Reviews for Deng Xiaoping and the Chinese revolution

The average rating for Deng Xiaoping and the Chinese revolution based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-09-02 00:00:00 Yoshio Katagiri Very solid, fair and even-handed political biography that strikes a good balance between conciseness and detail, relating the development of Deng Xiaoping's thought and career in relation to the burgeoning modern China, the rise and entrenchment of the Communist Party and the changing geopolitical alliances. It underlines the apparently overlooked importance of Deng's military career from the late 20's onwards, in which period he built up the connections and credibility that would garner him backers and allies for life. An unexceptional military commander, Deng still got in Mao's good books by backing him against ultra-left tendencies (who wanted to expropriate not only landlords but also all rich and moderately wealthy peasants) and, later, by very successfully managing the economy of the Taihang region, then under constant threat of the Japanese. Meaningfully, the economic policies he developed at this point (an individually-contracted 'responsibility system' (43) that allowed peasants to keep complete control over any surplus harvest) prefigured the post-1976 market reforms. The second thrust of the book is to highlight the continuity between Mao's early policies and the views Deng was to be criticized and ostracized for during the Cultural Revolution. In agreement with current PRC history, Mao in his advanced age forsook Mao Zedong Thought (which Deng codified and promoted a great deal) for personalized, dogmatic theory and ultra-left deviations. After the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, the party's non-radical factions, chief among who Zhou Enlai, were only too happy to reinstate Deng Xiaoping. The picture painted here is one of a socialist, nationalist, traditionalist reformer, whose geopolitical swervings were dictated by a need for independence from a hegemonic Soviet Union (Deng always upheld Mao's foreign policy as correct, and vice-versa) and whose internal government privileged the absolute dictatorship of the party and a pragmatic, trial-and-error-based approach to economics over dogmatic prescriptions - hence his revulsion towards the Little Red Book. The typical Cold War horror stories are, likewise, treated with nuance and sobriety. The mortality figure given for the Great Leap Forward (a population decrease of 13,5 million over 2 years) is outdated, or at least uncritically contextualized, and the Cultural Revolution is simply reduced to a series of economic blunders and senseless upheaval; on the other hand, despite being published only 5 years after the fact, the Tienanmen square 'massacre' is quietly revealed not to have taken place on the square and neither was it the result of trigger-happy authoritarian actions. Informative, lucid, coherent and rigourous. Recommended.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-01-02 00:00:00 Navinchandra Mehta Excellent account of the life of Deng, with a very accurate and astute analysis of his life. IT is an early account, written while Deng was still alive in the '90 when the author started to have access to more archives and speeches by Deng released by the CPC apparatus.