Deng Xiaoping

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description: a Chinese politician who served as the leader of the Communist Party of China and was instrumental in modernising China

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Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong

by Louisa Lim  · 19 Apr 2022

September 1982, emerging from the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, where she’d been discussing the future of Hong Kong with Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher missed her footing and toppled down the steps, landing unceremoniously on her hands and knees. The optics of the British prime

financial city, to plummet 600 points. The fall was an omen, people in Hong Kong said, of the territory’s future. Thatcher had tripped because Deng Xiaoping had run so many rings round her. In fact, Hong Kongers had no idea quite how badly the meeting had gone. High on her success

deadline on the land leases as a trial balloon to investigate Beijing’s intentions. When he arrived in Beijing, MacLehose discovered he would be meeting Deng Xiaoping, the cunning Sichuanese vice premier who had survived three purges to become China’s paramount leader. On the morning of the meeting, Sir Yuet-keung

to push ahead even though the Chinese Foreign Ministry had preemptively requested he not raise the issue. In the event, he has always maintained that Deng Xiaoping was the first to break the taboo. In the meeting, Deng told him that Hong Kong was part of China and would be recovered, but

. Their enforced ignorance was not casually done; it was a considered British government strategy, memorialized in diplomatic notes. Since they had not been told of Deng Xiaoping’s position, the Unofficials continued to lobby for an extension of British administration for two more years. They were not served well by their loyalty

surprised Hong Kong secondary school students visiting Beijing. The way the blueprint was revealed was a gesture of contempt for the official talks. In September, Deng Xiaoping laid down a one-year deadline, warning that if an agreement could not be reached, Beijing would act unilaterally. In November, Beijing publicly released a

were informed that they could only visit as private citizens since Beijing did not recognize Exco or Legco. They did, however, receive an audience with Deng Xiaoping. Right from the start, Deng laid out his position firmly, telling them there was no role for them in negotiations over Hong Kong’s future

their way through the whole newscast. When we went live to mark the death of ninety-three-year-old Deng Xiaoping, a mistake on the autocue led my colleague to announce, straight-faced, “Deng Xiaoping has died. He was thirty-nine years old.” This night, however, the mood in the vast newsroom, almost empty

with Patten and his photogenic daughters sailing out on HMY Britannia. The Convention Centre was full of Chinese officials attending ceremonial functions, and I spotted Deng Xiaoping’s son Deng Pufang in his wheelchair. I chased him, trying to elicit a comment on what his father would have thought, until I was

squash the idea.” What I really wanted was to find out what he thought of the Unofficials’ suspicions about a secret deal between MacLehose and Deng Xiaoping in 1979, to hand Hong Kong back as a kind of human factory. If there had been such a deal, Patten was possibly the only

comes before, and what comes after the dates that we all remember.” Chapter 6 KING In the first few years after the handover, just as Deng Xiaoping had promised, the horses still raced, the stock market sizzled, and the nightclub dancers continued to writhe and grind through the night. As their symbols

intentions: Tsang, A Modern History of Hong Kong. Cradock, Experiences of China, 166. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT he would be meeting Deng Xiaoping: Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT tried to dissuade him

. Vines, Stephen. “In Hong Kong, Public Consultations Are Effective—at Keeping the Public at Bay.” South China Morning Post, October 24, 2018. Vogel, Ezra F. Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011. Wasserstrom, Jeff. Vigil: Hong Kong on the Brink. Columbia Global Reports

Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century

by Christian Caryl  · 30 Oct 2012  · 780pp  · 168,782 words

was under way at the same time in the world’s most populous country. At the end of 1978, the septuagenarian Chinese Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping heaved himself into the top job, and in the months that followed he and his comrades introduced a series of economic reforms that ultimately changed

was a grain of truth to these accusations. The protagonists of 1979 were, in their own ways, participants in a great backlash against revolutionary overreach. Deng Xiaoping rejected the excesses of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in favor of pragmatic economic development—a move that, despite Deng’s disclaimers, entailed a gradual restoration

that many of the Conservative Party comrades-in-arms who accompanied her into government in 1979 questioned just how “conservative” she really was. As for Deng Xiaoping, he insisted on maintaining the institutional supremacy of the Communist Party even as he charted a course away from central planning and toward state capitalism

leadership; in the wake of the great famine, some of his high-ranking colleagues—most notably Liu Shaoqi, chairman of the People’s Republic, and Deng Xiaoping, CCP general secretary—had modified some of Mao’s most foolhardy reforms, thus ameliorating the crisis. This was something that Mao was not prepared to

depended on him, was unclear. There was no way for them to know how long the situation would last. The old man’s name was Deng Xiaoping. Over the previous decade, his life had described a bewildering trajectory. By the middle of the 1960s, he had attained a lofty position as general

unleashed a media campaign, warning, a bit too loudly, against the misuse of Tangshan relief efforts by their number-one political foe: “Be alert to Deng Xiaoping’s criminal attempt to exploit earthquake phobia to suppress revolution,” ran one of the slogans. The Gang allegedly took the campaign one surreal step further

within the CCP leadership and bringing the Cultural Revolution to an end. A few months after that, Hua welcomed Deng back into active political life. Deng Xiaoping was finally back for good, and he would remain in power long enough to send his country in a completely different direction. It was not

. We should be wary of biographies that rely excessively on social determinism. People are not only the products of their surroundings. Other Chinese men of Deng Xiaoping’s generation emerged from environments comparable to his, but that didn’t necessarily turn them into leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. Unlike Khomeini, most

their high-ranking comrades who had been purged in the years before Mao’s death. The most prominent survivor of this group, of course, was Deng Xiaoping. Hua was aware of the potential challenge and moved quickly to forestall it. In March 1977, he admonished delegates at a key party meeting: “

legacy of the Great Leap Forward was still tangible. In the early 1960s, in the wake of the titanic famine caused by the Great Leap, Deng Xiaoping and his then-mentor, Liu Shaoqi, had tried to stimulate agricultural productivity by allowing some peasants to return to the prerevolutionary practice of family farming

All of them offered ritual praise to Hua Guofeng, but they knew whom they really had to thank for their political resurrection. These people were Deng Xiaoping’s past. Like them he had emerged from the ruins of the old imperial order to pledge himself to the Communist ideal, one that had

potential of the nine-hundreth anniversary of the martyrdom of a saint. The thirtieth anniversary of the Communist takeover in China was shrewdly exploited by Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues to reinforce the sense of a new beginning. The forty-day Islamic mourning cycle proved a crucial dynamic for the revolution in

inevitable, perhaps, that we focus on leaders when we examine grand political and economic transitions. But they are not the only actors in these dramas. Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues triumphed precisely because they unleashed the creativity and the entrepreneurial urges of millions of Chinese. Many of them—shocking though it might

so rich?’ one young woman asked me in the Peace Café, confessing that she was transfixed by what she had seen on Chinese TV when Deng Xiaoping visited the United States.”6 Schell had visited China during the waning years of the Cultural Revolution and recalled how hard ordinary people were prepared

opened in that spring of 1979 proved a big success. Three years later, by now an affluent Guangzhou entrepreneur, he received the privilege of meeting Deng Xiaoping at a social event for Guangdong Province luminaries. The fact that a local businessman was deemed worthy of such a gathering said a great deal

socialism from Britain.”26 Bolivian president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada cited Thatcher—along with the rise of the East Asian tigers and the reforms of Deng Xiaoping—as the precedent for the program of market-oriented reform that began in 1985.27 In Brazil in the 1990s, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso embarked

suppressed at the same time. The chairman of the Central Military Commission, the man who issued the command for the crackdown, was none other than Deng Xiaoping. In 1977 those who yearned for an end to Maoist turmoil had greeted Deng’s return to power by hanging up small bottles over Beijing

countries where the elites were not prepared to relinquish their privileged political status.19 In this respect, it seems safe to say that it was Deng Xiaoping, the man who devoted his life to the ideals of Communism, who has done more than any other individual to ensure its demise as an

while yet, the exhibition implies, but the future no longer belongs to it. Walk around the corner, though, and you come across a remarkable sight: Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher are having a chat. The two life-size wax figures—Thatcher’s hair a bit too red—sit in armchairs against a

were roughly contemporaneous with the first flowering of Solidarity. But it is also true that the Polish example combined two factors that the party of Deng Xiaoping continues to follow with particular alertness. One is labor activism. The party tracks every strike and independent labor movement with extraordinary care, and it responds

a surprise that the Chinese Communist Party has taken measures to fill the resulting “meaning gap.” In the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, Deng Xiaoping and his comrades tried to compensate for the loss of faith in Marxist-Leninist dogma by playing up patriotism and pride in the glories of

which disembodied utopias cannot easily compete. Similarly, a look at the events of 1979 leads us to appreciate the myriad forms that counterrevolutions can assume. Deng Xiaoping changed China’s course through stealth and subtlety. Khomeini and the Afghans chose the path of violent uprising, the sudden transformative release of pent-up

John Paul II, Baqer Moin on Ayatollah Khomeini, Ali Rahnema on Ali Shariati, John Campbell and Hugo Young on Margaret Thatcher, and Ezra Vogel on Deng Xiaoping. I owe particular thanks to the men and women who allowed themselves to be interviewed about their own experiences: Akbar Ayazi, Adam Boniecki, Bao Pu

Schoenhals, 10. CHAPTER 2: DRAGON YEAR 1. Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Death of Mao’s China, James Palmer, 160. 2. Deng Xiaoping and the Cultural Revolution: A Daughter Recalls the Critical Years, Deng Rong, 428. 3. The name originally came from Mao, who had coined it when

29. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 32. 10. Ibid., 60. 11. Deng did not coin the phrase. It is actually an old Sichuanese proverb. 12. The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 1978–1994, Maurice Meisner, 82. 13. “Deng’s Legacy,” MacNeil Lehrer Report (Online News Hour), February

Ali Shariati, Ali Rahnema, 226. 9. Ibid., 325–326. CHAPTER 10: TRUTH FROM FACTS 1. Deng Xiaoping Shakes the World, Yu Guangyuan, 21. 2. Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, Ezra F. Vogel, 193. 3. Ezra Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, 103–109. 4. “The 1979 Truth Criterion Controversy,” Michael Schoenhals. The

Chinese Quarterly, no. 126 (June 1991). 5. The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 1978–1994, Maurice Meisner, 91. 6. Ibid. 7. The China Reader: The Reform Era, edited by

Change,” David Butler, Holger Jensen, and Lars-Erik Nelson. 10. Coming Alive!, Garside, 220–221. 11. Ibid., 219. 12. Ibid., 221. 13. Ibid., 215. 14. Deng Xiaoping Shakes the World: An Eyewitness Account of China’s Party Work Conference and the Third Plenum (November-December 1978), Yu Guangyuan, 21. 15

Vogel, 233. 16. Ibid. 17. How the Farmers Changed China: Power of the People, Kate Xiao Zhou, 53–54. 18. Deng Xiaoping Shakes the World, Yu, 52. 19. Ibid., 44, 46. 20. Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, Vogel, 234. 21. Ibid., 234–235. 22. Hu Yaobang, who made those daring remarks about

agriculture at the conference, also worked with Yu on the final version of Deng’s speech. 23. Deng Xiaoping Shakes the World, Yu, 13. 24. Ibid., 136. 25. Ibid., 187. 26. Ibid., 132. 27. Ibid., 130, 133. 28. The Soviet Regional Dilemma: Planning,

People, and Natural Resources, Jan Åke Del-lenbrant, 99. 29. Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, Vogel, 246. 30. “Communiqué of the Third Plenary Session of the 11th CPC Central Committee,” Beijing Review.com.cn, October

Mathews, Washington Post, February 3, 1979. 5. “The New China,” Deming. 6. Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750, Odd Arne Westad, 373. 7. Deng Xiaoping: Portrait of a Chinese Statesman, David Shambaugh, 61–62. 8. Coming Alive! China After Mao, Roger Garside, 255. 9. China’s War with Vietnam, 1979

: Issues, Decisions, and Implications, King C. Chen, 151. 10. The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 1978–1994, Maurice Meisner, 109. 11. “The Fifth Modernization,” Wei Jingsheng, 171–172, in The China

Schell and David Shambaugh. 12. Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China: Political Reform in the Deng Xiaoping Era, Merle Goldman, 55. 13. Deng Xiaoping Era, Meisner, 109. 14. Ibid., 121. 15. Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping (1975–1982), Deng Xiaoping, 1984. 16. Deng Xiaoping Era, Meisner, 11–12. CHAPTER 14: THE EVANGELIST 1. “Sir Larry Lamb: Obituary,” Telegraph, May

://china-boom.asiasociety.org/bio/detail/219. 26. Broken Earth, Mosher, 44. 27. Author’s interview with Tom Gorman, Hong Kong, March 10, 2010. 28. Deng Xiaoping Shakes the World: An Eyewitness Account of China’s Party Work Conference and the Third Plenum (November-December 1978), Yu Guangyuan, 204–205. 29. Ibid

. The Search for Modern China, Jonathan Spence, 715–716. 11. “‘Two Faces’ of Deng Xiaoping,” Bao Tong, Radio Free Asia, December 29, 2008. 12. “June 9 Speech to Martial Law Units,” Deng Xiaoping, http://tsquare.tv/chronology/Deng.html. 13. Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, Ezra Vogel, 659–660. 14. Ibid. 15. “Deng’

s Last Campaign,” Roderick MacFarquhar, New York Review of Books, December 17, 1992. 16. Ibid. 17. Ibid. 18. Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, Vogel, 697. 19. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times, Odd Arne Westad, 362

the KGB and his rivals among the mujahideen had repeatedly attempted to kill him during the 1980s.) Of the other leaders treated in this book, Deng Xiaoping, true to his extraordinary talent for survival, probably leads the pack in number of attacks survived; fanatical Maoists, who never forgave him for his heresy

Education, Harlow, UK, 2000. Broken Earth: The Rural Chinese, Steven W. Mosher. Free Press, New York, 1983. Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping, Richard Baum. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1994. Capitalism and Freedom: Fortieth Anniversary Edition, Milton Friedman. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1962. Capitalism with Chinese

of Four, with First Translations of Teng Hsiao-Ping’s “Three Poisonous Weeds,” Chi Hsin. Cosmos Books, Hong Kong, 1977. China and the Legacy of Deng Xiaoping: From Communist Revolution to Capitalist Evolution, Michael E. Marti. Brassey’s, Dulles, VA, 2002. China Guidebook: 1980/81 Edition, Arne J. de Keijzer and Frederic

Defense of Muslim Lands, Sheikh Abdullah Azzam. 2nd ed. Azzam Publications, London, 2002. Deng: A Political Biography, Benjamin Yang. East Gate Books, Armonk, NY, 1998. Deng Xiaoping: Chronicle of an Empire, Ruan Ming, translated and edited by Nancy Liu, Peter Rand, and Lawrence R. Sullivan. Westview Press, Boulder, CO, 1994

. Deng Xiaoping: My Father, Deng Maomao. Basic Books, New York, 1995. Deng Xiaoping: Portrait of a Chinese Statesman, David Shambaugh. Oxford University Press, New York, 1995. Deng Xiaoping and the Chinese Revolution: A Political Biography, David S. G. Goodman. Routledge, New York

: Solidarity, Timothy Garton Ash. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT, 2002 (original ed., Jonathan Cape, London, 1983). Politics of Disillusionment: The Chinese Communist Party Under Deng Xiaoping, 1978–1989, His-Sheng Ch’I. M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY, 1991. “Popular Versus Elite View of Privatization: The Case of Privatization,” Ian McAllister and

. W. Norton, New York, 1991. Seasons in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974–1979, Dominic Sandbrook. Allen Lane, London, 2012. Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping (1975–1982), Deng Xiaoping. Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 1984. Seventies: The Sights, Sounds, and Ideas of a Brilliant Decade, Howard Sounes. Simon & Schuster, London, 2006. The Shah, Abbas

: Planning, People, and Natural Resources, Jan Åke Dellenbrant. M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY, 1986. Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China: Political Reform in the Deng Xiaoping Era, Merle Goldman. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1994. Special Economic Zones and the Economic Transition in China, Wei Ge. World Scientific Publishing, Singapore, 1999

, 279, 323 Democracy, 39, 47, 109, 114, 126, 140, 150, 176, 177, 178, 325, 334, 337, 346, 359 tribal democracy, 217 Demonstrations. See Protests/demonstrations Deng Xiaoping, 18, 22, 23–24, 25–32, 73, 120–121, 124, 127, 128, 177, 179, 223, 243, 252, 268, 329, 331, 333, 335, 351, 355,

treatment for shah of Iran in, 231–232 and People’s Republic of China, 169, 170, 171, 172 World Trade Center in, 308 See also Deng Xiaoping: visit to United States Universities, 8, 12, 19, 26, 34, 39, 40, 41, 46, 70, 72, 103–104, 109, 123, 124, 139, 151, 162,

Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy

by Quinn Slobodian  · 4 Apr 2023  · 360pp  · 107,124 words

new management. Premier Zhao Ziyang gave early reassurances that China would keep the territory as a free port and international financial center.69 In 1979, Deng Xiaoping clarified that Hong Kong would be ruled as a “special administrative region” (SAR) after it was folded into the People’s Republic of China, free

fitting symmetry between the image of Milton Friedman over the skyline of Hong Kong in Free to Choose and the famous billboard in Shenzhen showing Deng Xiaoping over its own skyline. Neither man over five feet tall, they loomed large as champions of the shared belief that a competitive edge could be

suicide. Singapore offered itself as a model. “Growth must come before sharing,” said Lee in 1974.52 “Let some people get rich first” is how Deng Xiaoping phrased it a few years later. Both countries accepted medium-term inequality for long-term growth. Singapore seemed to have lessons about containing the potentially

. 4 (Autumn 1985): 643–60; and Louisa Lim, Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong (New York: Riverhead, 2022), 103.   66.  Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), 477.   67.  Barry Naughton, Growing Out of the Plan: Chinese Economic

York: Free Press, 1999), 291–412.   52.  Pang Eng Fong, “Growth, Inequality and Race in Singapore,” International Labour Review 111, no. 1 (1975): 16.   53.  Deng Xiaoping, “Excerpts from Talks Given in Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shanghai (January 18–February 21, 1992),” http://www.china.org.cn/english/features/dengxiaoping/103331.htm

branding and in question in United States republican restricted franchise and revival of in Singapore Democracy for Docklands democratic capitalism “democratic feudalism” democratization, narratives about Deng Xiaoping deregulation Deutsche Bank development corporations direct democracy “discontinuists” disenfranchisement disintegration distributed networks Djibouti, Somaliland Djibouti-Ambouli International Airport Dominican Republic–Central America–United States Free

The Elements of Power: A Story of War, Technology, and the Dirtiest Supply Chain on Earth

by Nicolas Niarchos  · 20 Jan 2026  · 654pp  · 170,150 words

. Iseard met Aronson when the inventor showed up in a class he was teaching in the Bahamas in 1980: They had worked together ever since. Deng Xiaoping, China’s paramount leader, had assumed power in 1978. A disciple of Zhou Enlai, the leader who had defined China’s aid framework during his

years. The program was an example of what Chinese revolutionary leaders had called “crossing the river by feeling for the stones,” a sentiment endorsed by Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese premier who had opened China to private businesses. Deng’s selection of Shenzhen—the city where Wang Chuanfu established BYD—as the first

from the mines is purified into chemicals that are suitable for batteries. Often, this is achieved through dirty, pollutive processes, and since the era of Deng Xiaoping, the U.S. and Europe have been happy for Chinese firms to do this work. The year after the IRA was signed, as if to

-master-electric-car-manufacturing-china-started-with-bikes. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT had called “crossing the river”: The phrase is often attributed to Deng Xiaoping, but it in fact has its roots in a Chinese folk saying, “Crossing the river by feeling the stones—take a steady step, then take

unemployment in, 40–41 U.S. investment in, 300–301 violent seizure of resources in, 168–69 Zhou, P., on, 228, 254–55 dendrites, 65 Deng Xiaoping, 193, 319 on wealth, 94–96 Department of Defense, U.S., 9, 296 Department of the Treasury, U.S., 275–76 Department of Transportation, U

How Asia Works

by Joe Studwell  · 1 Jul 2013  · 868pp  · 147,152 words

. In writing names of people and places, I have attempted to use the romanised forms that are most familiar to contemporary English language readers. Hence Deng Xiaoping is rendered in the mainland Chinese pinyin system, whereas Chiang Kai-shek is rendered in the Wade-Giles system favoured in Taiwan. In South Korea

determinant of that country’s performance. Mao Zedong proselytised a baby boom that was already occurring, telling Chinese people there was strength in numbers. Then Deng Xiaoping and his successors put the brakes on the birth rate, which was already slowing, with an often brutally enforced policy to limit child-bearing. Yet

population pressure to induce high-rent tenancy and stagnant output. A rather typical landlord of the era was Deng Wenming, father of future Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who owned ten hectares in Paifang village in the hinterland of Chongqing in Sichuan province. Deng Wenming lived in a 22-room house on the

nutrition in China in the 1970s were little better on average than in the 1930s.32 China waited until the revolutionary son of a landlord, Deng Xiaoping, rose to power in 1978 to rediscover what household farming could do for a developing country. By then, two decades of development had been lost

point is: we must acknowledge that we are backward, that many of our ways of doing things are inappropriate, and that we need to change.’ Deng Xiaoping, on being confirmed as China’s preeminent leader in December 19781 Can the history of east Asian development tell us something useful about the development

in, and so on.2 Through autarky, China failed to develop a single industrial product with which it could compete internationally. In the era of Deng Xiaoping, China broke out from the two great socialist fallacies. First, household farming was restored. Then, following Deng’s visits to the United States, Japan and

themselves, supported by a few progressive regional Party leaders, who declared their families to be collective units and made household farming a fait accompli. As Deng Xiaoping admitted in his turgid autobiography: ‘It was the peasants who invented the household contract responsibility system with remuneration linked to output.’8 This was a

corvée labour, and more. (In China, the bulk of welfare services are managed and funded at the local level.) As the Chinese economy grew under Deng Xiaoping, and then Jiang Zemin, urban bias in national fiscal policy increased greatly. Then, from 2001, China abandoned the bulk of its agricultural protection measures under

run for the past thirteen years by the same highly rated manager, Chen Yuan, son of Chen Yun, the economist who rescued Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping from their worst policy follies.33 The institution built up its balance sheet by supporting large-scale, high-quality domestic infrastructure projects in the 2000s

University Press, 1934), p. 74. Part 4 – Where China Fits In 1. Li Xiangqian and Han Gang, ‘Xin faxian Deng Xiaoping yu Hu Yaobang deng sanci tanhua jilu’ (‘Newly Discovered Record of Three of Deng Xiaoping’s Talks with Hu Yaobang and Others’), Bainianchao, n0. 3 (1999): 4–11, reprinted in Xie Chuntao, ed

., Deng Xiaoping xiezhen (A Portrait of Deng Xiaoping) (Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 2005), p. 192. 2. The hugely polluting cement kilns developed in China are a form of vertical kiln into which ingredients

. 14 below, which cover China’s seventeen most important agricultural provinces. Some other, less productive provinces have larger average farm sizes. 8. Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, vol. 3 (1982–1992) (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 1993), p. 370. 9. According to UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) data for 2009, Chinese

1989. The premier in 1993 was Li Peng. Zhu Rongji became a vice-premier that year and – largely because Li Peng was not trusted by Deng Xiaoping to run the economy – Zhu took on that role, which normally falls to the premier. In January 1994, Zhu overhauled China’s tax system, redirecting

the correct approach to economic reform as ‘crossing the river by feeling the stones’ (mozhe shitou guohe). The phrase is frequently and erroneously ascribed to Deng Xiaoping. 34. CDB was a major funder of the Three Gorges hydropower project, the ‘South–North’ water diversion project, and many other big power and road

). Klaus Deininger and Lyn Squire, ‘New Ways of Looking at Old Issues: Inequality and Growth’, Journal of Development Economics, vol. 57, no. 2 (1998). Deng Xiaoping, Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, vol. 3 (1982–1992) (Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 1993). Department of Agrarian Reform, Republic of the Philippines, ‘Philippine Agrarian Reform: Partnerships for

Cultures at Risk (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2007). Adrian Vickers, A History of Modern Indonesia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011). Robert Wade, Governing the Market: Economic Theory and the Role of Government in East Asian

, 183, 218n28 Malaysia 198 Philippines 193, 321n43 Dee, Dewey 322–3n55 Deininger, Klaus 10, 276–7n12 democracy xxv–xxvi demographics see population Deng Wenming 17 Deng Xiaoping xxii, 17, 21, 221, 224, 226, 228, 241, 331n21 Denmark 61, 81 deregulation 162, 165–6, 173–4, 184, 196–8 Indonesia 212, 216, 217

The Cold War: A New History

by John Lewis Gaddis  · 1 Jan 2005  · 392pp  · 106,532 words

might have put it, “totally beyond the imagination of the Soviet leadership.” CHAPTER SIX ACTORS Be not afraid! —JOHN PAUL II1 Seek truth from facts. —DENG XIAOPING 2 We can’t go on living like this. —MIKHAIL GORBACHEV3 THE POPE HAD BEENan actor before he became a priest, and his triumphant return

to become prime minister of Great Britain, who relished being tougher than any man and revived the reputation of capitalism in Western Europe. There was Deng Xiaoping, the diminutive, frequently purged, but relentlessly pragmatic successor to Mao Zedong, who brushed aside communism’s prohibitions on free enterprise while encouraging the Chinese people

the power of the Chinese Communist Party to give his country a market economy: “It doesn’t matter if the cat is white or black,” Deng Xiaoping liked to say, “so long as it catches mice.” Deng’s views on cats—by which he meant ideologies—got him into trouble with Mao

in the world.”94 Most of this, however, was rhetoric: Gorbachev was never willing to leap directly to a market economy in the way that Deng Xiaoping had done. He reminded the Politburo late in 1988 that Franklin D. Roosevelt had saved American capitalism by “borrow[ing] socialist ideas of planning, state

Party dictatorship were over?”13 However true that might be in Hungary, Poland, and the Soviet Union, it was not the case in China. There Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms had brought pressures for political change, a course he was not prepared to take. When former general secretary Hu Yaobang, whom Deng

weeks in Leipzig, and they resumed on October 9th, the day after Gorbachev returned to Moscow. With the Soviet guest gone, the possibility of a Deng Xiaoping solution was still there: Honecker may even have authorized one. But at this point an unexpected actor—Kurt Masur, the widely respected conductor of the

morals. The threat of a world war is no more.”53 Gorbachev was never a leader in the manner of Václav Havel, John Paul II, Deng Xiaoping, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, Lech Wałęsa—even Boris Yeltsin. They all had destinations in mind and maps for reaching them. Gorbachev dithered in contradictions without

Pope John Paul II, 1920–2005 (New York: Harper, 2005), pp. 10, 14, 262. 2 Richard Baum, Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 47. 3 Mikhail Gorbachev, Memoirs (New York: Doubleday, 1995), p. 165. 4 See, for example, Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory

Military Balance, 1979–1980 (London: IISS, 1979), p. 9.] 44 Arbatov, The System, p. 206. 45 Baum, Burying Mao, pp. 11, 56–65; Richard Evans, Deng Xiaoping and the Making of Modern China (New York: Penguin, 1997), pp. 184–89, 212–43. The quote from Mao is in Li Zhisui, The Private

Physician, translated by Tai Hung-chao (New York: Random House, 1994), p. 577. I have also benefited from reading Bryan Wong, “The Grand Strategy of Deng Xiaoping,” International Studies Senior Essay, Yale University, 2005. 46 “The ‘Two Whatevers’ Do Not Accord with Marxism,” March 24, 1977, http://English.people.com.cn/dengxp

., pp. 488—92; Gwertzman and Kaufman, eds., The Collapse of Communism, p. 52. See also Richard Baum, Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 242–74. 15 Ibid., pp. 275–310. 16 Mielke to Heads of Service Units, June 10, 1989, CWIHP Bulletin

. How Nature Works: The Science of Self-Organized Criticality. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Baum, Richard. Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Becker, Jasper. Hungry Ghosts: Mao’s Secret Famine. New York: Free Press, 1996. Berman, Larry. Planning a Tragedy: The Americanization

D. Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Evans, Richard. Deng Xiaoping and the Making of Modern China. New York: Penguin, 1997. Foot, Rosemary, John Lewis Gaddis, and Andrew Hurrell, eds. Order and Justice in International Relations

Department, 2000. Wells, Christopher W. “Kissinger and Sadat: Improbable Partners for Peace.” Senior Essay, Yale University History Department, 2004. Wong, Bryan. “The Grand Strategy of Deng Xiaoping.” Senior Essay, Yale University International Studies Program, 2005. PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS Insert page 1, top: Bettmann/Corbis; bottom: Corbis. Page 2, top: Bettmann/Corbis; bottom: Hulton

D-Day Declaration of Independence Defense Department, U.S. de Gaulle, Charles democracy globalization of Marshall Plan and Democratic National Committee Democratic Party, U.S. Deng Xiaoping achievement of Tiananmen Square massacre and Depression, Great détente Arab-Israeli war of 1973 and decline of Helsinki Accords and Kissinger on morality and as

Konstantin Chernenko at the Helsinki conference, July, 1975. Pope John Paul II in Częstochowa, Poland, June, 1979. Lech Wałęsa at the Gdansk shipyard, August, 1980. Deng Xiaoping, ca. 1970s. Margaret Thatcher, ca. 1979. Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan at Geneva, November, 1985. “Goddess of Democracy” statue in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, May 30

Our Dollar, Your Problem: An Insider’s View of Seven Turbulent Decades of Global Finance, and the Road Ahead

by Kenneth Rogoff  · 27 Feb 2025  · 330pp  · 127,791 words

such reforms been implemented, they might have given the Soviet Union some of the success that China’s more flexible implementation of socialism brought after Deng Xiaoping came to power, and perhaps the Soviet Union’s rapid growth might have maintained momentum. If the Soviet Union had been able to adapt and

, when the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 is marked. Following this, the graph shows a gradual increase starting in the late 1970s, coinciding with Deng Xiaoping’s economic opening and reforms. In the 1990s, the graph rises more steeply, with a notable acceleration after China joins the World Trade Organization (WTO

, but cannot understand it, much less dare to speak of it. Just a few years later, in 1978, after the death of Mao in 1976, Deng Xiaoping became president and China’s new era of seemingly miraculous growth began. Unlike Mao, who dogmatically rejected capitalism, Deng famously quipped, “It does not matter

or heads of central banks; I felt quite fortunate to be included. Zhu was perhaps the most important architect of China’s economic policy since Deng Xiaoping. I have had the great privilege of meeting many presidents and world leaders over the years; no other meeting was quite the same. When we

Trinity, 3 by U. K., 61, 233 by U. S., 264 deflation, 35 de Gaulle, Charles, 213 DeLong, Brad, 268 Democratic Republic of Congo, 127 Deng Xiaoping (President, China), 20, 69 Denmark, 46, 47, 322 n.9 Detroit, Michigan, 28 Deutsche Bundesbank, 53, 120, 251, 252 deutsche mark (Germany), 42, 53, 120

Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty

by Bradley K. Martin  · 14 Oct 2004  · 1,509pp  · 416,377 words

sixty-five-foot (twenty-meter) bronze statue of the Great Leader had been removed. His article cited a rumor among foreign residents in Pyongyang that Deng Xiaoping, during a visit not long before, had suggested to President Kim that a golden statue might be a bit too extravagant a display for a

them— perhaps during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s and ’70s, when the Red Guards criticized Kim harshly, or during the subsequent movement led by Deng Xiaoping and other reformers to stamp out signs of the discredited personality cult built around China’s own Mao Zedong. Or could it have been the

. Although I did not yet know it, the vitality I saw was to power the amazing changes that were about to come to China under Deng Xiaoping’s reform-minded rule. At the time, though, if I could credit what my eyes revealed in terms of economic development, the comparison between North

heels44 and teasing his hair up into a bouffant pompadour to add a few more inches. (The glorious career of China’s even more diminutive Deng Xiaoping evidently provided him little if any consolation.) If Kim had stood where he supposedly was asked to stand that day in 1963, he might have

backstage, while pretending on the surface to support the ideas of the party18 No name is given for this wicked Korean version of China’s Deng Xiaoping, but the high-ranking official whom the young loyalist zealot was pursuing appears to have been Kim To-man. Chosen in 1966 as party secretary

at the end of 1980 and the beginning of 1981 as she and her infamous Gang of Four were tried and sentenced. Their chief target, Deng Xiaoping, triumphed. Red Guards, having spent their youth revolting instead of studying, came to their senses and faced the bleak reality of their stunted careers and

this at dreadful cost to an economy that desperately needed new ideas and a decentralization of decision making. Every Korean suspected of being a closet Deng Xiaoping would be vanquished. FOURTEEN Eyes and Ears Propaganda alone, of course, was not sufficient to enable Kim senior and junior to gain and maintain unprecedented

in Pyongyang to which visitors were urged to present flowers—the statue that was golden for a while before being bronzed in reported response to Deng Xiaoping’s expression of distaste. Kang and his family rated a royal red-carpet welcome. He became vice-director of a government unit that supplied goods

cult figures of superhuman brilliance and accomplishments. The film covers only ceremonial and social parts of Mr. Kim’s meetings with Chinese officials, who included Deng Xiaoping, Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang and Premier Zhao Zhiyang. But it covers those parts interminably and in the process supports some observations and some

than individual performance. Even such relatively mild heresy, however, was not something the regime’s ideology permitted it to take pride in. Chinese followers of Deng Xiaoping by then had become communist in name only as they pursued economic reforms nakedly intended to unleash the individual’s profit motive, but North Koreans

ruling class had been helpless to take the serious steps many believed were needed to prolong their rule—as, for example, Chinese economic reformers under Deng Xiaoping had been able to extend Communist Party rule. With Kim Il-sung and son occupying the status of permanent royalty, their more expendable subordinates in

). “We need to change this and require specific knowledge of foreign trade.” He spoke favorably of sending students abroad for training. “In China, one of Deng Xiaoping’s great feats was to send two thousand or so students abroad annually to study, and upon their return they were given important jobs,” Kim

.” Frank found it “remarkable that the leveling of the ideological battlefield has begun so early. Kim Jong-il may be no Mikhail Gorbachev, nor a Deng Xiaoping, but the evidence makes it hard to believe he is a stubborn opponent of reform.” At the 2003 parliamentary budget session came an announcement of

successfully combined broad central planning with market decisions. While recognizing that Kim Jong-il had spent much of his career pounding down every would-be Deng Xiaoping who popped up, South Korean officials evidently believed that no one was beyond salvation. An ideologically born-again Kim himself could be seen as the

People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) formation of, 62 compactness, as aid to regime’s control, 185 communication among bureaucratic units, lack of lateral, 467 Deng Xiaoping, 8, 22 diaspora, Korean, 16–17, 100 as business network, 481 homecoming, in 1950s and 1960s, 100–104, 229–230 dissent, dissidence, 6, 91, 141

Chinese Spies: From Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping

by Roger Faligot  · 30 Jun 2019  · 615pp  · 187,426 words

Preface Introduction: Old Red Spies Never Die PART ONE 1. The Battle for Shanghai 2. Mao’s Secret Service 3. The Spies’ Cultural Revolution 4. Deng Xiaoping’s Deep-Water Fish 5. 55 Days At Tiananmen 6. Operation Autumn Orchid, Hong Kong PART TWO 7. Jiang Zemin’s Global Intelligence 8. China

. Zhou surrounded himself with faithful Hakka comrades, also gifted in clandestine activity, and became close to a young man called Nie Rongzhen who, like Deng Xiaoping, hailed from Sichuan. He had studied with Deng at the University of Grenoble and then at Charleroi in Belgium, where he fell under the influence

some kind of allegiance to the longstanding Elders Brothers Society (Gelaohui), whose members included Zhu De, the other military leader of the Long March, and Deng Xiaoping’s own father. “In other words,” explains the Korean historian Park Sang-soo, a specialist in rural secret societies, “if the backbone of the

Dongxing, and theorists like Chen Boda and Zhang Qunqiao—all to the detriment of the more moderate faction around Liu Shaoqi—the “Chinese Khrushchev”—and Deng Xiaoping. Antonkin received instructions from his TASS supervisors ordering him to write articles about how the Chinese people were “hostile to Mao”. Like his KGB

the other institutions disrupted by the Cultural Revolution. Luo Ruiqing was its first sacrificial victim. In the winter of 1966, three “revisionist” leaders, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and Yang Shangkun, were arrested and subjected to a barrage of intense criticism and humiliating self-criticism in mass meetings where collective hysteria prevailed over

all preserved entire sections of the system. Zhou guaranteed the decent treatment of some jailed functionaries. This was the case for some political figures, including Deng Xiaoping, and for some intelligence agents. The collapse of the Diaochabu After the death of Kang Sheng’s rival Li Kenong in 1961, Kong Yuan,

with the North Korean Kim Il-sung, about whose early life we know almost nothing. In 1977, a covert organization called 637 Headquarters, which backed Deng Xiaoping, circulated an illicit and devastating document entitled Fire on Hua Guofeng. This mini-biography recounted how Hua Yu, the new president’s mother, had

8341, the army’s political security unit. State security forces, with the support of the army under Marshal Ye’s leadership, were poised to bring Deng Xiaoping to power.44 However, Hua Guofeng’s and Wang Dongxing’s reign in Zhongnanhai, government headquarters, continued. Having gained power in mid-October, they

agent, equipped with one defective satellite radio. Coupled with the routing of the PLA on the Vietnamese border, this was a serious setback. Nonetheless, Deng Xiaoping continued to support the Khmer Rouge for another ten years as it fought the new government installed by Hanoi. Details of Diaochabu operations in Cambodia

launch. He would soon begin the Four Modernizations programme, and usher in a massive intelligence agency appropriate for this newly awakened China: the Guoanbu. 4 DENG XIAOPING’S DEEP-WATER FISH The last emperor of China, Pu Yi, was completely swamped in his oversized uniform. This was the ultimate humiliation for the

service—and indeed all the other services dependent on the party, foreign ministry and army—towards economic, scientific and technological research. With these three moves, Deng Xiaoping “revolutionized” Chinese intelligence. The Chinese KGB On 6 June 1983, Prime Minister Zhao Ziyang announced the establishment of a new Ministry of State Security, or

he was “a Kuomintang spy”. MOFERT’s international sector—as well as that of its successor, MOFTEC—offered important cover for roaming Guoanbu agents, as Deng Xiaoping had suggested.12 All this training appears to have been rather necessary, because—according to several intelligence and security specialists who were fighting the new

public disclosure of this obvious failure by its own counterintelligence service. This was during Ronald Reagan’s presidency, when the CIA had an agreement with Deng Xiaoping’s intelligence services to jointly intercept Soviet communications, and both countries were involved in joint operations supporting the Mujahedin in Afghanistan against the Soviet military

taken by China’s “deep-water fish”—deep-cover or sleeper agents—if the intelligence they gathered, even when duly cross-checked, did not help Deng Xiaoping, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang to make decisions? Deng gave a former diplomat, Huan Xiang, the job of establishing the International Studies Research Center

cities. The unintended consequence of those protests had been the fall of the reformist general secretary, Hu Yaobang, who had been forced to resign. Deng Xiaoping against Mikhail Gorbachev On 16 April 1989, Hu suffered a heart attack and died. The following day, thousands of students gathered in Tiananmen Square to

GRU were known. A month of peaceful demonstrations had already gone by. From senior members of the party up to the top brass, with Deng Xiaoping at the helm, the Chinese leadership had underestimated the rise of Gorbachev, a reformer whose policy of perestroika was clearly influencing the younger Chinese generation

on 19 May. But their positive disposition towards the students could not last forever. As head of the intelligence services, Qiao was directly accountable to Deng Xiaoping and the Politburo Standing Committee, of which he was now third in command. Guoanbu correspondents in foreign postings, as well as his own children

have seen Qiao Shi, the coordinator of the security services, vacillating and trying to negotiate with the students alongside Zhao Ziyang, before eventually rallying to Deng Xiaoping’s position. On 5 May, students from the Institute of International Relations (Guoji Guanxi Xueyuan), where analysts and spies are trained by director and Guoanbu

the police academy in Hong Kong, was expelled for spying. Based in Canton, for the next twenty years he continued his surveillance work and advised Deng Xiaoping. To complicate matters further, all over Hong Kong, conflicts were breaking out between different communist factions in the region, which thousands of Chinese people fleeing

& Investment Corporation (CITIC), founded in Beijing in 1979 by the Shanghai-born “red capitalist” Rong Yiren, also vice-president of the PRC. It was Deng Xiaoping himself who had given Rong the responsibility of setting up the CITIC, a capitalist business group in communist China, directly answerable to the State Council

of Asia Satellite Telecommunications Ltd, which managed communication satellites in the region. Among the CITIC’s senior executives were several Red Princes, including Deng Zhifang, Deng Xiaoping’s second son, who also owned several real estate companies, a growing sector in both Hong Kong and the PRC. Wang Jun, president of

1930s. Alongside Ding and Nie were other prominent directors: Zhang Pin, son of former defence minister Zhang Aiping, and Deng Nan, the youngest daughter of Deng Xiaoping. Clearly, the most successful Red Princes were those linked to the military-industrial lobby, which played an important role in weapons and technology proliferation. They

and the supervision of the special services During this period, General Secretary and President Jiang Zemin was continuing down the path first mapped out by Deng Xiaoping, seeking to develop intelligence and analytical structures that would, for the first time, permit the PRC to compete on a level with the Americans.

the influence of the CCP. This debate was made more challenging in the early 1990s, when the leadership established something of a personality cult around Deng Xiaoping and his achievements, using him as a cover to advance their own agenda. Developments in Poland had further coloured Zhongnanhai opinion against the relative reformist

Qiao. Everything Deng Xiaoping obsessively feared was contained in a single word: Solidarnos sc c. After all the upheaval in the USSR and China, the Solidarity movement was Deng

Jiang Zemin attached great importance to the Central Security Bureau and its regiments, reorganized after Tiananmen under the leadership of Yang Dezhong, who had been Deng Xiaoping’s bodyguard, and You Xigui, his personal minder from Shanghai, who ended up being promoted to general. You’s constant presence at Jiang’s

in the Yasin region, while logistics operations were overseen by the Air Force general Zhang Tingfa. An ideological problem had overshadowed Beijing’s support, but Deng Xiaoping and his team were pragmatic. They would have preferred not to abandon Afghanistan’s pro-China communist organizations, such as Shoaleye Djawid (Eternal Flame) or

(PAP). While the CMC controlled the strategic axes of defence, the government was also directly behind several industrial organizations. Set up in 1982 by Deng Xiaoping and directed by his daughter, the science and technology research organization COSTIND had become more of a civil body since 1998, as it no longer

institutes. They all came under the umbrella of the State Council-controlled International Studies Research Centre (ISRC/Guoji Wenti Yanjiu Zhongxin), also dreamt up by Deng Xiaoping. In March 1986, Deng had launched Programme 863, whose purpose was to raise the necessary funds for these projects. After ten years, with the

, drug monopolies and new means to protect the environment, to take just a few examples. Indeed, the services rely on the guiding principles decreed by Deng Xiaoping in 1978, the “16 characters” policy, which specifically requires the mixing of “civil” and “military” in order to “erase the borders between state operations

approach. These warnings corresponded to the ramping up of economic intelligence in the Deng–Jiang era. A brief history of economic intelligence It was under Deng Xiaoping, in the early 1990s, that economic intelligence began to boom. This has led to a popular belief that such Chinese intelligence was born in

of MOFERT’s international sector—and that of its successor, MOFTEC—various roaming Guoanbu operatives directly involved in espionage operations were offered covers, as per Deng Xiaoping’s ideas. Madame Chen was seconded into this area, thanks to a former Diaochabu technician, Wei Jinfei, who was advisor to the minister of

behind economic intervention abroad. There had also been a lengthy presentation of the major reforms in this area, covering every detail: the instigating role of Deng Xiaoping; the launch of major information technology programmes under Jiang Zemin; and the “theory of the three harmonies” conceived by President Hu Jintao (2003–13),

particularly in language skills, before they were sent on mission. This was a field in which she excelled, having once worked as an interpreter for Deng Xiaoping. As we saw with the 1989 Tiananmen movement, after which refugee dissidents in France came under close surveillance, several Chinese press correspondents were believed to

become increasingly frequent since the Chinese overtook the Russians in espionage in the first decade of this century. China on the counterattack In the 1990s, Deng Xiaoping, Yang Shangkun (who had been accused of placing listening devices in Mao’s offices during the Cultural Revolution) and Jiang Zemin pushed for the establishment

scratch. As early as the 1930s, when Zhou Enlai was leading the secret war in Shanghai against Kuomintang nationalists, his former comrade from Paris, Deng Xiaoping, was overseeing the establishment of technical units in communist bases in southern China. Their friend Nie Rongzhen, who had been in charge of liaison between

2006 the PLA feted the memory of this first communications school, that of its predecessor, the Chinese Workers and Peasants Red Army. In March 1933, Deng Xiaoping chose its location, Pingshangang, in Ruijin province. Nowadays, young SIGINT technicians and apprentice PLA radio operators come to pay homage at this historic site.

blow emerged an unexpected “friendly” intelligence collaboration. As early as April 1979, US intelligence services received the green light from Jimmy Carter to negotiate with Deng Xiaoping on possible collaboration in this area. The Anglo-American interception base was closed and its workers redeployed elsewhere. Admiral Stansfield Turner, head of the CIA

Xinjiang. Another 15% were related to Chinese leaders and their families (including security chiefs Zeng Qinghong and Luo Gan, as well as historical figures like Deng Xiaoping, Mao Zedong and his wife Jiang Qing); 15% to do with politics and corruption, with the word “democracy” considered just as subversive as “dictatorship”,

internet users, tracked down militant Tibetans, and spied on foreign businesspeople, whose numbers had been steadily increasing since China opened up to international trade under Deng Xiaoping. Geng’s challenge was to ruthlessly apply the rules of an increasingly hegemonic twenty-first-century CCP, at the same time as continuing to pursue

development for this new China on the move. In Sudan, for example, people remember seeing Zhou himself working on CNPC oil wells. During the Deng Xiaoping era in the 1980s, Zhou Yongkang switched to political management, both as minister of planning and natural resources, and as party secretary in Sichuan province

from CCP Central Office Secretariat, “Minutes of the May 17 Politburo Standing Committee meeting”, document supplied to Party Central Office Secretariat by the Office of Deng Xiaoping, quoted in Andrew Nathan and Perry Link (eds), The Tiananmen Papers, New York, Little, Brown and Company, 2001. This book is an astonishing documentation

Succession in China: Leadership, Institutions, Beliefs, Santa Monica CA, Rand Corporation, 1992. According to Nicholas Eftimiades (Chinese Intelligence Operations, Annapolis MD, Naval Institute Press, 1994), Deng Xiaoping did succeed in establishing a liaison with the regional centres of PLA2, military intelligence. 16. Transcript available at http://folk.ntnu.no/tronda/kk-f

Western diplomats, who, unlike the Soviets, were obliged to take refuge in diplomatic residences. 21. Libération, 7 June 1989. Sabatier published a remarkable biography of Deng Xiaoping (Le dernier dragon [The Last Dragon], Paris, J.C. Lattès, 1990), in which he goes into great detail about the Tiananmen massacre. 22. Xiaobing

Chubanshe, 2006. NOTE ON SOURCES Since publishing my first article on this subject over thirty-five years ago—a piece in Le Monde diplomatique about Deng Xiaoping’s establishment of the Guoanbu—I have written hundreds more such articles. With my co-author Rémi Kauffer, I published the first biography of

Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Faith in the New China

by Evan Osnos  · 12 May 2014  · 499pp  · 152,156 words

Lin defected from Taiwan, the People’s Republic was poorer than North Korea; its per capita income was one-third that of sub-Saharan Africa. Deng Xiaoping had been China’s paramount leader for less than six months. At seventy-five, he was a persuasive but plainspoken statesman, and a survivor—repeatedly

, inevitably, received credit for the expression.) In 1979 the Party announced that it would no longer tag people as “landlords” and “rich peasants,” and later Deng Xiaoping removed the final stigma: “Let some people get rich first,” he said, “and gradually all the people should get rich together.” The Party extended the

than eight employees—Marx had believed that firms with more than eight workers were exploitative—but eventually small enterprises began popping up so fast that Deng Xiaoping told a Yugoslav delegation that it was “as if a strange army had appeared suddenly from nowhere.” He did not take credit. “This is not

had been songbang—“unfettered”—a term more often used for a liberated prisoner or an animal. They began to talk of politics and democracy. But Deng Xiaoping had his limits. In March 1979, not long before Lin Zhengyi embarked on his adventure to the mainland, Deng spoke to a group of senior

wandered into an introductory class on modern Chinese politics: revolution and civil war; the tragic, protean force of Chairman Mao; the fall and rise of Deng Xiaoping, who led China out of seclusion and into the world. Only five years had passed since the 1989 democracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square, when students

rural people to live and work temporarily in cities. In the next eight years, the number of rural migrants reached a hundred million. In 1992, Deng Xiaoping let it be known that prosperity was paramount: “Development,” he said, after visiting a refrigerator factory that had expanded sixteenfold in seven years, “is the

that Lin Yifu’s military unit on Quemoy had played her music over the radio to attract defectors. Since she had the same surname as Deng Xiaoping, the soldiers on the mainland joked that they listed to Old Deng all day and Young Deng all night. “Before that, the songs we sang

my opinion, to buy a house and a car will take me about five more years. Five more years.” FIVE NO LONGER A SLAVE When Deng Xiaoping declared that it was time to “let some people get rich first,” he didn’t say which people. It was up to them to figure

to others for help if their risk-taking does not succeed. Another theory is more specific to the boom years. “The economic reforms undertaken by Deng Xiaoping were a gamble in themselves,” Ricardo Siu, a business professor at the University of Macau, told me. “So people got the idea that taking a

. The Department almost disappeared. In 1989 the uprising at Tiananmen Square convinced some Party leaders that propaganda was growing impotent in the modern age. But Deng Xiaoping disagreed, and he made a fateful decision—the Party’s future survival, he declared, would rest, more than ever before, on two pillars: prosperity and

.” The end of the Cold War, and the crackdown at Tiananmen Square, shook the Chinese establishment politically and economically. Zhao Ziyang, the reformist member of Deng Xiaoping’s original economic brain trust, was blamed for not suppressing the demonstrations earlier; think tanks that he had created were dissolved, and several economists went

strident: he dismissed the “optimistic, and perhaps naïve, argument put forward by some scholars that democracies … are more likely to undertake economic reforms.” He quoted Deng Xiaoping, who once said, “The United States brags about its political system, but the president says one thing during the election, something else when he takes

went “straight into the garbage.”) He gravitated to the group of avant-garde artists known as the Stars, but their activism was circumscribed. In 1979, Deng Xiaoping put an end to an incipient political movement called Democracy Wall; its central figure, Wei Jingsheng, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison, on charges

. Ding was an illiterate egg farmer in rural Shanxi—five feet ten, with broad shoulders and a foghorn of a voice. In the 1980s, after Deng Xiaoping launched the country toward the free market, she collected eggs from neighbors to sell on the sidewalk in the county seat. This was illegal without

’t know the truth.” But more and more, it seemed that the problem was the truth itself. To some degree, the great national footrace that Deng Xiaoping ordained was rigged. The field was not simply tilted against them. They weren’t playing the same game. In January 2010 a nineteen-year-old

Special Operations (New York: Routledge, 2000). For background on the relationship between senior leaders at the advent of reform, see Barry Naughton, “Deng Xiaoping: The Economist,” China Quarterly 135, Special Issue: Deng Xiaoping: An Assessment (Sept. 1993): 491–514; Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1990

das Neves, Manuel Joaquim Defense Ministry, Taiwan Delacroix, Eugène de Leeuw, Hendrik De Meuron democracy Democracy Forum Democracy Wall democratic centralism Deng Lijun Deng Qian Deng Xiaoping; capitalist reforms of; China opened by; Mao’s purging of; public relations of; U.S. political system disdained by Depardieu, Gerard Dewey, John Diamond Bachelors

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The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations

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The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty

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The Age of Stagnation: Why Perpetual Growth Is Unattainable and the Global Economy Is in Peril

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The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall

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Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet

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Capitalism, Alone: The Future of the System That Rules the World

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Water: A Biography

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Capitalism: Money, Morals and Markets

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Currency Wars: The Making of the Next Gobal Crisis

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Aerotropolis

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Reinventing the Bazaar: A Natural History of Markets

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Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global

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Chokepoints: American Power in the Age of Economic Warfare

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The Long Boom: A Vision for the Coming Age of Prosperity

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The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us

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Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First

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The Next Factory of the World: How Chinese Investment Is Reshaping Africa

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The Economists' Hour: How the False Prophets of Free Markets Fractured Our Society

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The Elements of Power: Gadgets, Guns, and the Struggle for a Sustainable Future in the Rare Metal Age

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Red Moon

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The China Mission: George Marshall's Unfinished War, 1945-1947

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The Jakarta Method: Washington's Anticommunist Crusade and the Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World

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Siege: Trump Under Fire

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The Scandal of Money

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Four Battlegrounds

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The Emperor's New Road: How China's New Silk Road Is Remaking the World

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Imagining India

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Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend

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Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization

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Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

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The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor, and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car

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The Death of Money: The Coming Collapse of the International Monetary System

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Capitalism in America: A History

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The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State

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The Despot's Accomplice: How the West Is Aiding and Abetting the Decline of Democracy

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Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language

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The Hidden Half: How the World Conceals Its Secrets

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On Time and Water

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Extreme Money: Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk

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Age of Discovery: Navigating the Risks and Rewards of Our New Renaissance

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We Are All Fast-Food Workers Now: The Global Uprising Against Poverty Wages

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The City: A Global History

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The Panama Papers: Breaking the Story of How the Rich and Powerful Hide Their Money

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The Great Demographic Reversal: Ageing Societies, Waning Inequality, and an Inflation Revival

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Salt: A World History

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Shadow of the Silk Road

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Golden Holocaust: Origins of the Cigarette Catastrophe and the Case for Abolition

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Earth Wars: The Battle for Global Resources

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World Cities and Nation States

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MegaThreats: Ten Dangerous Trends That Imperil Our Future, and How to Survive Them

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Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

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The Making of Global Capitalism

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Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World

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Adapt: Why Success Always Starts With Failure

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More: The 10,000-Year Rise of the World Economy

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Open: The Story of Human Progress

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Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

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Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat

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The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans

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Supertall: How the World's Tallest Buildings Are Reshaping Our Cities and Our Lives

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Net Zero: How We Stop Causing Climate Change

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The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy

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The Ages of Globalization

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Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies

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The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism

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The Growth Delusion: Wealth, Poverty, and the Well-Being of Nations

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The Shifts and the Shocks: What We've Learned--And Have Still to Learn--From the Financial Crisis

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Roads to Berlin

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The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It

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Leading From the Emerging Future: From Ego-System to Eco-System Economies

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Bean Counters: The Triumph of the Accountants and How They Broke Capitalism

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Capitalism and Its Critics: A History: From the Industrial Revolution to AI

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What Would the Great Economists Do?: How Twelve Brilliant Minds Would Solve Today's Biggest Problems

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Energy and Civilization: A History

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The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value

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Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global Super-Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else

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Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World

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The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom

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An Edible History of Humanity

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Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity

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The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century

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Quit Like a Millionaire: No Gimmicks, Luck, or Trust Fund Required

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Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Explain Everything About the World (Politics of Place)

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AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

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Seriously Curious: The Facts and Figures That Turn Our World Upside Down

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Stocks for the Long Run 5/E: the Definitive Guide to Financial Market Returns & Long-Term Investment Strategies

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Lifestyle Entrepreneur: Live Your Dreams, Ignite Your Passions and Run Your Business From Anywhere in the World

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