Veteran Asia hand Ezra Vogel has written a magisterial study of Deng Xiaoping that will stand the test of time. It will be used and remembered as much for the prodigious and meticulous research as his trenchant analysis and findings. Vogel uses an unprecedented range of source materials: Chinese government and party documents; foreign government archives; international histories of China and biographies of Deng; Chinese and foreign personal and official memoirs; oral interviews with a wide range of Deng's associates and foreign officials who interacted with him; periodicals and newspapers; television and radio transcripts; visual observations in situ; and an incredibly broad range of Chinese publications. Other scholars have used some of these sources, but never together. As a result, Vogel provides a far more comprehensive and nuanced study than any previous study of Deng's life and career (including in a special issue of this journal, No. 135).

Through mining these vast materials, Vogel is able to paint a complex portrait of the man who changed China. Readers will find a leader driven by time and conviction. By the time he took control of the nation in 1978 Deng was already 75 years old, and was in a hurry to do what he could to overturn the ill effects of the Cultural Revolution and decades of Maoist stultification in order to launch China on the proverbial path of “reform and opening.” Unlike the dogmatic and autarkic Mao, Deng was open to eclectic learning from a wide variety of foreign systems, experimenting with previously “capitalist” policies, and unleashing the promethean forces of entrepreneurial Chinese. Rather than attack bureaucratic institutions, as Mao did, Vogel shows Deng as the quintessential Organization Man – working to rebuild and strengthen the Chinese Leninist state. Deng was a committed socialist, and sought to strengthen the Communist Party – yet he understood that progress required pragmatic compromises in domestic and foreign policy. It is this flexibility and adaptability that saved the Chinese Communist Party.

While Vogel brings new information and perspectives to bear on Deng's domestic reforms, I found the discussion of foreign policy and military modernization to provide particular new insights and data. Chapter 11 on the protracted US–China negotiations for normalization of diplomatic relations breaks new ground and assembles disparate information drawn from archives and interviews not previously available in one study. Similarly, chapter 17 on Deng's pivotal role in the negotiations with Britain over the retrocession of Hong Kong, and his novel “one country, two systems” concept, is the single best account available. Chapter 18 on Deng's role in the People's Liberation Army's modernization effort offers a detailed and nuanced account of the strategic influences, bureaucratic politics, fiscal factors, technological hurdles and doctrinal departures that launched the PLA on the road to the semi-modern force it has become today. The discussion in this chapter and chapter nine sheds new light on the 1979 border war with Vietnam – which was clearly “Deng's War.”

The domestic policy chapters are no less well done. Among other contributions, Vogel restores Deng's predecessor Hua Guofeng's role in the transition away from extreme Maoism and into the reform era, thus offering a historical corrective to conventional wisdom. In Vogel's analysis Hua was more than the inept placeholder, dogmatic neo-Maoist, and transitional figure as he is usually portrayed in other studies.

Vogel also rightly describes Deng as obsessed with Western science and technology, and admiring of the economic miracles of the East Asian “tigers” (of which Vogel has written in previous books). Readers also get extensive treatment of Deng's role in the now familiar rural and industrial reforms, education policy, foreign trade and investment initiatives.

While other reviews of Vogel's discussion of Deng's role in the events of 1989–92 have criticized him for being too “soft” on Deng, I found his treatment of these complex and tragic events – the Tiananmen “massacre” and subsequent three-year crackdown in the wake of the East European and Soviet implosions – to be detailed and balanced, but critical. Vogel makes it clear that this was “Deng's massacre.”

If there is a dissatisfying element to this landmark study it is that the narrative is written in a somewhat antiseptic and detached (albeit appropriately scholarly) way. One might have looked for the author to pass more (and critical) judgments. The author is admiring of Deng's accomplishments – this comes through most clearly in the concluding chapter “China transformed” – but perhaps not as critical as one could be of Deng's lifelong hand in oppression. The dark side of Deng does not come through as clearly as it could have. One would have also liked to have a better feel for his manipulative tendencies and the way he dealt with various Party leaders. These lacunae may not be possible given the available evidence, however, and Vogel is to be credited with evaluating only as much as the empirical record sustains. Vogel's most important contribution lies precisely in amassing the empirical record as no one has done before, or will likely do again. More than a decade in research and writing, Ezra Vogel has contributed a major study of lasting historical significance.