25: China

The Man Who Took Modernity to China Some reviews, however, have accused Mr. Vogel of devoting too little space to Deng’s iron-fisted rule, including his 1989 decision to allow the military to use deadly force against demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. ....... But other scholars say that Mr. Vogel’s new volume offers a deeply textured portrait of Deng and the reforms he championed. ....... scholars have begun to conclude that it was Deng (1904-97), Mao’s diminutive and long-suffering lieutenant, who deserves credit for truly reshaping China after Mao’s death. ........ Mr. Vogel, who worked for a decade on this huge biography, spent a year brushing up on his Chinese-language skills with a tutor. (Most of his interviews were conducted in Chinese without an interpreter.) He talked to people close to Deng, including two of his daughters, as well as relatives and aides of Communist leaders like Chen Yun, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, who had worked with Deng. ....... Deng loosened state controls over the lives of ordinary people, opened the door for Chinese to study overseas and, Mr. Vogel explains, he retreated from Maoist doctrine and Communism without ever really saying so. He lured foreign investors to China and tapped outside expertise to jump-start a largely moribund economy, setting the stage for China’s three-decade-long economic boom. .......... Much of this happened, Mr. Vogel explains in minute detail, despite stiff opposition from Communist Party elders, some of whom feared the reforms were too aggressive, and others who viewed them as bourgeois liberalization. ......... “A lot of Americans’ view of Deng is so colored by Tiananmen Square. They think it was horrible. I have the same view. But it’s the responsibility of a scholar to have an objective view.” ...... Vogel said he tried to put Deng’s life in context, to show him as a survivor, obsessed with social and political stability and economic progress. ........ “Who in the 20th century had more influence on more people?” he asked. “He took 300 million people out of poverty. They’d been trying to do it in China for 150 years, and they couldn’t. And he did it.”