Deng Xiaoping, China, and the World

Editor's Note: Deng Xiaoping had a crucial impact on China's role in the world in the latter half of the twentieth century. Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai oversaw Chinese foreign policy during the country's first quarter century of Communist rule—initially establishing a close alliance with the Soviet Union, then turning bitterly against the USSR at the end of the 1950s, and finally pursuing a rapprochement with the United States in the early 1970s—but it was Deng who made the momentous decision in the late 1970s to integrate China into the global economic order that had been largely shaped by the United States from the mid-1940s on. When Mao and Zhou died in 1976, China was still one of the poorest countries in the world. Deng's bid to link China with the international capitalist system spawned a prolonged period of rapid economic growth that nowadays has made the Chinese economy the second largest in the world.

In political terms, however, Deng never made a full break with Maoism. Deng's willingness to use brutal violence against unarmed demonstrators in Beijing in June 1989—killing many hundreds of people—kept China from modernizing its political system in a way compatible with the dynamism of its rapidly growing economy. Deng's legacy in China is thus mixed, having turned his country into an economic powerhouse but having left it under a repressive authoritarian system.

Over the past several years, two important biographies of Deng have appeared in English, one put out in 2011 by a colleague of mine at Harvard, Ezra Vogel, and the other produced by Alexander V. Pantsov, assisted by Steven I. Levine. Pantsov, who spent the first part of his career in Moscow before moving to the United States in the early 1990s and becoming a professor of history (currently at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio), originally published the book in Russian in 2013. Soon thereafter he teamed up with Levine to put out a slightly revised English version, the same approach the two of them had earlier undertaken with a huge biography of Mao published by Pantsov in Russian in 2007 and in English in 2012. We asked three leading experts on Chinese politics and Chinese foreign policy under Mao and Deng—Joseph Fewsmith, Frederick C. Teiwes, and Sergey Radchenko—to offer their assessments of the Pantsov-Levine biography of Deng. We present their commentaries here along with a reply by Pantsov to numerous points of criticism.

Commentary by Joseph Fewsmith

In March 1931, Deng Xiaoping, who had been commanding troops in the ill-fated Bose Uprising in Guangxi Province, led the remnants of his 7th Corps to Jiangxi to link up with Mao Zedong in Jiangxi. As they got to southern Jiangxi, Deng left for Shanghai to report to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) center. On the day he left, his co-commander, Li Mingrui, came under attack and had to retreat. The circumstances of Deng leaving were murky, raising the possibility he had abandoned his troops (p. 80).

The incident was significant not only because it forms a part of a chapter on the Bose Uprising, which is not well known, but also because Mao in April 1967, after Deng had been enduring months of harsh criticism in the Cultural Revolution, suddenly had Deng woken up in the middle of the night to berate him for sending work teams into the schools. He then asked Deng whether he had abandoned the 7th Corps 36 years earlier (p. 256). This incident perhaps sheds less light on Deng than on Mao, who seems to have spent much time in his later years ruminating about the past actions of his comrades. Had Mao's memories been stirred by Red Guard charges that Deng had indeed abandoned his troops? Did Mao just want to see how Deng would respond to the question in the early hours...