. He spent most of the next five years working at various menial jobs: arms-factory worker, waiter, train conductor and rubber-overshoe assembler.

As a member of the proletariat, he learned something else: communism, the doctrine spreading among French industrial laborers and the Chinese students among them. In 1922 Deng joined the Communist Youth League set up by his expatriate countrymen. With a practical mind for detail, Deng helped duplicate and distribute the party newsletter, a job that earned him the mock degree of “doctor of mimeography.” He earned his true credentials, however, in Moscow, where he studied Marxist-Leninist thought in 1926. Then it was back to a strife-torn China to propagate the faith. Deng’s first assignment, as ideological watchdog to a Soviet-supported warlord, fell through when his patron defected to the Nationalists. Deng’s next mission was even less promising: the young communist was ordered to the backcountry of Guangxi province in the far south, where he was to organize ragtag rebels to seize huge cities. Deng went loyally, even though he knew the task was impossible. The journey, however, proved to be momentous. On it he met up with Mao Zedong.

The two hit it off almost at once. Though Mao’s guerrilla strategy was in strong disfavor with the Moscow-influenced “internationalists” at Communist Party headquarters in Shanghai, Deng, who had become exasperated with Soviet-style conventional warfare, was convinced that Mao’s tactics were right. From 1931 to 1935, as the two worked to establish a Red Army base in the south-central province of Jiangxi, a mutual affection ripened that was almost brotherly. When Mao was denounced and demoted by pro-Russian elements of the party as an “escapist” for advocating a hit-and-run campaign of attrition, Deng was ousted along with him.

Amid this purge, Jin Weiying, Deng’s second wife (little is known of his first), divorced him and married his chief ideological accuser. Subjected to psychologically brutal criticism sessions, Deng recanted–but only to an extent. He refused to give up his support of Mao. “I cannot say more,” he told his tormentors. “What I say is true.” He said enough, however, to preserve his life. Soon he was able to rejoin Mao.

Their fortunes changed after October 1934. Harassed by superior Nationalist forces, the Red Army of Jiangxi joined the arduous Long March, threading in roundabout ways through the hinterland until it straggled to the caves of Yan’an in northwestern Shaanxi province a year and 7,500 miles later. The retreat cost the lives of more than 90,000 troops, but sheer survival, along with the self-sacrifice the soldiers displayed toward civilians en route, made heroes of the communists. Mao’s guerrilla strategy had by then made him the movement’s unchallenged leader.

In Yan’an, Deng met and married his third wife, Zhuo Lin. While Mao’s romantic life was tumultuous, Deng and Zhuo’s marriage was beyond scandal and produced a family of three daughters and two sons. But the civil war, which was soon subsumed into the bloody conflict with invading Japanese forces, provided little time for family and certainly no time for home. In fact, Deng was too busy proving his worth to Mao to return to Paifangcun in 1940, when his father was killed and beheaded by unknown attackers. After Japan’s defeat in 1945, Deng was instrumental in driving a military wedge down the middle of China, forcing the Nationalists to withdraw and enabling Mao to press on to victory by October 1949.

With the establishment of the People’s Republic, Deng began a rapid rise. From 28th in the communist pecking order in 1945, he became General Secretary of the party and one of Mao’s 12 Deputy Premiers in 1956. That was the year Khrushchev came to power in Moscow and denounced Stalin at a secret Soviet party congress. Learning of this indictment of a “personality cult,” Deng commended it to his own party–a move used to discredit him in the following decade by the Mao-worshipping Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution. In truth, Deng was still loyal to Mao. Indeed, when Mao moved against his intellectual rivals in the Anti-Rightist purge, Deng organized a merciless roundup of as many as half a million of his friend’s ideological enemies. Mao appreciated the fervor. During a 1957 visit to Moscow, Mao took Khrushchev aside and pointed out the diminutive Deng: “See that little man there? He’s highly intelligent and has a great future ahead of him.” Nevertheless, one of the most devastating, man-made catastrophes of the 20th century would fray their comradeship and wound China almost mortally.

At least 30 million, perhaps 40 million, Chinese died as a result of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, his campaign to overtake the per capita industrial production of Britain within 15 years. It was Mao’s attempt, by sheer force of will, to march a deeply impoverished nation into the front ranks of modernity. The Leap’s unscientific agricultural practices and inane technologies turned China into an immense archipelago of unproductive communes racked by famine. No one had clean hands–not the urbane Premier Zhou Enlai, who, though skeptical of collectivization, kept a polite silence; not the gentlemanly President Liu Shaoqi, who withdrew to the island of Hainan to avoid bringing up the subject of famine. Deng himself sycophantically proclaimed high expectations for grain harvests: “We can all have as much as we want.” His own home county would be ravaged by hunger.

Mao refused to believe reports of famine, at one point joking that “even if there’s a collapse, that’ll be all right. The worst that will happen is that the whole world will get a big laugh out of it.” By 1961, however, not only were people dying by the millions but the state was on the verge of collapse. By then President Liu decided the time had come to make a leap in another direction–and Deng collaborated with Liu’s economic reforms. During a visit to Guangzhou, Deng declared, “It doesn’t matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.” It was his way of arguing that any method could be tried as long as it meant the people could eat. The words would later be used against him.

Mao continued to ordain idiotic agricultural experiments, but Liu and Deng sidetracked the policies. The strategy–a sort of bureaucratic guerrilla warfare–exasperated the Great Helmsman. Presented with new Deng directives on communes, Mao sputtered, “What emperor decided these?” Finally, even Mao recognized that China was famished and dying. He made a strategic retreat and allowed Liu and Deng to restore order and the food supply. But he never forgave them for showing him up. Increasingly paranoid, he accused Deng of refusing to sit next to him at meetings. In 1962 he attacked Liu and Deng, screaming, “You have put the screws on me for a very long time!… Now, for once, I am going to put a scare into you!” Mao’s revenge came in 1966 with the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

With big-character placards crying BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS! revolutionaries attuned to Mao took over the party and ousted Liu and Deng. Mao’s wife, the ferociously radical Jiang Qing, had been biding her time to get at Deng. He had scorned some of her extreme efforts to “reform” Chinese culture, such as turning traditional opera into perfervid propaganda spectacles. “I support wholeheartedly that Beijing opera should be reformed,” he said. “But I just do not feel like watching these plays.” The croissant lover who had once commented that no one could be truly civilized without having dined out was despised by radicals. His feline remark became evidence against him. Along with fascism, treason and a raft of other crimes, Deng was accused by some Red Guards of promoting cat-ism.

By August 1967, with China in tumult, he and Liu were put on public trial. Liu’s leg was broken in the spectacle, and he later died of pneumonia in a makeshift prison in the city of Kaifeng. At the trial Red Guards decried Deng as a “capitalist roader,” a “fascist” and a “traitor” and shouted, “Cook the dog’s head in boiling oil!” Confronted by such rantings for hours on end, Deng simply removed his hearing aid. What saved him from Liu’s fate, evidently, was a simple thing as well. While Mao had always despised the patrician Liu, he remembered with some affection his wartime adventures with Deng. Thus Mao declared Liu “an enemy of the people” but defined the opposition of his old comrade as an antagonism that emerged “from among the ranks of the people.” Deng and his wife were allowed to live under house arrest in Beijing for two years before being sent south, back to the old revolutionary base of Jiangxi. They were assigned quarters in the commandant’s house at a deserted infantry school and required to work mornings at the tractor factory. Their greatest sorrows at this time were the death of Deng’s younger brother, driven to suicide by Red Guards, and the crippling of their son Deng Pufang. A promising student of physics at Peking University, Pufang was hounded by radicals until he fell–or was pushed–from a fourth-story window. His spine was fractured, leaving him a paraplegic.

Deng spent his spare time in exile reading, pacing the grounds of his house and calculating what China needed to recover its sanity. His moment came in 1973. By then, the Red Guards were nearly a spent force, and the army had to intervene to save the nation by manning civilian posts. Mao, wary of the increasing importance of the People’s Liberation Army, thought Deng, whom the military respected, would serve to check its influence. Beyond that, Premier Zhou, Deng’s onetime mentor in Paris, respected his knack for down-to-earth statecraft.

Summoned back to Beijing, Deng walked unheralded into a banquet for Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia. The Great Hall of the People resounded with applause as he entered on the arm of Mao’s favorite niece. Though he remained outside the party’s inner circles, Deng resumed his post of Deputy Premier and within two years had helped author Zhou’s Four Modernizations, the manifesto of practical reforms that launch China’s rapid growth. After Zhou’s death in early 1976, Jiang Qing and her radical Gang of Four accused Deng of orchestrating massive demonstrations of sorrow for Zhou that loudly criticized the Gang. The clique suppressed the marches in Tiananmen Square–precursors of the 1989 demonstrations–and purged Deng, who took refuge in Guangzhou.

In the meantime, an ailing and indecisive Mao, unable to trust his wife and her cohort, anointed as his heir Hua Guofeng, a man without allies. Yet Mao would not throw Deng out of the party. “Leave him his party card to show his descendants and to see how he will behave in the future,” Mao decreed. It was now a matter of waiting for Mao to die–and waiting to see whose power base was most effective. “I am prepared for the worst,” said Deng. He got the best of it. Within a month after Mao’s death in September 1976, the Gang of Four was under arrest. Deng staged his third and last comeback the next year.

In Paifangcun there is a cactus-like plant whose hundred-year blooms are an omen. When the flowers burst forth in 1979, the village knew whose good fortune they portended. By then the greatest son of the village was firmly in control of Beijing, having outmaneuvered Hua Guofeng and eased the Maoists out of power. Millions of peasants were allowed to cultivate private plots, sell surplus crops and invest in village factories. Soon Chinese peasants were not only adequately fed–no small thing in a country where 80% of the people still lived on the land–but more than a few were able to build houses and fill them with television sets, refrigerators and clothes washers.

For a moment dissent was allowed to flourish in the “Beijing spring” of 1979; hundreds of the walking wounded from the Cultural Revolution plastered public spaces with denunciations of Mao and even of Deng. Before long, that spectacle triggered Deng’s deep distrust of spontaneous mass movements. Had not the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution turned into cataclysms? The Beijing spring was cut short, and the champions of political reform were imprisoned.

By 1984, economic reform was being introduced in the big cities, so much so that Old Guard Marxists began to decry the “spiritual pollution” of cosmetics and discotheques. But Deng persisted, likening the effect to mere “flies that come through an open window.” By the late ’80s, however, economic liberalization had spilled uncontrollably into political yearnings; soon labor unrest and student demonstrations for greater freedom panicked Deng. He sacked his popular heir apparent, party chief Hu Yaobang, for pushing political reforms. By this time the only title Deng held was honorary chairman of the Chinese Bridge Association (he had refused all high posts since his 1977 comeback, and in 1989 gave up the critical job as head of the Central Military Commission). Still, Premier Zhao Ziyang admitted to the visiting Mikhail Gorbachev that all major Politburo decisions had to be approved by Deng.

Prosperity, however, dictated its own momentum. The sudden wealth of the country had engendered a pandemic of official corruption, widened income disparities and brought on severe bouts of inflation. In April 1989, students turned public mourning for Hu Yaobang, who had died of cancer, into the protracted Tiananmen protests. One night in June, Deng called in the army.

His conservative rivals took advantage of the massacre to pull back the reforms–or at least slow their pace. And as Deng retreated into a self-critical silence, they seemed to succeed. But Deng, though increasingly frail, fought back. In February 1992, sensing that the populace was exasperated by conservative austerities, he emerged from seclusion to rout his opponents. His stratagem: leading high officials on a tour of Shenzhen and Zhuhai, his prosperous economic enclaves. Nearly deaf by now, he urged Chinese to “seize the opportunity” of such go-go, free-market examples. The result was an explosion of economic growth and the elevation of “Deng Xiaoping Thought” to gospel, an ironic turn for a man who shuddered at “cults of personality.” But it was the final somersault he had to perform to ensure the survival of his legacy.

“Leaders are men, not gods,” said Deng Xiaoping. Mao Zedong, the man who would be a god, lies embalmed and displayed in his mausoleum in Tiananmen Square. Deng has asked that his eyes be donated to medicine, his ashes be cast into the sea and no monuments be built to him. Mao had resided in Zhongnanhai, the walled district of Beijing that is China’s new Forbidden City; Deng chose to live not in Zhongnanhai but in a block-long house called Miliangku (literally “rice-grain storehouse”), not far away. It was there that China’s unquestioned leader, its emperor without portfolio, enjoyed his family, played his beloved games of bridge and drifted into senescence, dealing with the specters that haunt the capital and the realm. They were ghosts as hoary as the last Emperor of the Ming dynasty who hanged himself on Coal Hill, just east of Deng’s home; the students gunned down outside Miliangku by a reactionary government in 1919; the many spirits of Tiananmen; the tens of millions who died of hunger in the Great Leap Forward. And finally there was that most troublesome shadow of all, Mao Zedong, Deng’s friend and foe, his rival for the soul of a country so ancient it has had the misfortune both to forget its history many times over and to repeat it again and again. Only history will decide who was the greater.

–Reported by Jaime A. FlorCruz and Mia Turner/Beijing