Book review: ‘Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China,’ by Ezra F. Vogel

By John Pomfret, Published: September 9

Twenty-six years ago, an American vice president went to the western Chinese city of Chengdu with a message for China: America is here to help. In a speech to students from Sichuan University, George H.W. Bush said the United States would allow China access to a far greater range of American technologies — some with military applications — than other communist countries were granted. American firms, he said, were eager to invest in China. American consumers, he predicted, would soon hanker after Chinese goods. “We are interested in helping China,” Bush told his audience. “Very, very interested.”

An American vice president wouldn’t visit China again until last month, when Joe Biden addressed a similar audience of students from the same university, in the same city. Only this time, the message was different. Instead of promising markets, investment and technology, Biden pledged that the U.S. Treasury would make good on the trillion bucks it owes Beijing. It raises the question: Do the schedulers at the White House lack imagination, or are they just trying to help a scribbler draw a parallel?

The Bush and Biden trips to Sichuan bookend one of the world’s greatest stories: the rise of China and its emergence as a global juggernaut. How China got to this point — last year it surpassed Japan as the world’s second-biggest economy and Germany as the nation with the most exports — is the story that Ezra F. Vogeltells in “Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China,” a masterful new history of China’s reform era. It pieces together from interviews and memoirs perhaps the clearest account so far of the revolution that turned China from a totalitarian backwater led by one of the monsters of the 20th century into the power it has become today.

Vogel, a Harvard professor who has bounced between interests in China and Japan for all of his professional life, picked one man on whom to center his tale: Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997), the communist leader who left the Sichuan countryside for France when he was 16. While Deng might have been tiny (he stood 4-foot-11), this book is massive, Yao Ming-big — the text alone runs to 714 pages.

But Vogel has a monumental story to tell. His main argument is that Deng deserves a central place in the pantheon of 20th-century leaders. For he not only launched China’s market-oriented economic reforms but also accomplished something that had eluded Chinese leaders for almost two centuries: the transformation of the world’s oldest civilization into a modern nation.

“Did any other leader in the twentieth century do more to improve the lives of so many?” Vogel asks. “Did any other twentieth century leader have such a large and lasting influence on world history?” He clearly believes that Deng — known in the West mostly for engineering the slaughter of protesters in the streets near Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989 — has been wronged by history. His tome is an attempt to redress the balance.

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