Just ordered a copy of Ezra Vogel's new biography of Deng Xiaoping.  I look forward to reading it; biography affords a certain immediacy and specificity when working through dynamic historical periods.  

The reviews have started to come in already. One, by Christian Caryl, caught my eye in particular.  He is a bit more willing to take Vogel to task for going easy on some of Deng's more brutal political decisions: his key role in the Anti-Rightist campaign in 1957; his early support for the Great Leap Forward; and his active leadership in the killing of hundreds of Beijing citizens in 1989.

These lines jumped off the page for me:

To be sure, there is good reason for a biographer to focus on the way his subject saw the world; we would miss much of Deng's story if we only listened to his critics. The problem here is that Vogel bends so far backward to explain the party's logic on, say, the Tiananmen crackdown or Tibet that it sometimes becomes difficult to understand why anyone might possibly think differently. About one instance in the early 1980s, when Deng harshly dismissed some liberal talk from party intellectuals, Vogel primly informs us that "Western notions of a transcendental God that could criticize the earthly rulers were not part of Chinese tradition." Maybe I've missed something here, but Deng and his comrades spent their entire lives reshaping Chinese society according to the esoteric theories of a German Jewish intellectual. Chinese tradition? Oddly enough, whenever Vogel brings up the subject, it's the party that gets to decide what constitutes Chinese values. The critics somehow never do.

It seems that Vogel is suggesting that without something like a Christian tradition, there is little cultural obstacle to autorcracy in China. 

But, of course a notion of an external standard of good and proper rule, external to the mere will of the ruler, is a part of Chinese tradition: Confucianism.  And I suspect that that external standard, had it had any sort of political standing, would have understood Deng’s support of the Anti-Rightist Movement and the GLF, as well as his decision to kill citizens in 1989, as deeply inhumane.

 A passage from Mencius:

 Prince T’ien asked: “What is the task of a worthy official?”

“To cultivate the highest of purposes,” replied Mencius.

“What do you mean by the highest of purposes?”

“It’s simple: Humanity and Duty.  You defy Humanity if you cause the death of a single innocent person, and you defy Duty if you take what is not yours.  What is our dwelling-place if not Humanity?  And what is our road if not Duty?  To dwell in Humanity and Duty – that is the perfection of a great person’s task.”

Vastly more than one innocent person died as the result of the policies championed by Deng Xiaoping.  By Confucian standards he was inhumane, and thus not worthy to rule. 

Indeed, had Deng, and Mao, not been successful, had the Anti-Rightist Movement and the Great Leap Forward not occurred, there would have been much less need for economic reform in 1978. To put it another way: It was the horrific failures of Deng's favored policies in his earlier career that created his successes later in his career….. and millions of Chinese people died, unnecessarily, along the way.

A Confucian wold argue that Chinese history, and contemporary Chinese society, would have been better had there been no Deng Xiaoping, no Mao Zedong and no Communist Party.  Maybe that's why the powers-that-be took down the statue of Confucius near Tiananmen Square.