Professors at the Harvard
University are often foremost in exploring new subjects for writing books;
accordingly, during the last decade the Harvard University saw a frenzy of book
writing on China. Much of this resulted in a fairly good number of books on
Chinese economy, business, governance and politics. By comparison, Ezra Vogel's "Deng
Xiaoping and Transformation of Modern China" is a scholarly and solid work
of contemporary history and it brings out detailed political biography of Deng
Xiaoping and his tryst with the destiny in the post-Mao China that was bedeviled
by excesses of Cultural Revolution.
This work, running into 800 pages, is a political
history of a period that saw a monumental change in the way China reshaped itself and challenged the world order. To a patient reader it is a lucid and detailed
account of economic reforms Deng initiated in a China whose economic growth was stifled under a local brand of socialism nurtured by Mao. These
reforms, within a period of thirty years, were to hurtle China ahead of all the
big nations and pose a serious economic and strategic challenge to the mighty
US. In 1977 at the time of the death of
Chairman Mao, the country was in the throes of the ravages and moral degradation
brought about by the Cultural Revolution. It was a providential
arrangement that a person of Deng’s skill, dedication and capacity for relative
moderation was available to carry the mantle of leadership.
For
several reasons Ezra Vogel’s job of writing the story of Deng’s leadership was
a tough one. Chinese ways of chronicling leaders’ lives, normally stuffed with excessive praise, in accordance with the
relative importance and hierarchies of leaders have to be understood first. Reconciling these difficulties with the western
writers’ penchant for painting an intimate and informal portrait of the subject
of the biography also has its own problems.
At places, therefore, Vogel hurries through Deng’s personal details and
delves deeply into drab policy making,
presumably because the official records are full of such details. Despite these
inadequacies of resources and materials required for a biography, Ezra Vogel
has largely succeeded in presenting a portrait of Deng Xiaoping that is
authentic and riveting. He is portrayed vividly, both as an eminent political leader of China and as a
human being torn between the compulsions of a huge complicated governing machine
and his own conscience.
A few points need to be
made here on the portrait of Deng that stands out from Vogel’s long work. Deng may have lacked Mao’s charisma and other
attributes but he was a man of details and of performance. He did not have
Mao’s capacity to move masses and lend them a grand vision of future; but Deng
had a pragmatism and a great sense of his times with which he could deliver and decide what was good for
people. Mao held sway over people’s hearts, and in turn people were ready to be
led blindfolded wherever he led them, at times with disastrous results. Deng put
road-map before his people, broadly agreed to a blueprint and basic tenets of
execution, developed consensus among colleagues and followers and gave
freedom to his people to show results. And this worked immensely well in a society
that had suffered from absurdities and violence of Cultural Revolution.
Mao was a visionary and a
dreamer and a poet who subsisted on books and a sense of history. Pragmatic Deng was not merely an astute administrator with a keen eye for details; he had an ability of peeping into the future and preparing for it.
Mao had hardly traveled outside China and cared little for the world. Relatively, Deng had traveled
extensively through the world and knew that he had to keep China appropriately on the world map through alliances and friendships. He had been to France as a student apprentice at the
age of 15, worked there and cut his teeth working with the Communist Party there. He
was also in Russia for a fairly long period and was conversant with communist
movements in other countries. He had firsthand experience of war and conflicts
during the Communist Revolution and served as Commissar with the Red Army,
administering and managing the territories occupied by the Army. And after the Communist
Revolution he occupied important positions in the government. All these stood in good stead for Deng when he
became preeminent communist leader and administrator and made China an engine of world economic growth. Deng was a tough diplomat but knew how to cultivate personal relationships with heads of states and win friends. He took personal interest and initiative to improve relations with countries like US and Japan.
Deng had always been an efficient administrator
and he initiated administrative reforms whenever he had been entrusted with
important positions by Mao. Twice he fell out of Mao’s favor due to maneuverings
and machinations of Mao’s close aides including politically ambitious Jiang Qing,
Mao’s third wife who ruined several careers during the Cultural Revolution. Despite these disruptions, he survived and kept his spine straight.
Putting China on the path
of high economic growth needed some economic reforms that ran counter to the
socialism. It needed
adopting some aspects of open economy, abandoning system of collective farming,
committing to international trade, system of incentives for agriculturists and
farmers, encouraging FDI (Foreign Direct Investments), liberalizing system of administered
prices etc. And yet Deng managed all this while retaining his hold on the Communist
Party. Managing this change and moving on the high trajectory of economic
growth needed deft political management. Although the economy was being run
like an open economy, China still continued to loudly avow its socialistic
credentials. Managing these contradictions and developing consensus among various factions tested Deng’s skills and mettle. And he succeeded.
Apart from economic
reforms, Deng’s contributions proved outstanding in two important sectors.
After Cultural Revolution and especially after he took over reins after Mao’s
death, Deng moved decisively in reforming education sector, especially
universities, higher education and research and development. He freed the
universities of the socialistic leaders and their pernicious ideologies and
promoted merit/performance based systems. If Chinese universities and higher
education are gaining universal acclaim today, it is mainly because in late
seventies and early eighties Deng took up an intense program of University
Reforms and gave priority to research and development. His second important
contribution pertains to creating internal mechanism for peaceful and consensual
succession of political leadership from one generation to the other.
Private Deng was a family person, given to wife, children and grandchildren. Although not very educated himself, he had great
respect for education. His wife was a university teacher and taught physics. During Cultural Revolution Deng was under political attack and his son was targeted and roughed up by red
guards. He ended up being crippled for the rest of his life and Deng nursed him
during his illness. Deng was not vindictive but nursed strong personal emotions
for the excesses committed during the Cultural Revolution.
Clearly, Deng occupies a
unique position in the History of China. Without him China would not have become a world leader. And yet, it seems that at times Deng’s role has remained somewhat
ambiguous and even negative in certain aspects. Especially, in issues
relating to political reforms, he failed to appreciate democratic and intellectual
aspirations of a China that was in the process of momentous transformation. It appears that he was somewhat apprehensive,
even timid when it came to issues of political reforms. May be, perhaps he had
seen how political reforms unleashed by the Soviet leaders in eighties brought
the mighty Soviet Empire to a tottering end. And this could be a reason why
in 1989 he chose to crack down on the agitating students in the Tiananmen
Square. Deng may have been much softer and far more positive
than Mao; however, there is no evidence that he did anything to further the
interests of liberalism and democracy in China. On the contrary he appears to
have always stifled even the slightest dissent that he feared would snowball
into demand fro political freedom. Historians and scholars still argue whether he could have handled the Tienanmen students' demonstrations in 1989 somewhat differently so as to keep the doors for political reforms slightly open. Further, intellectuals as a class in China
never looked to Deng with any confidence the way they looked to Zhou. During
the Great Leap Forward and Mao’s other earlier disastrous adventures, Deng does
not appear to have made any attempts to protect liberals and critics.
Ezra Vogel’s book on Deng
Xiaoping tries to capture all these and other aspects and presents a fairly
balanced portrait of a great statesman, who brought China on the world map of
high development. It's a work on political economy of Reforms in China that provides insights into interplay of forces that shape and mold the way we develop. It’s a book teeming with great details on how Chinese leaders
managed the great challenge of tight rope walking between capitalism and
communism.