Review by Choice Review
One of modern China's most significant individuals, yet also its most mysterious and enigmatic, Deng Xiaoping single-handedly ushered the country into the modern global economy with his bold strategic policies, while also nearly reversing its course through his controversial decision for the crackdown at Tiananmen Square. As one of the foremost scholars of modern China, Vogel (emer., Harvard) is an appropriate authority to pen such a thorough account of Deng Xiaoping's tumultuous journey from political exile to paramount leader of China. A detailed study into Deng's dedication to the Chinese Communist Party, from his days as a student in Paris to his rise as a party cadre after the establishment of the People's Republic, to his reemergence as unrivalled decision-maker of the Chinese people, the book details how Deng's policies continue to shape the nation, and how it will most likely require a number of generations before scholars can fully appreciate his impact. In capturing the most turbulent period in the modern 20th century in this 928-page tome, Vogel contributes an important piece to the historiography of Chinese history. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above. A. Cho University of British Columbia
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
A look at the career of Deng Xiaoping, who changed Chinas course. TWO mighty rhetorical questions conclude this enormous biography of Deng Xiaoping (1904-97): "Did any other leader in the 20th century do more to improve the lives of so many? Did any other 20th-century leader have such a large and lasting influence on world history?" The answers emerge from this comprehensive, minutely documented book, but not as predictably as Ezra F. Vogel a Harvard University emeritus professor of social sciences, assumes. After Mao's death in 1976, Deng became the champion of the economic reforms that transformed the lives of many, but not most, Chinese. (Vogel observes that Mao's immediate successor, Hua Guofeng, was the initiator of the reforms.) Deng had long been a central figure in the Communist Party. Vogel rightly says that "for more than a decade before the Cultural Revolution" - 1966-1976 - "no one had greater responsibility for building and administering the old system than Deng Xiaoping." Yet, most of Deng's life and career takes up only a quarter of Vogel's 714 pages of narrative. By 1978, Deng had become China's "paramount leader." It follows, therefore, that apart from his long period of house arrest and banishment during the years 1967-73, and during another year in 1976-77, when Mao again removed him from the political scene, Deng must share the blame for much of the agony Mao inflicted on China and the Chinese. He certainly bears the major responsibility for the Tiananmen Square killings in 1989. It is a curiosity of "Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China" that Deng the man is almost invisible. There is a well-known list of his personal characteristics: he played bridge; liked bread, cheese and coffee; smoked; drank and used spittoons. He was unswervingly self-disciplined. Though Deng left no personal paper trail, Vogel ably relates what is known. Deng came from a small-landlord family in Sichuan Province, yet his formal education, apart from his time at a local school when he was a child, consisted mainly of a single year, 1926, of ideological indoctrination at Sun Yatsen University in Moscow. For five years before that, he lived in Paris, where he received a practical, and enduring, education inside the infant Chinese Communist Party, serving under the leadership of the young Zhou Enlai. After Paris and Moscow, Deng went back to China, ana before long hau ceased being "a cheerful, fun-loving extrovert." He commanded a small force against warlords, was defeated and may have run away. Eventually, he joined the "Mao faction," rising and falling with its inner-party fortunes. During the Long March of 1934-35 Deng attended the meeting where Mao took supreme power, and after the Communist triumph in 1949, he served as party commissar for the army that occupied Tibet, although he seems not to have set foot there. In the southwest Deng organized the land reform program of 1949-51 "that would wipe out the landlord class." Mao praised Deng "for his success . . . killing some of the landlords." (As part of a national campaign in which two million to three million were killed, "some" seems an inadequate word.) In 1957, Deng oversaw the "anti-rightist campaign," a "vicious attack on 550,000 intellectual critics" that "destroyed many of China's best scientific and technical minds." As for the Great Leap Forward of 1958-61, when as many as 45 million people starved to death, Vogel provides no evidence that Deng objected to Mao's monomaniacal policies. Frank Dikotter's well-documented book "Mao's Great Famine," however, shows that Deng ordered the extraction of grain from starving peasants for the cities and export abroad. In late 1966, Vogel tells us, Deng was accused of "pursuing the capitalist road." Under house arrest in Beijing until 1969, he was transferred to Jiangxi Province to work half days in a factory. Red Guards harassed his five children, and the back of one of his sons was broken when he may have jumped from a window after the guards frightened or bullied him. Mao permitted Deng to return to Beijing in 1973. Vogel contends that during his internal exile Deng concluded that something had gone systemically wrong with China: it was economically backward and isolated from the international scene; its people were poorly educated. China under Deng became an increasingly urban society. And following Deng's view that corruption crackdowns limit growth, many officials, Vogel writes, "found ways not only to enrich China, but also to enrich themselves." The result, he says, is that China is more corrupt than ever and its environment more polluted. While Deng believed that science and technology were important - as have many Chinese reformers since the late 19th century - he feared that the humanities and social sciences could be seedbeds of heterodoxy; he never hesitated in punishing intellectuals, whose divergent views could "lead to demonstrations that disrupt public order." It is telling that for Deng perhaps the worst development in the Communist world after Tiananmen was the execution on Dec. 25, 1989, of the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife. Ceausescu was the only Eastern European leader whose troops had fired on civilians. VOGEL calls Tiananmen a "tragedy," and quotes Deng brushing aside doubts from colleagues that using troops to smash the uprising would disturb foreigners; "Westerners would forget." Actually, it is young Chinese for whom the demonstrations in over 300 cities are a dim fact absent from their history lessons. Vogel's account of the crackdown is largely accurate, although he omits the shooting down on Sunday morning of many parents milling about at the edge of the square, searching for their children. In this, as in other parts of this narrative, Vogel could have spoken with journalists who were there, and not just read their accounts. (I declare an interest; I saw these events.) What is disappointing is Vogel's comments about why "the tragedy in Tiananmen Square evoked a massive outcry in the West, far greater than previous tragedies in Asia of comparable scale." Part of the answer, Vogel correctly says, citing another scholar, was the real-time television in Tiananmen. Then he perplexingly adds that viewers "interpreted" what they saw "as an assault on the American myth that economic, intellectual and political freedom will always triumph. Many foreigners came to see Deng as a villainous enemy of freedom who crushed the heroic students." Furthermore, Vogel contends, for foreign reporters the Tiananmen uprising "was the most exciting time of their careers." Such comments are unworthy of a serious scholar. He states flatly that "Deng was not vindictive." If he means Deng didn't order his adversaries and critics killed, that is true - as far as individuals are concerned. But Deng never shrank, either in Mao's time or his own, from causing the murder of large numbers of anonymous people. The most valuable part of Vogel's account is his survey of Deng's economic reforms; they made a substantial portion of Chinese better-off, and propelled China onto the international stage. But the party has obscured the millions of deaths that occurred during the Maoist decades. In the end, what shines out from Vogel's wide-ranging biography is the true answer to his two questions: for most of his long career Deng Xiaoping did less for China than he did to it. During years of internal exile, Deng concluded something had gone systemically wrong with China. Jonathan Mirsky is a journalist and historian specializing in China.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 25, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
This hefty work assesses Deng Xiaoping's years (1978-92) as China's paramount leader. Perhaps most intriguing to readers interested in Chinese history will be the granular detail Vogel gleans from the country's sources about maneuvering within the top echelon of the ruling Communist Party, starting with how Deng supplanted Mao's designated successor, Hua Guofeng. With Deng's domination of intraparty politics serving as his narrative linkage, Vogel delves into Deng's objectives in domestic and foreign policy. Recognizing the economic irrationality and international isolation bequeathed by the Maoist era, Deng determined to redress both without compromising the party's control of China. He was a dedicated revolutionary and not a pluralistic democrat. Outlining Deng's relaxation of the state's economic grip and his abolition of Mao's agricultural communes, Vogel recounts the nigh-inevitable pressures for political reform that followed, which Deng invariably squelched. Descriptive rather than critical or praiseworthy of the way Deng wielded power, Vogel frames Deng's leadership within the primacy traditionally accorded by Chinese leaders to social order, an apt perspective from which to view Deng's legacy of a vibrant but authoritarian China.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This intensely researched doorstop delivers a step-by-step political biography of the man who gets most of the credit for China's spectacular rise to an economic juggernaut. Vogel (Japan as Number One; Lessons for America) recounts how Deng (1904-1997), a leading figure from the 1950s on, was banished when his preference for practicality over class struggle angered Mao Zedong during the disastrous 1969-1975 Cultural Revolution. Returning to power after Mao's 1976 death, he eliminated the anti-intellectualism and chaotic policy swings that characterized Mao's rule while opening the nation to Western ideas. The result was China's emergence as the world's most dynamic economy, with a free market but still with a disturbing absence of political freedom (he gives a nuanced analysis of the Tiananmen Square massacres). Vogel, emeritus Harvard history professor and former director of its Fairbank Center for East Asian Research, draws on massive Chinese scholarship, but Chinese historians treat their great men respectfully, so the book delivers a relentless stream of itineraries, meetings, political debates, speeches, and policies but few personal details. Scholars will value it, but average readers will find more minutiae than they can tolerate. 40 b&w illus.; 1 map. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
If you want to understand China today, you must understand Deng Xiaoping (1904-97). Mao Tse-tung's death in 1976 left in its wake historic achievement and historic tragedy. "We are all to blame," said Deng, who had joined the Communist Party in the 1920s and was Mao's trusted helper in such disasters as the Great Leap Forward of the late 1950s. Deng shared Mao's ambition to make China a strong nation under party leadership, but he cannily built an unassailable position within the party to take it in new directions. Vogel (Henry Ford II Professor of Social Sciences Emeritus, Harvard; The Four Little Dragons: The Spread of Industrialization in East Asia) interviewed dozens of leaders and China experts, as well as Deng's family, did exhaustive documentary research, and mines the scholarly literature (a good deal of it by his former students) to analyze Deng's initial success in building China's economy and international position, frustration in the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, and ultimate legacy. VERDICT Chapters of overwhelming detail are balanced with lucid summary sections. Massive but fascinating, this is highly recommended for those with a serious interest in modern China. Indispensable in understanding Deng, what he accomplished, and where he fell short.-Charles W. Hayford, Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A thorough picking-over of Deng Xiaoping's record and accomplishments, setting him firmly as the linchpin linking an antiquated authoritative thinking to modern growth and acceleration.With Deng's accession to preeminence in 1978, China was still very much in the throes of closed thinking and hostility to the imperialist West, reeling from internal wounds inflicted by Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution and choked by centralized control. In this well-considered and -researched study, Vogel, former director of Harvard's Asia Center, portrays the whole remarkable character: from early student worker in France in the 1920s turned communist revolutionary, fired by imperialist humiliations and determined to help build a rich and strong China; to Mao's capable tool in constructing a coalescent communist base and, by turns, Mao's builder, finance minister and foreign and general secretary during the '50s and '60s. Indeed, Deng proved to be Mao's indispensable "implementer," to the extent of supporting Mao's attack on outspoken intellectuals during the Hundred Flowers period and obediently carrying out Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward. Yet Deng's reservations would render him purged and disgraced twice by Mao: during the early Cultural Revolution, then again in 1976, when Deng's efforts at consolidation and reform (encouraging Western support, learning about modernization of industry and science and reviving higher education) were "placed in cold storage" because he was suspected of designs to seize power and restore capitalism. Under Mao's successor Hua Guofeng, then as premier in his own right, Deng's reforms in science, technology and education proved the impetus for the modernization that would propel China forward. His willingness to seek Western expertise and open to other countries, "emancipate minds," encourage initiative and meritocracy and create special zones for attracting foreign investment have produced today's economic juggernaut, yet his firm grip on the Communist party line also resulted in the tragedy of Tiananmen in 1989. Deng's policy of staving off democratic reform by economic growth may last only so long.Vogel meticulously considers all facets of this complex leader for an elucidatingand quite heftystudy.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
