ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Thursday, February 20, 1997 TAG: 9702200033
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LEWIS M. SIMONS SAN JOSE MERCURY NEWS
Deng Xiaoping, the thrice-purged Communist Party patriarch and its last great living revolutionary, died Wednesday and finally, irreversibly passed on power to his hand-picked successors.
He left China's 1.2 billion people two antithetical legacies, one liberating, the other repressive. The man who was bold and visionary enough to blast away the economic miasma left by Mao Tse-tung and put an end to the iron rice bowl - lifetime jobs for all - was also so frightened by the specter of nascent democracy in 1989 that he ordered the bloody Tiananmen Square massacre.
The first test of Deng's legacy will be whether his chosen successor, Communist Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin, and the other younger technocrats he installed in the 1990s will weather political maneuvering that is expected to intensify in the coming months.
Jiang received a boost in claiming Deng's mantle by being named chairman of Deng's 459-member funeral committee.
Deng had been in declining health for hears. By the early 1990s, he was barely able to walk or talk. Puzzled foreigners frequently questioned the basis of his power. The explanation is as old as China itself: The emperor, no matter how feeble, how removed from rule, remains emperor until he dies.
Deng saw this coming and, seemingly determined to break the centuries-old cycle, vowed to turn over power to younger leaders. In a rare interview in 1980, when he was 76, Deng said he would retire and limit his role to that of an adviser when he reached 81.
``When a man reaches that age, his brain doesn't work too well anymore,'' he said. ``Enough with old men who continue to be in power until the day of their death, enough with life-long tenure of the leaders. It has not been put on any paper that the old men must rule, that the leaders must lead all their lives, and yet this mistaken habit continues to dominate our system and to be one of our shortcomings.''
Although Deng held true to his vow on the surface - he gave up all formal titles over time - he remained de facto emperor until the day he died. For so deeply entrenched is the imperial system in China that despite his advanced senility, Deng's role was cast by his communist courtiers.
Chinese history, particularly that of the communist era, is subject to sudden thrusts of distortion to fit the erratic needs of new leaders waiting in the wings.
Thus Deng, who suffered tragedies during the Cultural Revolution - his eldest son was paralyzed after Maoist Red Guards threw him or forced him to jump from a fourth-story window - later found it useful to recreate Mao's personality cult and pay homage to him.
Similarly, in the aftermath of Tiananmen, Jiang and others awaiting Deng's mantle found it to their advantage to create a Deng personality cult. The irony is that Deng, perhaps out of repugnance for the physical, psychological and professional abuse that Mao heaped on him, assiduously shunned cult status.
While Mao relished his larger-than-life myth and lived it to the hilt - as a ruthless dictator, cunning military strategist, Machiavellian schemer, womanizer and mass murderer - Deng chose to live a relatively quiet and private existence.
If he had a passion, it was the bourgeois game of bridge. While Mao regularly would take a pair of attractive young women to his sprawling bed in the belief that they would help revive his libido, a big night for Deng was cards with cronies, played in a thick cloud of cigarette smoke and lasting into the wee hours.
Deng's origins did not provide much for heroic tales, either. Deng, who married three times and had five children, was born to a landowner in the southwest province of Sichuan on Aug. 22, 1904. He acquired the nickname Xianwa, meaning "good boy."
Tutored at home, he was one of the few in his village who was literate, and by the time he was 11 he was writing letters for many of his family's neighbors. ``Of course I didn't write very well,'' he later recalled modestly. ``But that didn't matter.''
At 16, he went to France on a work-study program and joined the Communist Party.
In 1934 Deng joined Mao in the famed Long March, the tortuous 6,000-mile retreat that hardened the Red Army and led to the communist victory over Chiang Kai-shek in 1949. Out of the shared hardships of the Long March, Deng's fate was irretrievably linked to Mao's whims, sometimes beneficent, sometimes cruel.
Three years after the 1949 founding of the People's Republic of China, Deng became vice premier. By 1956, he was on the Politburo Standing Committee - the most powerful ruling body.
But Deng's economic pragmatism and his ties to Mao's rivals within the Communist leadership twice put him in political disfavor during the Cultural Revolution. Sent to work at a tractor factory, he returned to the leadership in 1973, only to be purged once again in 1976.
In 1977, he was rehabilitated and once again named vice premier, which gave him the power he needed to get his reform plans moving.
But where Deng came into his own was in setting China's shackled masses free from the constraints of the so-called iron rice bowl, the Maoist system under which they were assured basic food, clothing and shelter but were blocked from acquiring any real wealth.
In December 1978, at the critical Third Plenary session of the Eleventh Central Committee meeting of the ruling Communist Party, Deng unveiled his startling program of economic reform and opening of China's massive market to the West.
With that single act, he did more to free the peasants of China than Mao's victory over the warlords and the landlords.
Suddenly, Deng declared, ``to be rich is glorious.'' He sought foreign investment and encouraged the world's most populated country to set about making money. ``It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice,'' was his most famous saying.
He abolished farming communes, allowed some private enterprises and established special economic zones to produce goods for export. The people of China picked up the theme with a joyous vengeance. Peasant farmers, who before had no incentive to produce more than their own needs, began churning out surpluses of rice and wheat, fruit and vegetables. Factory workers who hardly bothered to crank over their machines began opening their own shops and plants. Computer gurus who dozed in the backwaters of technology began devising affordable hardware and software suitable for China's unique needs.
Even in distant Beijing, the puritanical capital of the emperors, gleaming hotels and office towers began soaring over the dusty hutongs, the ancient courtyard houses with their outdoor privies and charcoal heaters.
Communism, Deng told his people, wasn't supposed to mean poverty. For a while, it worked. What didn't work was Deng's attempt to screen out the ``negative'' aspects of the West and capitalism while allowing only the desirable, economic-enhancing bits and pieces.
Soon, Chinese youngsters who had flocked to the West for schooling realized that the people back home were getting only half a cake. Without a say in how they were governed, financial gain soon took on a hollow ring. Those young people also realized that the sons and daughters of the communist ruling class were growing fat on corruption.
Thus, in mid-April 1989, when Hu Yaobang, Deng's former Communist Party secretary who had fallen from favor with his boss, died of a heart attack, Beijing students seized the opportunity to take to the streets.
From Deng's viewpoint, the timing of the brazen student uprising couldn't have been worse. The top echelon of the party leadership was in disarray and, as the final straw, the reformist president of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, was coming to Beijing on a historic visit.
Deng suffered a terrible loss of face because he was unable to escort Gorbachev to Tiananmen for a traditional wreath-laying ceremony: The square was occupied by tens of thousands of protesters.
Once the Soviet leader left town, Deng took his revenge. Few Western analysts - few Chinese for that matter - expected a brutal crackdown, because Deng had appeared weak and indecisive. What they had failed to consider was that he, like Mao, fully believed that political ends warranted bloodshed. And no end could be more worthy to Deng than the preservation of his position and the party for which he had sacrificed so much.
Today, as it marks Deng's death, China remains a country of striking contradictions: economically vibrant and politically repressive. Deng brought China to where it now stands. But he was incapable of taking his people that momentous next step into China's promised land.
The Associated Press contributed information to this story.
LENGTH: Long : 150 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: (headshot) Deng Xiaoping. color. GRAPHIC: Chart by KRT.by CNBcolor.