When reading history it’s tempting to hold the question “is this person good or evil?” in mind. With Franco, Mussolini, and Hitler the answer is clear. More often it is not. World leaders must make decisions where there are severe costs regardless of which path they choose. Reading Deng Xiaoping and The Transformation of China by Ezra Vogal it became clear Deng was impossible to neatly categorize. Deng was overall, a pragmatist. A man who would do whatever the moment required to serve his long-term vision for China, whether that meant embracing markets, cracking down on dissent, or playing both sides of the Party.
Surviving under Mao
Deng devoted his life to China with a genuine desire to improve the quality of life of its people.
While serving under Mao he was twice exiled for bourgeois thinking and “following the rightist path.” During those periods his children were harassed by the Red Guards to the extent that his son was left permanently disabled. Any person with a less resolute constitution would have abandoned the revolutionary movement and fled China. Not Deng. He patiently waited, waiting for his call back to Beijing.
Deng understood that the only way to shape China was from inside the system, no matter the personal cost.
Experiments
Deng, like a modern-day startup founder, liked to test ideas before fully committing.
The household responsibility system is a perfect example. Under Mao, agriculture was run by collectives, thus individual output was not rewarded and everyone shared the same rations. In 1978, farmers in Xiaogang village, Anhui, secretly divided collective land among their households, each agreeing to meet the state quota while keeping any surplus for themselves, at the time an illegal act driven by the threat of famine. Rather than suppress it, Deng endorsed and scaled the practice of household responsibility. Families were required to produce the government quota but then free to sell whatever surplus they could create.
The ‘household responsibility’ policy sat neatly alongside the philosophical groundwork he had championed in the lead-up to the 1978 Third Plenum, “Practice is the Sole Criterion for Testing Truth“. After years of the ‘Two Whatevers‘ (a policy to uphold whatever Mao believed) under Hua Guofeng, Practice gave Deng a palatable framework to experiment, observe, and implement based on facts rather than dogma.
Deng’s landmark policy of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) followed the same logic. A ‘small’ contained experiment in Guangdong and Fujian (far away from the political heart in Beijing) with economic opening and foreign investment before scaling nationally. A lesser known but fascinating example being ‘Democracy Wall’, his early push for open discourse and criticism of the Party, can be remembered as an experiment that was rolled back when it no longer served his purposes, notably after some posters began to criticize Deng himself.
Clever wordplay was a recurring theme. The SEZs were originally just “Special Zones,” but aware that this might imply that political experimentation was permissible, Deng promptly added “Economic.”
Economic reform
It is impossible to understate the impact of Deng’s economic reforms. It would be a fair argument to say his policies lifted more people out of poverty than any leader before or since.
He understood that China could not modernise in isolation. Despite deep resentment toward Japan after the WW2 atrocities, he rebuilt relations to drive knowledge sharing and investment. After visiting Japan and being inspired by their modern and efficient factories, Deng began importing management practices that transformed Chinese industry after decades of bloated, top-down enterprises. He became the first Chinese leader to visit the United States, building political relationships and personal friendships with presidents.
Unlike Mao, Deng believed science and technology were essential to economic growth. His drive to support science was one of the source of friction with Mao. Understanding that developing intellectual firepower would support growth his first act in power was to give every student a fair shot at attending university by reinstating the National Higher Education Entrance Examination.
Earlier purges had killed or banished talented minds to the countryside for manual labour and re-education. Ever the pragmatist, Deng reframed knowledge workers as “mind labourers” reviving the sciences without directly contradicting Mao.
Growing pains
Economic growth viewed in the abstract is one thing. On the ground, the removal of price controls and state employee job security caused real pain. Crime and corruption spiked, apparently the bars we see today on most Chinese apartment windows stem from Deng’s era. The one-child policy, implemented during his tenure, addressed immediate population pressures but created demographic consequences China is still reckoning with decades later.
Deng keenly aware that economic opening could lead to unrest came up with yet another clever slogan, “some will get rich first.” Knowing that his reforms would create winners and losers, Deng tried to maintain social order with ever increasing pressures which came to a head in 1988 with rampant inflation.
Deng the enforcer
The same pragmatism that drove economic opening also drove Deng’s hardest decisions. The 1979 war with Vietnam was a brief but bloody signal that China would assert itself militarily when geopolitics demanded it. A decade later, Tiananmen Square revealed the limits of Deng’s tolerance for political reform and tolerance for ideas that posed existential threats to the Party. When student protests threatened Party stability, he infamously authorised martial law. The economic project could not survive, in his view, without political control.
Amidst the backdrop of the Soviet Union collapsing and socialist states dwindling in global importance one can only imagine the internal pressure inside Beijing during this period.
This is what makes Deng difficult to categorise. The man who opened China to the world and lifted hundreds of millions from poverty is the same man who sent in the military against student protesters. Both decisions flowed from the same instinct: do what is necessary to keep China on the path he had set.
Embracing vagueness
Deng was a master of broad strokes. Leaving ambiguity allowed him room to manoeuvre, and often the official responsible for specifics and implementation would take the fall when things went awry, even when Deng had privately agreed or lent support. His coldness in dispatching former allies and popular reformers Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang highlighted a ruthless, survive at any means approach. Deng felt that Party survival and stability were far more important than personal loyalties. Inside the Party he was a master at balancing reformers and conservatives, playing to whichever side served his strategic goals at any given moment.
His catchy slogs capture the sentiment of vagueness perfectly. Memorable enough to rally support, vague enough that he could later change tack without appearing a hypocrite:
- Black cat, white cat, as long as it catches mice
- Some will get rich first
- Seek truth from facts
- Socialism does not mean poverty
- One country, two systems
Deng’s final act
Deng’s last major move was his ‘Southern Tour’. In his mid-eighties, with Jiang Zemin readied to become preeminent leader Deng still had concerns about how committed Jiang was the his modernizations and economic opening. During the tour he swung Party sentiment firmly away from the conservatives, pushing for bolder economic reforms and deeper opening as he visited and praised the successes of the SEZs.
Before departing he established term limits and retirement norms for Party leaders, deliberately trying to prevent another Mao-style concentration of power and ‘cult of personality’. Above all, Deng wanted to be remembered fairly but not worshiped.
His successor, Jiang Zemin, duly obliged, implementing policy under Deng’s aggressive framework of opening and growth. Under Jiang, from 1992-97 China, the largest population on earth, reported an average growth rate of >10%.
Ezra Vogel’s book is an excellent, nuanced account of the man who shaped modern China more than any other. Reading it, I found myself oscillating between admiration and unease. But good or bad feels like the wrong question. What is certain is that Deng was a pragmatist and pragmatism, for better or worse, is what built modern China.