Biography and History: Bad King Deng?

Biography gets tasked with varied chores and changing purposes, and it pays to distinguish them. Plutarch in Greece, Suetonius in ancient Rome, and Sima Qian in ancient China used sets of biographical miniatures to score moral points. Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, which is credited with creating the genre of modern biography, was an artful literary character portrait not in the least worried about Johnson's exemplary virtue or turpitude. Its loose handling of sources and lack of documentation, however, led one scholar to call it “the world's worst biography,” surely an optimistic judgment (Greene Reference Greene1993). Offering an example closer to our concern here, Emily Chua Huiching argues that bestselling biographies published over the decades of economic reform in China were structured around a narrative of historical change that is only implied, never directly stated or argued, reflecting an argument they do not explicitly present. Political events, she concludes, “are portrayed as distinctly removed from, if not irrelevant to, the individual's reality” (Chua Reference Chua2009, 370).

Biography serves authors in different ways. For American postwar graduate students in area studies it was pragmatic genre, for their interest was not in personality and life experience so much as in a theme or topic. The person in the title was more or less the clothesline on which the historical laundry was hung. The template for the title was “[name of person] and “[abstract noun],” then perhaps a colon followed by more abstract nouns: Liang Ch'i-ch'ao and the Mind of Modern China (Levenson Reference Levenson1959). This type of biographical monograph moved the field beyond exploratory generalizations and into showing individuals in action over time; if it is now less widespread, it is not because the results were unsatisfactory. Researching an individual also had advantages over researching a dissertation topic that might require a lifetime. A serious student could go to the library and find a shelf lined with books that could be worked through before the fellowship ran out and it was necessary to get a job. College and university specialists published for their peers; writing accessible biographies for the public was left to journalists, retired diplomats, independent scholars, and Jonathan Spence. Because they did not face academic reviews or tenure committees, nonacademic biographers could publish before they had read every last article or monograph, which made academics think their biographies were unfinished and premature.

Academic historians have long found biography a little dodgy. Nowadays the prudent grad student avoids straight biography, and academic journals do not generally review popular biographies. This is not just because the obvious biographical figures have been picked off, but because of shifts in scholarly interest. Cultural historians write about groups and abstractions, critical studies scholars are interested in theory and how it interprets large scale stuff, while social scientists scarcely think of biography at all. Nigel Hamilton's (Reference Hamilton2007) history of the genre laments this neglect in spite of biography being the most widely practiced and often most controversial area of nonfiction. To academics biography was “under-theorized and—heaven forbid—‘popular,’” writes Hamilton (Reference Hamilton2007, 3–4). Hermione Lee, who also contrasts biography as a genre with history and fiction, compares it to the autopsy, in which the biographer plays the role of a forensic examiner, and to the portrait, a snapshot that can go wrong—“flattery, idealization, flatness, inaccuracy, distortion” (Lee Reference Lee2009, 1).

The “heroic biography,” mostly produced by nonacademics, writes Lucy Riall, “has long fueled a major publishing industry dedicated to celebrating or exposing the lives of the rich, celebrated, beautiful, and notorious.” Heroic biographies are especially useful as Christmas presents, but academics even look down on the political biography. Academics suspect them of “over-personalizing complex historical developments, overemphasizing the role of the individual in shaping and determining events, [and] ignoring or playing down the social and political context in which those actions took place.” Riall, a scholar who writes political biography herself, insists that in the end “the study of a political life has value because it possesses considerable explanatory force,” and because “the life of a political leader can tell us a great deal about the creation and exercise of power” (Riall Reference Riall2010, 376).

E. H. Carr's What Is History? (Reference Carr1961) put the classic historians' objection: biography represents the “Bad King John theory of history.” King John was the English monarch whose tyranny provoked the barons into drafting the Magna Carta and whose weakness led him to sign it. Legend then turned the Magna Carta into the cornerstone of British freedom and gave John the credit. Carr used historians' treatment of the hapless King John to distinguish between “biography,” which is based on the assumption that what matters is the “character and behavior of individuals” and “history,” which treats the individual as “part of a whole.” Hamilton and Lee worried only that a biography might not be true to its subject, Riall concluded that political biography could be useful in spite of cogent objections, but Carr charged that “good biography makes bad history” (Carr Reference Carr1961, 45–48).

Who Made “Modern China”?

Over the last decade or so, a number of “heroic biographies” have proclaimed that what Carr called the “character and behavior” of an individual created modern China or changed the course of the Chinese revolution. Mao Zedong remains the reference point, for biographies of other political figures have to address the questions and meet the arguments defined by Mao biographies, which form a genre with a trajectory of its own. Edgar Snow's Red Star over China (Reference Snow1937) challenged the story that had dominated Western thinking, that of an “unchanging China” that did not participate in the same scheme of historical progress as Europe. Snow promulgated the new scheme of periodization that governed all societies and saw China not as “ancient” but as “feudal,” with a new China waiting to be born. The story of modern China became the story of Mao's revolution (Hayford Reference Hayford and Cheek2010). Postwar historians sought to explain why late Qing attempts to modernize had not worked. Mary Wright's influential study of the government modernization programs after the Taiping Rebellion concluded that their failure “demonstrated with a rare clarity that even in the most favorable circumstances there is no way in which an effective modern state can be grafted onto a Confucian society” (Wright Reference Wright1957, 312). Logically, then, China needed revolution of some sort, a Chinese counterpart to the French Revolution of 1789.

After Mao's death in 1976, this story lost traction, and ironically, Deng's success seemed to reverse Wright's verdict: Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore modernized using Confucian values of education, selection by merit, order, and respect for authority. Statist conservatives, such as Zeng Guofan, the Empress Dowager, Yuan Shikai, and even Chiang Kai-shek, now appeared as creators of state institutions that Mao and Deng would preserve and build on (Cohen Reference Cohen1988).

When Deng's reforms finally allowed Western scholars access to China, the meanings of Mao's 1949 revolution changed again. Joseph Esherick's elegant 1995 article, “Ten Theses on the Chinese Revolution,” epitomized a generation of post-Mao studies that argued that China's long revolution was not created by Mao, but that it emerged from external shocks, national accidents, local movements, and ad hoc reactions. Historians now saw 1949 not as a liberating quantum leap from one historical epoch to the next but as the replacement of one set of oppressors by another. Esherick ([1995] Reference Esherick and Wasserstrom2003) cited thematic biographical monographs to demonstrate diversity and contention, but his ten theses would satisfy E. H. Carr as history; they do not include any leader's personality, ideology, or leadership, even those of Mao or Chiang Kai-shek.

Deng's Lives and Deng's China

Up to the spring of 1989, the three Deng biographies tell a roughly similar and mostly familiar story: Deng was tough, even bloody-minded, dedicated, and decisive, and he got the job done. Deng set China on the road to cosmopolitanism, but he had no aptitude for languages and the few years he spent abroad were spent mostly in Communist Party circles, not cultural interchange. He went to France to work in factories under the cosmopolitan Diligent Work–Frugal Study program of Li Shizeng and Cai Yuanpei, but ignored their anarchist vision that put social liberation over institutional power building. Besides learning to admire big machines and fix them, Deng derived at least two lessons from his years in France: that he loved croissants and that revolution needs people who can make things work more than it needs grand ideas. Deng became a communist less because of an ideological conversion experience than because he hated the humiliation and low pay of a French factory worker's life and because Zhou Enlai led the way. Like Stalin in the Soviet Union following the death of Lenin, Deng learned to keep his head down, his eyes open to political instruction and shut to humanistic distractions, and to do the scut work of the revolution. He later called himself a “PhD in Mimeography.” Deng then spent an instructive apprenticeship in Moscow, where the croissants were few and political lessons many, and returned to Shanghai to work with Zhou. On this period, Pantsov and Levine use the new material from Russian archives to give an expansive, lively account.

The story heats up with Chiang Kai-shek's purge of communists from the Nationalist Party in 1927 and the punctuated rise of Mao Zedong. Deng did not come into his own until Mao made him army commandant and commissar in 1938. Deng was now in his element: networks of relations, ruthless discipline, recruitment of talent, hierarchy, and precise planning but improvisational response to events. Deng once traveled for days through battle areas to deliver a strategic report that he memorized rather than carry briefing papers that might fall into enemy hands. Mao was impressed. Deng was in a political food chain in which he depended on Zhou Enlai and Mao and in turn he sponsored younger men (and they were all men), at various points, including Wan Li, Zhao Ziyang, Hu Yaobang, and others he later brought back to power after the Cultural Revolution. In the 1950s, Deng carried out a key but second-level role in executing Mao's policies. Pantsov and Levine's new Russian sources show that his heart and allegiance were actually more with the Chairman than with Zhou Enlai.

The spring of 1989 is axial. Pantsov and Levine devote a chapter, “The Tiananmen Tragedy,” to the events; Dillon covers the period 1980–92 in a single chapter; while Vogel uses two chapters, “Beijing Spring (April 15 – May 17, 1989),” covering a little over a month, and “The Tiananmen Tragedy (May 17 – June 4, 1989),” a little under three weeks, followed by another chapter, “Standing Firm,” which covers the follow-up, and another on the Southern Tour of 1992 that reasserted the reform agenda against wide opposition in the party. Vogel (p. 638) reviews a number of ways of looking at the crackdown, then gives a judgment that was quoted by several critics:

That is, Deng broke the eggs and produced the omelets.

At this point, the metaphor breaks down: the only way to make an omelet is to break eggs, but was killing these particular people and killing so many of them the only way to achieve stability and economic growth? Did Deng make and enforce the decision? What choices did confrontational and unorganized students leave him with their demands for undefined democracy? Was Deng misled? Was he cut off from the flow of fresh information and contending recommendations? If so, what did he not know and when did he not know it?

Vogel and Pantsov and Levine probably use “tragedy” to imply a fated clash in which there is right on both sides. Vogel's more circumstantial day-by-day account ascribes responsibility to Deng for declaring martial law and ordering the use of deadly force in the face of Zhao Ziyang's opposition. Dillon concludes that Deng “cannot be absolved of blame for the massacre,” but that “the responsibility for the military intervention and the deaths lies primarily with his duplicitous and manipulative colleagues,” Li Peng and Yang Shangkun (p. 276). He explains in some detail his “considerable caution” towards the Tiananmen Papers, a set of internal party documents leaked to the West that seems to show Deng's central role. Dillon points out (p. 276) that Zhao Ziyang's account distances Deng from the decision (Zhang, Nathan, and Link Reference Zhang, Nathan and Link2001; Zhao Reference Zhao2009, 6, 8–14). We may never find definitive sources, at least not in the lifetime of scholars today. Pantsov and Levine put the burden on the “hypersensitive eighty-four-year-old” Paramount Leader who “considered his own point of view beyond dispute” and who viewed the students as “impudent” and feared the “genuine democratic student movement” that was springing to life around the country (pp. 413, 409). Still, even their command of sources may not empower them to accurately read the minds of Deng and Zhao or indisputably characterize the student movement as democratic. Zhao achieved the tragic hero's recognition of his fate; Deng unreflectively celebrated the enforced stability.

The Reviewers Take Their Shots

China books that make a splash get waves of reviews that tell us as much about the sociology of Western—particularly American—publishing and the scholarly debate about America's place in the world as they do about China's destiny. Many of the reviewers review China books regularly and have known the authors and each other for years and years.Footnote ² Generally, initial newspapers and weekly journals welcome the book for telling the “real” story, revealing the “hidden” history, or rectifying a scandalous academic neglect, and it is probably better to encourage people to read these books than to pick nits. In good time the academic specialists come along and show where the book fell short, sometimes with a tinge of regret that they had not written it themselves.Footnote ³

The reception of the Deng biographies is an example. Newspapers and the general press welcomed Vogel's book, calling it “encyclopedic rather than a racy read,” “imposing,” “massive,” “exhaustive,” “comprehensive, minutely documented,” and “fine-grained.” John Pomfret, a nonacademic China scholar, wrote in the Washington Post that Vogel's “masterful new history” is “perhaps the clearest account so far of the revolution that turned China from a totalitarian backwater led by one of the monsters of the 20th century into the power it has become today” (Pomfret Reference Pomfret2011). Andrew J. Nathan's (Reference Nathan2012) review in the New Republic, a substantial analysis on its own, explicated the ways that Deng changed the system to make it possible for the Chinese Communist Party to survive. He concluded that Deng remade China into what it essentially remains today: “a new kind of authoritarian political system, adaptive and resilient, managing a semi-capitalist economy, open to the world, with a growing middle class and a wide ambit of personal freedom, but with power still held tightly in a small number of hands, and facing a growing wave of challenges that are decisively repressed” (Nathan Reference Nathan2012).

A chorus of reviewers also wanted to summon Deng before the court of history. Fang Lizhi, the exiled Chinese astrophysicist and human rights activist, wrote in the New York Review of Books that his first impression of Vogel's Deng was a “sense of the ‘nonappearance of the expected’” because “the term ‘human rights’ does not appear in its index.” He concluded that “this omission was not an oversight of the indexer,” for “systematic nonconsideration of human rights is one of the book's features” (Fang Reference Fang2011).Footnote ⁴ Pete Sweeney objected that Vogel's account of 1989 “lets Deng off the hook” by implying that their “veto” system made the students “structurally unable” to compromise, leaving the moral burden on them (Sweeney Reference Sweeney2011).

Jonathan Mirsky (Reference Mirsky2014) criticized Dillon's account on much the same grounds: “Unfortunately,” he wrote, what Dillon does, “with a few exceptions, is to excuse or explain away Deng's record as a violent disciple of Mao, resorting to evasive words like ‘probably’, ‘possibly’ and ‘perhaps.’” Dillon, he went on, “concludes (as though the truth were unknowable): ‘Whatever the truth, Deng will always be associated personally with China's most public episode of repression.’” Mirsky's contrary-to-fact subjunctive (“as though the truth were unknowable”) brooks no doubt: the truth is knowable and Mirsky knows it. Mirsky (Reference Mirsky2015) did welcome Pantsov and Levine's Deng, which “at last shows him to be as violent and treacherous as his mentor and idol, Mao Zedong.” Yet Mirsky wanted to make his own reservations clear even here. Like Vogel, he pointed out, Pantsov and Levine contend that Deng was “definitely an outstanding revolutionary leader, a great economic and social reformer …, and a talented strategist,” qualities that “one would not readily apply to Hitler or Stalin. They leave the impression that one set of characteristics somehow balances the other” (Mirsky Reference Mirsky2015). They did not leave this impression with me, for they rightly claim that they list his “accomplishments as well as his large scale crimes” and that Deng was an outstanding revolutionary leader “but” a “bloody dictator” (p. 433; emphasis added). The words “as well as” and “but” state that the good and the bad co-exist, not that one “balances” the other.

Timothy Cheek's (Reference Cheek2012) review essay was more reflective and less rebarbative. Although conceding that Vogel did not give a full view of Deng's life or American policy, “given the concerns of some reviews that Vogel ‘goes easy on Deng’ (and I am inclined to agree), it is reassuring to see in the body of the book that Vogel does not go easy on the system and the political intrigue in China over these years” (Cheek Reference Cheek2012).

Perry Anderson, a major historian on the left who has morally engaged the changing Chinese revolution for decades, published a review-essay in the London Review of Books that grouped Vogel's Deng with Henry Kissinger's On China and Jay Taylor's Generalissimo. Anderson (Reference Anderson2012) called the three books “Sino-Americana,” not “Sinology proper,” and the authors “functionaries of the state, co-opted or career.” He labeled Vogel a “former servant of a Democratic administration” (a categorical dismissal that also applies to the man who delivered my mail for many years, by the way). English scarcely contained Anderson's scorn: Vogel's book is a “laudatio,” an “edulcoration,” and an “exercise in unabashed adulation” in which “anything in Deng's career that might seriously mar the general encomium is sponged away.” Vogel, “putting it politely,” is a “booster.” Anderson offered an explanation: All three American authors “have as their underlying question: ‘China—what's in it for us?’” According to Anderson, the outcome in Vogel's case “is a special kind of apologia, where the standard of merit is less Deng's record as a politician in China than his contribution to peace of mind in America.” I take this to mean that what was “in it” for Vogel was Deng's success in selling out to the capitalist world; this surely does not describe Deng's own motives, which Vogel elucidates. Does Anderson really mean to imply that “rising China” is actually a banana republic that murders its citizens only to protect global corporations?

Anderson (Reference Anderson2012) praised Taylor's Generalissimo, not least for showing that not all works of Sino-Americana are “automatically characterized by servility or opportunism.” This sideswipes Vogel's arguments without explaining why they are so inane that only “servility” or “opportunism” could have produced them. Moreover, Vogel's book is “formally speaking, a mismatch” between the author, his audience, and his subject. The book is a “misfit” with American audiences because it is too long for them to read. By definition, Anderson explained, “if we exclude puffs or barbs about contemporaries,” a biography is “an exercise of historical imagination,” a definition which Vogel's Deng does not meet, for Vogel “was trained as a sociologist, and in mental equipment has always remained one, with little admixture.” Yet what is the logical connection between being a sociologist and lacking historical imagination—like Max Weber, perhaps? This all disappointed me for being curiously disjointed and vituperative; I wanted more from one of our most powerful China observers.

Ruth Y. Y. Hung's (Reference Hung2014) extensive review-article on Vogel's Deng put what may have been Anderson's objection more clearly. “Most revealingly,” she wrote, instead of ending his account of June 4 with the military crackdown, Vogel “uses as many pages as he spends on the ‘tragedy’ to give an excited account of Deng's famous ‘Southern Journey’ in 1992.” She explained that “throbbing through the heart of Vogel's life story of Deng is the blood logic of transnational corporations, which, for the last two decades, have been working to equate the market with the society and to turn commercial value into the standard of societal measurement.” Vogel's focus is on Deng's “agency, function, and role in the process of China's ‘transformation’ from a dense, inbred civilization most suspicious of foreign influence into a modern nation.” According to Hung, by “modern,” Vogel refers “primarily to post-Mao China's openness to the outside world, notably the United States.” These are themes I would love Anderson (Reference Anderson2012) to have explored rather than sweeping past. Both Anderson and Hung do give Deng, for better or worse, the responsibility for transforming China.

Did Deng in fact invent “Deng's China”? Other reviewers said no. Charles Horner (Reference Horner2012), of the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., wrote that Vogel's argument was “triumphalist” and that “all the triumphalist narratives derive from a claim first made by Mao Zedong in 1950: “Without the Communist Party There Would Be No New China.” Horner responds that “a blueprint like Deng's appeared in the mid-19th century when even the Taiping rebels drew up detailed plans for the renovation of the country” and that the “self-strengtheners” of the late Qing were “well along” in “reform and opening up.” Others might counter-respond that it is great to draw up blueprints and to be “well along” with your plans, but that Mao and Deng did the harder job of creating the power to achieve the plans.

Those heroic biographies of the leaders of modern China make claims for earlier master builders. Some even trace the bloodline of Mao and Deng's China back to dynastic times or call Mao and Deng “Red Emperors.”Footnote ⁵ (Mao compared himself to several emperors, but not to their advantage, however.) Jung Chang (Reference Chang2013) makes a startling case for Empress Dowager Cixi, who “brought medieval China into the modern age”; promoted education, technology, and openness to the world; and championed women's liberation, all “without violence” and with “relatively little upheaval.” This, remarks Pamela Kyle Crossley (Reference Crossley2014), “is the sort of interpretation that might be produced by someone who had studied the original records of the Qing court but lacked sufficient knowledge of the existing scholarship to be able to decrypt them.” Crossley cites example after example where Chang credits Cixi with measures that others were actually responsible for or goes astray by reading documents in isolation from the interpretive scholarship. Crossley distinguishes “known history” from “Chang's Cixi-centred fancies.”

Marie-Claire Bergère's (Reference Bergère and Lloyd1998) scholarly and readable biography of Sun Yat-sen explained why in 1979 Deng claimed the roots of his Four Modernizations were in Sun's wild development schemes (or at least they seemed wild until Deng came along). If Sun was in fact “Father of the Nation,” he must have accomplished this progenitive feat posthumously, but biographies usually assume that Mao shaped history and should take the blame for its crimes.

Ross Terrill (Reference Terrill2006) gave a broad-ranging and contemplative review to Chang Jung and Jon Halliday's Mao: The Unknown Story from his point of view as a Mao biographer who reaches a general audience in spite of being a library-delving academic. He remarked that “overall the book is less the ‘unknown story’ promised by the subtitle than a known story distilled into a polemic,” and added that by “locating China's misery in one man's perfidies, Chang and Halliday have written a rather Confucian book.” Their “monster approach,” he continued, would have worked better if they had made better use of existing scholarship. An earlier bestseller, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, written by Mao's former physician, Li Zhisui (Reference Zhisui and Hung-chao1994), is as much memoir as biography. Margaretta Jolly's (Reference Jolly2000) analysis of the book's rhetorical structure and how it was constructed by an “exile and a ghost writer” could usefully be applied to popular biographies in order to understand why they appeal.Footnote ⁶

Jay Taylor (Reference Taylor2009) mused that if Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, Soong Mayling, could see today's Shanghai and Beijing, they “might well believe that their long-planned ‘counterattack’ had succeeded and their successors had recovered the mainland.” Taylor did not see state capitalism, repression, and market Leninism as defining present-day China when he asserted that “it is their [the Chiangs'] vision of modern China, not Mao's, that guides the People's Republic in the twenty-first century” (592). Taylor's triumphalism was echoed in Laura Tyson Li's (Reference Li2009) Washington Post review, which ran under the headline “The Final Triumph of Chiang Kai-shek.”Footnote ⁷

But even if he did not build “Deng's China,” what measure of praise and blame does Deng deserve? Vogel plausibly argues that Deng lifted millions out of poverty, a condition that killed many more than were killed in 1989, yet Pantsov and Levine are also right that Deng stands in the ranks of blood-drenched statists: “History is full of blood” (p. 5). All the heroic leaders just mentioned except Sun Yat-sen killed for some self-determined good cause and because they had the power to do so. Hong Xiuquan murdered Manchu devils in the name of the Heavenly Father; Zeng Guofan slaughtered thousands of disarmed Taiping rebels after he captured Nanjing in 1864; the Empress Dowager beheaded reformists in 1898; Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists unleashed the White Terror of 1927, breached the Yellow River dikes in 1938, had critics assassinated, and killed thousands of Taiwanese in 1947; Mao and Deng were responsible for uncounted millions of deaths. Outside China, those Western leaders who did not kill their own citizens on this grand scale compensated for this dereliction by killing the citizens of other countries, variously citing the need to spread civilization by taking their land, vengeance, ending a war, or stopping communism.

Where does this leave “Bad King Deng,” or, as some might have it, “Bad Emperor Deng”? We must consider not metaphorical eggs and omelets but real people's lives and the legacy that Deng shaped. A mature account of revolution and its discontents will recognize that prices must be paid, but it is an error to think that any scales can balance items in such different categories: not even apples and oranges, but apples and habeas corpus, oranges and a Gini coefficient, bloodshed and lifting families out of fatal poverty. Pantsov and Levine's exercise in historical imagination is good, tough history: sound research, a robust argument, and a compelling story. Dillon's straightforward and comprehensible story gives readers ample material to weigh Deng's role in making “Deng's China.” Vogel's meticulously articulated chapters on Deng's reforms demonstrate in more telling detail than other biographies that there was no inevitability for success but that Deng made the reform process work. This is history as narrative analysis, not chronicle. These three political biographies show that good biography grapples with slippery truths; the reviews each highlight parts of the challenge. As to the future, we can only guess and fear.