Deng: A Political Biography (review)

This is a well-written, insightful book that makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the life, times, and political strategies of Deng Xiaoping. Yang also enlightens the reader about the deeper patterns of Chinese politics and in so doing makes a notable contribution to a growing biographic literature on the last political giant of the twentieth century. A graduate of Beijing University who completed graduate work at Harvard University and subsequently returned to China to teach at People’s University, Yang provides texture to Chinese politics and Deng Xiaoping. This volume and Deng’s daughter’s account of family life in the Deng household provide a sense of a three-dimensional person. Yang’s nuanced image of Deng the politician is captured in a few lines toward the end of the volume:

One way to get a fix on Deng is to remember that he was a bridge player. He liked the game, not just as pastime but also, in his own words, as a general exercise of his brain; with a few rules, strict or loose, kept in mind; with a few cards, good or bad, received by chance; with a few quick ideas on how to deliver these cards; with a little cooperation from one’s partner; with an occasional finesse of one’s foes. Win or lose, it’s a game and let’s get on to a new round.

The first third of the volume begins with Deng’s childhood in rural Sichuan province and proceeds through his study abroad in France and the Soviet Union in the 1920s; the murky events surrounding his periodic falls from grace in the Chinese Communist Party in the early and mid-1930s; and his relationships with Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, and Liu Bocheng throughout the almost two decades of anti-Japanese and civil wars of the 1930s and 1940s. The latter two-thirds of the book address Deng’s post-1949 rise to supreme leader, a process that culminated in his securing power so self-evident that he needed no exalted official position from which to exercise it. Whether it was military strategy and tactics, economic issues, or international affairs, Deng is portrayed as someone far less skilled in the technical aspects of these fields than expert in the art of politics (managing personal relationships and using organizations). The overall image of Deng that emerges is that of an individual adroit in the art of flexibility - opportunities for advancement were to be seized, largely unconstrained by personal loyalties or policy commitments. This portrayal is predictably a far different picture than that painted by Deng’s daughter in her biography of her father. Yang draws appropriate attention to Deng’s actions in the anti-rightist campaign of the late 1950s and the Great Leap disaster that followed into the early 1960s.

In painting his picture of Deng Xiaoping, Yang presents a young man who sat at the knee of Zhou Enlai early in his career, hitched his chariot to Mao in the mid-1930s and thereafter (even if occasionally at the expense of Zhou), and at the end of his life seemed to be at the stage of “supreme maturity” where the accumulated lessons of the past could constructively guide policy. The reader only wishes that Yang were able to provide additional insight into how the conclusions Deng drew from his rise to power shaped his exercise of power during the last two decades of his life.

But, praiseworthy as the book is in many respects, it also is seriously flawed along one principal dimension. The greatest deficiency is that the author easily slides from adequate documentation and evidence, through marginal documentation and evidence, to absolutely no evidence or documentation. This is a pronounced problem when the author assesses the motivations of Deng and others and speaks with great assurance about their respective political strategies and factional alliances. It is troubling to read some interesting passages and find them documented simply as...