FORUM , , and the World

✣ Commentaries by Joseph Fewsmith, Frederick C. Teiwes, and Sergey Radchenko Reply by Alexander V. Pantsov

Alexander V. Pantsov, with Steven I. Levine, Deng Xiaoping: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 610 pp. $27.50.

Editor’s Note: Deng Xiaoping had a crucial impact on China’s role in the world in the latter half of the twentieth century. Zedong and oversaw Chinese foreign policy during the country’s first quarter century of Communist rule—initially establishing a close alliance with the , then turning bitterly against the USSR at the end of the 1950s, and finally pursuing a rapprochement with the in the early 1970s—but it was Deng who made the momentous decision in the late 1970s to integrate China into the global economic order that had been largely shaped by the United States from the mid-1940s on. When Mao and Zhou died in 1976, China was still one of the poorest countries in the world. Deng’s bid to link China with the international capitalist system spawned a prolonged period of rapid economic growth that nowadays has made the Chinese economy the second largest in the world. In political terms, however, Deng never made a full break with . Deng’s willingness to use brutal violence against unarmed demonstrators in in June 1989—killing many hundreds of people—kept China from modernizing its political system in a way compatible with the dynamism of its rapidly growing economy. Deng’s legacy in China is thus mixed, having turned his country into an economic powerhouse but having left it under a repressive authoritarian system. Over the past several years, two important biographies of Deng have ap- peared in English, one put out in 2011 by a colleague of mine at Harvard, Ezra Vogel, and the other produced by Alexander V. Pantsov, assisted by Steven I. Levine. Pantsov, who spent the first part of his career in Moscow before mov- ing to the United States in the early 1990s and becoming a professor of history (currently at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio), originally published the book in Russian in 2013. Soon thereafter he teamed up with Levine to put

Journal of Cold War Studies Vol. 19, No. 4, Fall 2017, pp. 211–225, doi:10.1162/JCWS_c_00771 © 2017 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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out a slightly revised English version, the same approach the two of them had earlier undertaken with a huge biography of Mao published by Pantsov in Russian in 2007 and in English in 2012. We asked three leading experts on Chinese politics and Chinese foreign policy under Mao and Deng—Joseph Fewsmith, Frederick C. Teiwes, and Sergey Radchenko—to offer their assess- ments of the Pantsov-Levine biography of Deng. We present their commen- taries here along with a reply by Pantsov to numerous points of criticism.

Commentary by Joseph Fewsmith

In March 1931, Deng Xiaoping, who had been commanding troops in the ill- fated Bose Uprising in Guangxi Province, led the remnants of his 7th Corps to to link up with in Jiangxi. As they got to southern Jiangxi, Deng left for to report to the (CCP) center. On the day he left, his co-commander, Li Mingrui, came under attack and had to retreat. The circumstances of Deng leaving were murky, raising the possibility he had abandoned his troops (p. 80). The incident was significant not only because it forms a part of a chapter on the Bose Uprising, which is not well known, but also because Mao in April 1967, after Deng had been enduring months of harsh criticism in the , suddenly had Deng woken up in the middle of the night to berate him for sending work teams into the schools. He then asked Deng whether he had abandoned the 7th Corps 36 years earlier (p. 256). This incident perhaps sheds less light on Deng than on Mao, who seems to have spent much time in his later years ruminating about the past actions of his comrades. Had Mao’s memories been stirred by Red Guard charges that Deng had indeed abandoned his troops? Did Mao just want to see how Deng would respond to the question in the early hours of the morning? Certainly Mao must have accepted Deng’s explanation when he joined the Central Soviet and must have seen Deng as a loyal comrade when Deng was purged as part of Mao’s ouster from the top leadership in 1933. As far as we know, Mao did not raise the question in all the years Deng served as political commissar in the Second Field Army or as General Secretary of the CCP. The murkiness of Deng’s actions in Guangxi, the complex relationship he had with Mao, and many other details of Deng’s pre-reform life are difficult to ferret out. With Mao, we have much more to go on, but even with him it is difficult to form a picture of the man (though Alexander Pantsov and Steven I. Levine do an admirable job in their biography of Mao). The trouble is that writing a biography of even (especially) such a prominent figure as Deng is

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very hard. We simply do not have the personal papers, correspondence, and detailed memories of close associates that we have with other major historical personages. It will be a long time before a biography of Deng comparable to Stephen Kotkin’s recent volumes on Iosif Stalin or Robert Caro’s multivolume study of Lyndon Johnson is feasible. If we cannot have the level of detail and the feel for personality, motives, and personal relations that we would like to have, what can we reasonably expect? In the case of Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life, what we get is an extensive telling of the Communist revolution with attention to what Deng was doing at particular points in time. But what Deng thought about the steps he was taking is hard to say. Consider the Jiangxi period, for example. Deng was close to Zhou Enlai, whom he had gotten to know and work with in France, but we hear nothing about what Deng felt when Zhou repeatedly disagreed with Mao on strategy and when Zhou stood by as Mao (and Deng) were sidelined. Similarly, Deng had studied in the Soviet Union, albeit only for a year, but we hear nothing of his relations with the so-called returned student faction. Perhaps this is simply because Deng was so low in the political hierarchy at the time that he was not even aware of tensions at a higher level, much less in a position to enter the political fray. Given how difficult it is to know much about how Deng felt or how he interacted with the other major political figures of the time, it is curious that Pantsov and Levine choose to spend roughly two-thirds of their biography on Deng’s revolutionary history rather than his better-known period as the leader of China’s reforms. Presumably this is because Pantsov and Levine want to emphasize that Deng’s consciousness, commitment to Marxism-Leninism, and loyalty to the CCP emerged from his life of activity in the party. Deng’s loyalty is repeatedly emphasized, but this only raises the question of where and when Deng rethought his commitments. Deng was notorious for his leadership of the anti-rightist movement in 1957, but he is also well known for his support of intellectuals when he returned to power in 1977. Before the CCP’s watershed Third Plenum in December 1978, Deng, still under ’s leadership, turned his port- folio of science and education into a power position. He proceeded with the opening of universities and the restoration of the examination system in the fall of 1977 and humbly told the Fourth Congress of Scientists that he would serve as their “logistics officer.” This was a major change of attitude. Perhaps Deng started to understand the damage he helped bring about as the anti- rightest movement descended into the Cultural Revolution, and his hatred of the Cultural Revolution no doubt stemmed not only from his own political demise but also from the crippling of his son, Deng Pufang. Deng may have

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been a revolutionary, but he was also a family man, joining his family for din- ner every Sunday when he could. It is hard to imagine Mao doing the same. No doubt Deng’s years in exile in Jiangxi provided the time to think through a different way of doing things. The Pantsov-Levine study is difficult to compare with Ezra Vogel’s 2011 biography of Deng, but Pantsov and Levine invite such comparison.1 They criticize Vogel for spending just 32 pages on Deng’s life prior to Mao’s death. Deng’s six decades as a revolutionary must have taught him a great deal, but what exactly is that legacy? Deng was a disciplined cadre who carried out a violent revolution, but he was hardly unique in this regard. The Chinese Communist revolution was an extremely violent affair, and our understand- ing of the depth and breadth of that violence is only increasing as new studies, including the Pantsov-Levine book, explore new sources. But Deng is also interesting because he initiated enormous changes in Chinese social and eco- nomic life. One still longs to understand how we can better reconcile this commitment to reform with six decades of dedication to violent revolution. Pantsov and Levine also criticize Vogel’s biography for not drawing on the Russian sources they are able to use. This is certainly true, but it is not clear what exactly the Russian sources tell us that the Chinese sources do not. More indication in the text or an explanatory note would have helped. As far as this reviewer can tell, the Russian sources add relatively little to our understanding. None of these comments should detract from the enormous amount of good work that has gone into this book. It reflects a prodigious amount of scholarship and makes a lively biography. But it remains more a history of the Chinese revolution than a biography of Deng Xiaoping.

Commentary by Frederick C. Teiwes

This biography by Alexander Pantsov with Steven I. Levine builds on, and is intimately related to, the biography they published in 2012 of Mao Ze- dong. Mao’s interaction with Deng Xiaoping was not only the crucial aspect of Deng’s political life; it provides a central basis for the authors’ understand- ing of this seminal figure in the history of Chinese . Pantsov and Levine claim their new book is “the only complete and objective biog- raphy” of Deng (p. 8)—a claim that is explicitly aimed at Ezra Vogel’s 2011 study, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. They take issue with

1. Ezra Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge, MA: Press, 2011).

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Vogel’s decision to focus predominantly on Deng’s post-Mao career (whereas they provide the story of his entire life), and they also assert—correctly—that Vogel’s account is unrealistically positive toward Deng. For them, an objective biography is “balanced”: It acknowledges Deng’s leadership in shaping China’s post-Mao economic reforms, while emphasizing his complicity in repression and shedding blood under Mao’s command, not to mention his own primary responsibility for the Tiananmen tragedy in June 1989. A strength of the book, although not an unmitigated one, is the authors’ grasp of their protagonist’s character: “Deng was tough, purposeful, ambi- tious, and cruel. But he was also cautious and patient” (p. 7). They underline such features of his behavior as his devotion to Mao to the point of sub- servience and his acceptance of humiliation, his cold, ruthless streak in deal- ing with people, whether his father or colleagues who were no longer useful, and his increasing capriciousness as he aged. Yet, seemingly reflecting per- ceived similarities to Mao, the authors continue their characterization of the tough and cruel leader in a less satisfactory manner: “a master of manipulat- ing people, engaging in intrigues, and luring people with beautiful slogans,” something supposedly essential for his emergence as Mao’s true successor. The biography is divided into three parts: (1) “The Bolshevik” covers the period from Deng’s birth, through his joining the Communist movement in Europe and absorbing Leninist-Stalinist values in Moscow, and his early rev- olutionary efforts back in China; (2) “The Maoist” examines Deng’s period in the Soviet area and his introduction to Mao’s policies from 1931, through his return to work in 1973 after the Cultural Revolution; and (3) “The Prag- matist” follows Deng from his ascendance after the Cultural Revolution to the end of his life. The dating of the shift from “Maoist” to “pragmatist” is unfortunate. The pragmatic tendencies Deng initially evinced, notably in 1975, were based on Mao’s initiative. Deng’s downfall was a consequence of his insufficiently nuanced understanding of Mao, not any conscious intent to exceed the Chairman’s remit. Despite the authors’ claim, Deng was not disobedient shortly before Mao’s death, and Mao for his part continued to protect Deng. Each section is based on extensive research that includes a great variety of CCP documentary materials, memoirs, and scholarly studies of CCP history, Soviet and Communist International (Comintern) archives (most useful for the Moscow phase of the “Bolshevik” period, demonstrating Deng’s natural disposition as a budding Stalinist cadre), and an extensive secondary literature that is used erratically—one notes an apparently deliberate decision to avoid engaging with recent scholarship at variance with the book’s narrative. The au- thors also have a tendency to view unreliable sources as definitive; notably, the

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account of Mao’s doctor, , and The Tiananmen Papers.2 Moreover, Pantsov and Levine ignore an important and extensively cited source—the ac- count by Deng’s daughter Maomao on his meeting with the “vile” upon returning to Beijing in 1973, a meeting at which she was present— when it does not fit their narrative. Having portrayed Kang as a leftist enemy of Deng and close supporter of , the authors disregard Maomao’s report of this meeting that not only revives a pre-Cultural Revolution fam- ily friendship but also, even more significantly, notes that Kang fiercely de- nounced Jiang as a traitor. Although the array of sources used, especially the recent official CCP lit- erature and memoirs, often provides useful documentation and insights, the resulting story does not break much new ground. What is particularly unfor- tunate is that the coverage of developments can be quite thin, strikingly so in the case of two of the most significant events in Deng’s career: the Tiananmen bloody repression (a 10-page chapter) and Deng’s revival and deepening of economic reform with his 1992 southern tour (a mere three pages). Beyond this, the analysis of specific episodes often misses important nuances and on occasion fundamentally distorts developments encompassing several years, as in treating Mao’s entire Hundred Flowers policy in 1956–1957 as a plot from start to finish to lure “poisonous snakes” from their hole. The book’s account of Deng’s Maoist phase is the most satisfactory sec- tion. It grasps Mao’s shifting moods, charts Deng’s rise, notes his complete loy- alty even when concerns over the consequences of the leader’s actions emerged, and correctly points out that what Mao really wanted was for Deng to repent his mistakes. The authors wisely observe: “Deng’s main task . . . was to guess what the Boss really wanted at any given moment” (p. 155). Their account of the pragmatic supreme leader and “architect” of reform is less satisfying. They capture the sense of Deng’s ultimate authority but without adequately explaining why. Moreover, the book advances its most indefensible narrative when it gets to the initial post-1976 period and Deng’s alleged struggle with Hua Guofeng. The authors’ account of Deng’s interactions with Hua and of Hua more generally comes close to the official denigration of Hua at the time of his re- moval from the leadership in 1981. Although noting some evolution in Hua’s position, the authors essentially paint him as a “weak man,” a “whateverist” who sought to maintain dogmatic Maoist ideology and resisted Deng’s return.

2. Andrew Nathan and Perry Link, eds., The Tiananmen Papers: The Chinese Leadership’s Decision to Use Force against Their Own People (New York: Public Affairs, 2001).

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They give him no credit for the rehabilitation of victims of the Cultural Revo- lution and characterize him as the leader responsible for the reckless new “leap forward” economic policies in 1977–1978. The authors downplay Hua’s role in the arrest of the “,” something never officially asserted even at the time of Hua’s removal from office. Deng, of course, receives excessive credit for the emergence of reform around the time of the 1978 Third Plenum. On all these points a quite different picture emerges from Western schol- arship, CCP history accounts, CCP officials’ memoirs, and even the official assessment of Hua’s life after his death in 2008 that affirmed him as the “de- cisive actor” in the arrest of the “gang,” the figure who initiated the process of “reversing verdicts” on Cultural Revolution victims, and much more. Despite the long-prevalent view of a neo-Maoist-reform struggle based on Hua versus Deng, deep research indicates no major differences on issues before the CCP leadership, finds Deng more excessive than Hua on the new economic leap forward, and demonstrates that Hua played a bigger role in the initiation of economic reforms in 1978–1979. Given the gross inadequacy of the book’s analysis of the neo-Maoist/ reformist struggle, what explains Hua’s demise, and what does it say about Deng? The key factor was the great disparity in historical status between Hua, a youngster who joined the CCP only in 1938, and Deng, one of the heroes of the revolution who stood at the apex of the system at the start of the Cul- tural Revolution. The situation was inherently unstable and had to be resolved given the regime’s need for stability. Which brings us back to the Pantsov- Levine picture of Deng as a master of manipulation and intrigues. These characteristics do not fit Deng in his Maoist phase, and only to a limited degree do they fit him in his post-1976 pragmatist phrase. Under Mao, Deng’s aim was to carry out his boss’s wishes; there is little to indicate intrigues against other leaders, even Jiang Qing. After 1976, Deng did at some uncertain point start to engage in intrigues in the form of under-the-table lob- bying of other senior leaders on the need to restore proper historical status in the party leadership. Intrigue, yes, but toward a result deeply embedded in party culture, accepted rather easily if with some reluctance by the broad elite, and not resisted by Hua. Once ensconced as the , Deng had no need for intrigue or manipulation. He got what he wanted once he set his mind on an objective. Having considerably less power than the Great Helms- man, he was also not as obsessed with determining a colleague’s true beliefs and loyalty, as Mao had been with Deng himself. In contrast to Mao cutting a swath through long-standing colleagues who simply could not comprehend his wishes in 1966, Deng acted against only after considerable resistance to his instructions on bourgeois liberalization, and in

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the context of an unfolding crisis. Two emperors who removed their succes- sors but very different personalities despite significant similarities, and very different contexts. The general reader, a major audience for this book, will come away with a largely insightful picture of Deng the man, which is the primary objective of biography, but will receive an often-distorted understanding of the circum- stances in which he operated—the essential requirement of history. Without both, an adequate account of Deng and his times is missing.

Commentary by Sergey Radchenko

Compared to Mao Zedong, whose revolutionary feats and villainies inspired generations of historians, Deng Xiaoping has not attracted as much atten- tion from biographers. To the extent that he has, he enjoys a good reputation not only in China but also in the West. Despite Deng’s transgressions as the “butcher of Beijing,” he has often been seen as the father of China’s economic success, the hands-on pragmatist who sought reform and opening of the stale Maoist regime and helped lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. This new, eminently readable biography by Alexander Pantsov and Steven Levine adds much-needed nuance to this uncritical picture: Deng’s portrait loses some of its more glorious colors, and we behold someone who is some- what cynical, somewhat kind, somewhat brave, somewhat cowardly, occasion- ally callous, but not wholly void of conscience, a hypocrite and a patriot, an ungrateful son and a loving grandfather. In short, we see someone who is nei- ther too good nor too evil: Deng the ordinary guy doing extraordinary things. One of the most useful and distinguishing features of this excellent biog- raphy is that it covers Deng’s entire lifetime. This allows the authors to reflect on persistent themes in Deng’s career, to trace the evolution of his views over decades, and to show how he changed or failed to change and what beliefs he renounced or maintained. Among the latter was Deng’s hardcore belief in the political monopoly of the Communist Party and in the centralization of power. “Centralized power flows from the top down,” he argued as early as 1926, when he was still a student in Soviet Russia. “It is absolutely necessary to obey the directives of the leadership” (p. 41). In 1989, Deng could have signed his name under every word: he later brooked no dissent, tolerate no opposition. “It is absolutely necessary to obey.” The price of disobedience was blood on the pavement. Pantsov and Levine write of Deng the Maoist, an uncommon depiction. Here was a man who for most of his life was not only loyally subservient

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to Chairman Mao (on occasion groveling in self-deprecation before the man who was responsible for the terrible suffering of Deng’s own children) but pur- sued Mao’s policies with exemplary zeal, whether in carrying out of his party comrades in the Communist base area in Jiangxi (p. 88), in overseeing an “orgy of executions” in post-liberation Sichuan (p. 145), in waging Mao’s brutal struggle against alleged rightist intellectuals (pp. 184–185); in enthusi- astically welcoming the disastrous (p. 195); or even in his spirited defense of Mao’s line in the Sino-Soviet split (p. 228). This is probably why Mao never completely cut ties with Deng, keeping him in privation but at least alive for the duration of the Cultural Revolution and agreeing, at last, to bring him back to power in 1973. In the authors’ view, Deng remained a Maoist even after Mao’s death, as evident, for instance in his clampdown on democratic sentiment in 1979, which he had helped unleash just months earlier (p. 356). Readers accustomed to the notion of “Deng as anti-Mao” will find the idea of “Deng as Mao” positively thought-provoking. Or Deng as Nikolai Bukharin? The name of this Bolshevik revolutionary purged and murdered by Iosif Stalin will not mean as much to Western read- ers as it did to the Russian readers of Pantsov’s earlier biography of Deng, on which this volume is based. Pantsov and Levine argue that Deng, in pursu- ing economic reform, consciously borrowed elements of Bukharin’s New Eco- nomic Policy, pioneered in the USSR in the 1920s. But whereas Bukharin’s ideas worked for China, the transmission belt seems not to have worked the other way: Pantsov and Levine show that China’s reform experience was not applicable to the Soviet Union. Mikhail Gorbachev could not follow Deng’s road because he had on his hands a much more complicated situation and did not have the benefits (cheap labor, hungry peasants, Huaqiao, and modest bu- reaucracy) that eased China’s way to prosperity. This seems like a reasonable argument, though in the end who really can tell from roads not taken what might have been? As always in a book this size and scope, I can find points on which I disagree with the authors, but, leaving those aside, I would like to devote my remaining space to source criticism or, as Deng liked to do in his time, to preemptive self-criticism, for I am every bit as guilty as Pantsov and Levine of having put too much trust in certain Chinese sources that, on close inspec- tion, turn out to be seriously problematic. Incidentally, I thought the much- anticipated Russian archives (advertised in the introduction) do not add as richly to the book as they do to Pantsov’s and Levine’s earlier acclaimed biog- raphy of Mao, nor are there as many interviews as one would hope for. This is in part inevitable because many of the primary source materials are still largely inaccessible, especially in China. Therefore, historians, including Pantsov and

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Levine, end up relying on memoirs or official chronologies (nianpu)andse- lected works (wenji and wenxuan). Is this a methodological problem? It could be, as E. H. Carr noted nearly 60 years ago.3 Who knows how the compilers of these chronologies and col- lections of speeches selected their sources and what they omitted or perhaps added in the process? What about the danger of being misled by self-serving memoirs, especially when it is difficult to check the veracity of their claims? An example from the book illustrates the problem: At one point (p. 170) Pantsov and Levine recount how, on 17 March 1956, Mao convened a large CCP Politburo meeting to hear Deng’s report on the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party (where sharply criticized Stalin). They go on to say that by that time the Chinese leaders were acquainted with Khrushchev’s secret report, “printed for them by staff members of the NewChinaNewsAgency...usingtheEnglishtranslationpublished in The New York Times onMarch10.”Fairenough...excepttherewasnothing of the kind published in The New York Times on 10 March 1956. (The text of the speech was not actually published there until early June.) The source for the above, Wu Lengxi, plainly gets it wrong.4 But if Wu, whose memoir is repeatedly cited, erred once so egregiously, is he really a reliable witness? I hasten to say that I have myself cited his book, so this is a question I put to myself as much as to Pantsov and Levine. Wu is just one of many witnesses, translators, doctors, children, and coworkers of Deng cited in the book, some credible, others less so. The chapter on the Tiananmen crackdown, for instance, relies heavily on The Tiananmen Papers (which may or may not be authentic) and on Zhao Ziyang’s memoir, Prisoner of the State. The sympathies are distributed accordingly. Of course, more or less every expert on Chinese history (this reviewer included) has to rely on such sources (though it is also remarkable how much further one can go these days in documenting post-1949 Chinese history—see, for example, the recent books by Shen Zhihua and Xia Yafeng, by Jeremy Fried- man, and by others). Still, as I read the book I kept thinking how little we still know about the inner workings of the Chinese leadership and how diffi- cult it must be to piece together a credible narrative from rumors, anecdotes, vague recollections, and the veritable official chronologies. Pantsov and Levine were remarkably successful in this endeavor. Their balanced, sober-minded assessment of Deng gives a lot of food for thought and contributes to our

3. In relation to Gustav Stresemann, see E. H. Carr, What Is History? (New York: Vintage, 1961). 4. Daniel Leese picks up on this point in his Mao’s Cult: Rhetoric and Ritual in China’s Cultural Revo- lution (New York: Cambridge University Press 2011), p. 30.

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understanding of one of the most important figures of China’s twentieth cen- tury and of his controversial legacies.

Reply by Alexander V. Pantsov

First, I thank Joseph Fewsmith, Frederick Teiwes, and Sergey Radchenko for the thought-provoking reviews and overall positive assessments of the book. I am impressed with their meticulous and critical analysis of the text. Because I undertook all the research and writing, all the errors they uncov- ered are mine and should not be attributed to my collaborator, Steven Levine, whose role was that of translating my Russian book in its entirety into English and cutting the manuscript to comply with the publisher’s requirements. In response to their comments, I have fixed the mistakes in the latest edition of the book that came out in April 2016 in Taiwan. At the same time, I want to make a few remarks. First, Fewsmith wonders “what the Russian sources tell us that the Chi- nese sources do not.” Radchenko also notes that “the much-anticipated Rus- sian archives (advertised in the introduction) do not add as richly to the book as to Pantsov’s earlier acclaimed biography of Mao” Zedong. The Russian archives on Deng are indeed extremely important even though they are not as rich as those on Mao. Although the materials do not cover every chapter in Deng’s life, they tell us much about him as a person. Not only do the archives shed light on his stay in Moscow in 1926–1927, they also provide us with unique information about his wives, uncle, friends, and bosses, including Mao, Zhou Enlai, Zhu Rui, , and . We can also find new information about Deng’s talks with Soviet officials in the 1960s that illuminates the nature of Deng’s negotiating style. This infor- mation helps to explain why Mao always credited Deng for his role in taking a stand against the Soviet Union during the split. The archival materials also show that Deng was not always loyal to Zhou, as he later claimed. Secret dis- patches of the Soviet spies who worked in the Soviet embassies in Beijing and Washington demonstrate that Deng was not a member of Zhou’s group and instead relied on his own military faction, which merely collaborated with Zhou against the Gang of Four. In addition, the Russian archives also provide us with many details about Feng Yuxiang’s visit to Moscow in 1926 as well as Iosif Stalin’s policy in China from the 1920s to the early 1950s. Bo Gu’s “Confession” (preserved in the Comintern files at the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History) helps us understand Bo’s struggle against Deng in the early 1930s, and the other archival materials show that Deng and Chen

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Yun followed Nikolai Bukharin’s rather than Vladimir Lenin’s ideas of New Economic Policy. Second, Teiwes says: “Despite the authors’ claim, Deng was not disobe- dient shortly before Mao’s death.” But in November 1975 Deng did display disobedience. On 20 November he openly declined Mao’s order to head a CCP Central Committee task force that was supposed to draft a resolution pronouncing the Cultural Revolution an overall success. Mao wanted the ra- tio of successes to failures set at 70:30, but Deng bluntly asserted that, as an exile, he could not say anything good about the Cultural Revolution. Before- hand he had accidentally angered Mao with his “cats” or something else, but this occurred because of his misunderstanding of Mao’s wishes, not disobedi- ence. The November 1975 incident was the first time Deng refused to follow a direct order of the Great Helmsman. Third, Teiwes believes that I have

a tendency to view unreliable sources as definitive; notably, the account of Mao’s doctor, Li Zhisui, and The Tiananmen Papers. Moreover, Pantsov and Levine ig- nore an important and extensively cited source—the account by Deng’s daughter Maomao on his meeting with the “vile” Kang Sheng upon returning to Beijing in 1973, a meeting at which she was present—when it does not fit their narra- tive. Having portrayed Kang as a leftist enemy of Deng and close supporter of Jiang Qing, the authors disregard Maomao’s report of this meeting that not only revives a pre-Cultural Revolution family friendship but also, even more signifi- cantly, notes that Kang fiercely denounced Jiang as a traitor. I would not be so conclusive. The Tiananmen Papers were published by two highly respected U.S. scholars, Perry Link and Andrew J. Nathan, whose professionalism is not in doubt. Why should I not trust their judgment? After all, both Nathan and Link became personae non gratae in China after the pub- lication of their book. By the same token, why should I not use Li’s memoirs? The fact that he was found dead in his son’s house in Carol Stream, Illinois, after his interview with U.S. television in January 1995 about his intention to publish the second book lends at least some credence to what he wrote. In much the same way, the poisoning of the former Russian state security officer Aleksandr Litvinenko suggests that his revelations about Vladimir Putin are more accurate than some observers had initially thought. No memoir on its own is totally accurate. Radchenko is correct about this.5 But we still must critically use memoirs if they are the only source of

5. I am extremely grateful to Radchenko for pointing out Leese’s remark on Wu Lengxi’s blunder. I had to check The New York Times myself.

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information and if we cannot find their flaws. Why should I trust Maomao more than I trust Li? Why should I find a place in my narrative for Maomao’s report of Deng’s meeting in 1973 with Kang Sheng if Maomao (or those who wrote her “memoirs”) actually does not add anything new to our understand- ing of Deng’s relations with Kang. As Teiwes himself notes, Maomao asserts that Kang “was . . . two-faced” and that “at death’s door, he used his last breath to puff up flames of discord?” This statement does not contradict my narrative at all. A few years ago in the Russian edition of my Mao book I mentioned that Kang had lost trust in Jiang Qing: “His [Mao’s] attacks against her [Jiang Qing] were so short-tempered that Kang Sheng took fright and shortly be- fore his death he severed all ties with Jiang and her confederates.” However, I deleted this phrase from the English edition and did not elaborate on it in my Deng book for the reasons explained. Fourth, Teiwes criticizes me for misinterpreting Hua Guofeng as a “weak man.” However, Mao himself asserted that Hua was not a strong leader and that this is why he chose him: “They say he has a low profile. That’s why I’m choosing the man with the low profile.” Teiwes then says that I do not affirm Hua as “the decisive actor” in the arrest of the Gang of Four. No, I do not. Hua did play a great role in the arrest, and I do not keep it secret, but I do not exaggerate it either. and Dongxing played the decisive roles. The initiative came from Ye, and it was Wang’s Unit 8341 that arrested the gang. Teiwes also contends that Hua was not a “whateverist.” However, at the end of October 1976 Hua told officials of the CCP Propaganda Depart- ment that “everything Chairman Mao said and [even] everything to which he merely nodded in assent, we will not subject to criticism.” Did his words shape the “” line? Yes, they did. Did he oppose Deng’s return to power? Yes, he did. Can we trust Ruan Ming’s account of the 1978 confer- ences of the party leadership? Why not? At the same time, did Hua play a big role in the initiation of economic reforms in 1978–1979? Yes, of course. Did I forget about it as Teiwes asserts? Not at all. I wrote that by the time Deng began talking about modernization, “serious changes had also occurred in Hua Guofeng’s worldview. ...Follow- ing Hua, other party leaders recognized the need for reform.” I emphasized the significance of his trips to Romania, Yugoslavia, and Iran, adding: “All the Politburo members, including Deng, began talking then about acceler- ated modernization.” I also acknowledged that Hua was the one who on 6 November 1978 convened a meeting of the CCP Politburo that decided to

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shift the center of gravity of all party work to modernization as of January 1979. Fifth, of course I agree with Teiwes that a chapter on the massacre and a section on the Deng 1992 southern tour could be longer. However, my task was to cover the entire life of Deng in a book of no more than 600 pages. Thus, I had to be frugal. Sixth, Teiwes mentions that I “made an apparently deliberate decision to avoid engaging with recent scholarship [and ‘deep research’] at variance with the book’s narrative.” In addition, he also finds some specific episodes to be insufficiently nuanced and even “fundamentally distort[ed].” I do not think that in a scholarly polemic the word “distorted” is appro- priate, but I leave the charge aside. I would be most grateful to Teiwes if he would clarify himself. What “deep research” did I ignore? What part of his- tory did I “fundamentally distort” and how? Why will my reader “come away ...withanoften-distortedunderstandingofthecircumstancesinwhichhe [Deng] operated”? Teiwes points to only one episode “encompassing several years, as in treating Mao’s entire Hundred Flowers policy in 1956–1957 as a plot from start to finish to lure ‘poisonous snakes’ from their hole.” Why should we treat this policy differently if we have recent materials that prove this assumption?6 So far I can acknowledge that I “deliberately” failed to “engage” with only one recent book; namely, the book by Teiwes himself on The End of the Maoist Era written in collaboration with Warren Sun. I did so for the same reasons Teiwes criticizes my book: the authors’ uncritical acceptance of unreliable sources as definitive and their frequent misinterpretation (or even distortion) of them. Maomao’s account of the Deng-Kang meeting is one example. Teiwes and Sun strangely assert that “the incident was seemingly indicative of the ex- traordinary trust Kang placed in his old comrade, and the depth of his hatred of Jiang and [Chunqiao].”7 This conclusion is misleading insofar as Deng had never been Kang’s “old comrade.” Maomao’s book contains noth- ing about “a pre-Cultural Revolution family friendship” between Deng and Kang. Moreover, Kang was known for his treacherous nature. The head of

6. See Deng’s explanations of the campaign’s objectives in the Cold War International History Project Bulletin, No. 10 (2001), p. 165; and revelations by Ekaterina Furtseva, then the Soviet Communist Party’s secretary for ideology, who is quoted in the memoirs of Stalin’s former interpreter Valentin Berezhkov. 7. Frederick Teiwes and Warren Sun, The End of the Maoist Era: Chinese Politics during the Twilight of the Cultural Revolution, 1972–1976 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2007), p. 74.

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provocateurs could not be an honest man. Presumably, he tried to provoke Deng (possibly on Mao’s request?). In addition, The End of the Maoist Era also contains so many references to anonymous “Chinese historians” that, with all due respect, I was reluctant to use it as extensively as I used other books by Teiwes. Finally, I again extend my deep appreciation to all the reviewers as well as the editors of the Journal of Cold War Studies for this very useful discussion.

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