Though the name of Mao Zedong still has resonance around the world, the man who has inherited the mantle of Chinese hero is Deng Xiaoping. While Mao is now mainly associated with the idea of revolutionary excess and periods of colossal suffering, Deng has come to be linked to China's astonishing economic development, and to the steering of China away from its Leninist and Maoist organizational straitjacket into a wider world of technological growth and international trade. When we think of Deng, it tends to be within a context where Mao's revolutionary legacy is seen as irrelevant. As Mao shrinks in the historical balance, Deng rises; it is Deng who is hailed as the pragmatist, as the man who introduced a new economic dynamism with his striking phrase that it did not matter whether a cat was black or white as long as it could catch mice.
resonance (n): the ability evoke or suggest images, memories, and emotions.
mantle (n): an important role or responsibility that passes from one person to another
Deng is now thought of, both within China and in the world at large, as having been in some measure heroic. That is due almost entirely to the stances he adopted, and the policies he helped propel into motion, after he had survived two purges and was called back to power in 1977, at the age of 73. What Deng had the intelligence to see was that China would have to break out of its Maoist mold of state control—that the nation's long-dormant entrepreneurial spirit had to be encouraged, not inhibited, and that the capitalist nature of some of the needed changes had to be openly accepted, whatever the political fallout.
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Yet Deng did not just focus on the economy. He identified other areas where changes had to be made for China to become a world power: there was the need to revamp the educational system, especially universities and research institutes; the military had to be streamlined and professionalized; lawyers had to be trained in the intricacies of commercial and corporate law, and be able to have cases heard in a viable and expanded judicial system; more Chinese had to be permitted to study overseas, and foreign students and tourists to come to China. As a complementary move, Deng ordered far-reaching reviews of the cases of hundreds of thousands of intellectuals, students and professionals who had been sent into internal exile in impoverished rural areas after the Hundred Flowers Movement in 1957, and later during the Cultural Revolution; under Deng, many were allowed to return to their homes and families.
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Taking a broad view of the intellectual and creative worlds that had essentially been banned in the radical Maoist years, Deng authorized the loosening of controls over filmmaking, fashion, music and the visual arts. Investigative journalists were encouraged to lay bare local abuses, even if they might implicate members of the Communist Party. In late 1978 a stretch of blank wall not far from the headquarters of the Party was opened for the airing of political and cultural views in the form of written posters and poems; swiftly dubbed Democracy Wall, it became a focal point for tough-minded criticism of local and national government, a critique from which not even Deng or Mao were spared.
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When Deng is described in heroic terms, it is largely because of the long-range effects of this remarkable torrent of change that he set in motion. Leading China down the capitalist path, Deng relaxed all manner of economic controls and launched Special Economic Zones—free-trade enclaves that demonstrated the prosperous potential of a liberalized economy. These initiatives helped transport millions of Chinese out of poverty in the space of just a few decades, a feat unprecedented in history; transformed China into the global manufacturing behemoth that it now is; and heralded the country's arrival on the world stage as a major geopolitical and financial player.
torrent (n): a strong and fast-moving stream of water or other liquid.
enclave (n): a place or group that is different in character from those surrounding it.
But the reforms Deng activated should not be allowed to expunge the ongoing effects of the changes he abandoned or chose not to make. Democracy Wall, for example, was closed down as a protest site early in 1979, and several of the most strident protestors were convicted of crimes against the state and given lengthy prison sentences. Many of the underground journals were banned, and the poets were silenced. Even as Deng visited the U.S. in 1979, a journey in which he charmed Americans with his apparently folksy ways and made major deals with Boeing and Coca-Cola, Chinese troops invaded Vietnam in an attempt to undercut Russian power in the region. University leaders were removed if their demands for new freedoms were deemed to be too strenuous, and Deng purged his own protégé Hu Yaobang on the grounds that he was pursuing too much change too fast.
expunge (v): erase or remove completely
folksy (adj): having the characteristics of traditional culture and customs, esp in a contrived or artificial way.
The intolerance reflected by the suppression of the Democracy Wall movement resurfaced during the massive demonstrations that began at Tiananmen Square in April 1989 with Hu's funeral and were so bloodily put down in June that year. In his use of the deadly force of the People's Liberation Army to clear Tiananmen Square, Deng showed how deep was his mingled contempt for and fear of the student and other leaders who, he believed, threatened to spread chaos across the country in the name of democracy. The Party's verdict on the Tiananmen protests—that they amounted to a counterrevolutionary act—was never reversed by Deng, and is also an indissoluble part of his legacy.
indissoluble (adj): unable to be destroy, lasting.
If Deng's actions were often cautious or even negative, it was because he had fought and lived a revolution for over 60 years, and he could not summon up the conviction that those years had been in vain. Deng could never forget that it was a Maoist vision, however flawed and ruthless, that had helped unite China after its decades of fragmentation. Mao might have pulled the nation together, but it was Deng who pushed it toward prosperity and modernity, and a future as one of the world's great powers.
Source:
Deng Xiaopeng by Jonathan Spence
