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Deng Xiaoping (1904-1997) had an extraordinarily interesting life. He was a member of the founding generation of the Communist Party of China (although he later considered himself head of the "third generation" of leadership). He joined the Party very young, when participating in a work-study program in France; and he later had a brief spell of training as a revolutionary in Moscow. Back in China he helped organize a guerilla uprising and worked in Party organization and as a political officer in the Communist armies. He was purged three times--the first time, in the 1920s, for supporting Mao Zedong against Party rivals, the next two times, late in life, for opposition to Mao or at least to the line identified with Mao. At the age of seventy-three he was brought back from his third disgrace and in short order rose to leadership of the Party and regime, where he sponsored a set of bold liberalizing reforms. Deng, economically broad-minded but intolerant of indiscipline, was the driving force behind the brutal suppression of the student democracy movement in 1989. But he disagreed with colleagues who attributed the unrest to the reforms themselves, and in 1992, in his last hurrah, he forced an even more radical economic liberalization, while keeping under strict control any threat to the ruling position of the party. Since then China has grown spectacularly year by year, and now ranks in gross terms as the world's second-largest economy.
In recent years there have been several massive biographies of twentieth-century leaders--notably Jung Chang and Jon Halliday's not unpersuasive hatchet job on Chairman Mao and Jay Taylor's convincing revisionist study of Chiang Kai-shek. I had expected that Ezra Vogel's weighty tome would make for a similarly pleasurable--edifying and entertaining--wallow. Instead, the book leaves an aftertaste of disappointment.
The first disappointment is the relative neglect of the first six decades of Deng's life--significant both for understanding him and his position and China's situation when he finally did assume power. These are passed over in fewer than fifty pages: so the book cannot seriously claim to be a biography. One realizes with a sigh that the focus is really on the small print of the title: "the transformation of China." But...