After Deng

John Gittings

• Deng Xiaoping: My Father by Deng Mao Mao
  Basic Books, 498 pp, £20.00, March 1995, ISBN 0 465 01625 1
• Deng Xiaoping and the Making of Modern China by Richard Evans
  Hamish Hamilton, 339 pp, £20.00, October 1993, ISBN 0 241 13031 X
• China After Deng Xiaoping by Willy Wo-lap Lam
  Wiley, 516 pp, £24.95, March 1995, ISBN 0 471 13114 8
• Burying Mao: Chinese Politics in the Age of Deng Xiaoping by Richard Baum
  Princeton, 489 pp, £29.95, October 1994, ISBN 0 691 03639 X
• Deng Xiaoping: Chronicle of an Empire by Ruan Ming
  Westview, 288 pp, £44.50, November 1994, ISBN 0 8133 1920 X

Mao Zedong used to point him out to foreign visitors. ‘That little man,’ said the Chairman, ‘will go a long way.’ Such praise was belittling in more than one sense and Mao made sure during the Cultural Revolution that Deng went nowhere. Yet Deng Xiaoping bounced back, once while Mao was still alive and then definitively after his death. The image of someone small but determined, refusing to be crushed by criticism, is very strong. In 1978, when Deng swept away Mao’s immediate successors, his admirers in Beijing compared him to the immortal Monkey of the classic Ming Dynasty novel Journey to the West who whirls his staff and vanquishes demons ten times his size. Affectionately they called him His Excellency Deng – literally, Big Man Deng.