Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (7 page)

Deng proved a talented student, and his father soon spotted a unique opportunity to make the best of his son’s skills. A group of prominent Chinese who strongly believed that China could become strong by mastering Western knowledge and technology set up a work-study program in France. Deng—at age fifteen, the youngest in his group of eighty-four students—set sail for Marseille in 1920. Badly mismanaged by its organizers, the program turned out to offer somewhat less than it advertised. The Chinese students, who were parceled out to factories as cheap labor with little chance to study French, quickly discovered they were essentially on their own. But Deng soon demonstrated his own knack for getting by. Moving from one factory to another, he managed to earn just enough to eat. His experience as an unskilled laborer exposed him to some of the worst ills of the modern industrial work environment and undoubtedly contributed to his deepening sympathy for the Communist cause.

France introduced Deng to three of his lifelong enthusiasms: soccer, croissants, and Communism. The Chinese Communist Party was established in China in 1921. Just two years later, Deng participated in one of the first meetings of its European branch in France. His interest in Marx probably had as much to do with his friends as his political interests. One who took an interest in him was Zhou Enlai, an older Chinese student who had come to France on a different program and would become one of his most important political patrons in the years to come. With Zhou’s patronage, Deng became the editor of
Red Light
, the Communist Party newspaper in France, and quickly demonstrated his abilities as a political operator and organizer. But then, in January 1926, Deng’s involvement in a Communist demonstration brought him to the attention of the French authorities. He managed to leave the country one day before the police showed up to arrest him. By the time they arrived at his apartment he was on his way to Moscow.

There he attended Sun Yat-sen University. The university, named after China’s most revered revolutionary, had been set up by the Soviets to train future Chinese leaders. Starting in the early 1920s, Moscow had pushed the Chinese Communists into a close collaboration with Sun’s Nationalist Party (KMT), based on the two groups’ common aim of defeating warlordism and reunifying China under a single
government. In 1923 the Soviets even ordered a merger of the two parties in which the Nationalists remained the senior partner. The Kremlin’s policy reflected Stalin’s skepticism about the viability of the Chinese Communist movement, which remained small.

Deng spent a year in Russia, learning the fundamentals of revolutionary politics, before he finally received an assignment to assist Communist Party organizers back home. In 1927 he returned to China, where, after some misadventures, he made his way to party headquarters in Shanghai.

He arrived at a critical moment. This marriage of convenience between the Communists and the Nationalists had held for the better part of a decade. But then, in 1925, Sun Yat-sen died. The man who emerged from the resulting succession struggle was General Chiang Kai-shek, commander in chief of the KMT army (and the father of one of Deng’s Moscow classmates). Chiang’s main rival was a leading member of the left wing of the KMT, and in 1927, as soon as Chiang had the chance, he struck out against his perceived enemies, who included the Communists. In Shanghai, where their headquarters was located, he unleashed a bloody purge that came to be known as the “White Terror.” This effectively marked the beginning of twenty-three years of civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists. It was a conflict that would profoundly shape Deng’s outlook, reinforcing his devotion to the Communist cause even as it gave him a wealth of practical political and military leadership experience. Along the way, it would also link his fate closely to Mao’s.

Deng managed to escape the Shanghai bloodletting and join the Communist peasant armies then being organized in the countryside—some of them under a shrewd party functionary named Mao Zedong. In 1929 the party sent Deng to the western province of Guangxi to represent the Communists in an alliance with some local warlords. Deng spent a year there until KMT troops succeeded in crushing the movement. The pro-Communist army was destroyed, and Deng left his troops and made his way back to Shanghai, where the Communists were gradually rebuilding their organization. His party superiors were not happy with his decision to leave his troops, and for a while he remained under a cloud. But at least he had had an experience of hands-on military command.
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His troubles did not end there, though. During his studies in Moscow, he had met a young woman and married her. Now, shortly after his return to Shanghai, she died in the hospital during childbirth; their infant daughter died as well. The Hobbesian world of the Chinese civil war left little time for private grief, and Deng was not particularly sentimental to begin with. No sooner was this personal tragedy
over than the party center was sending him on his next assignment. It took him to the Jiangxi Soviet, the Communist haven in the Southeast where Mao and his peasant army had succeeded in creating a mountain stronghold that was holding out against the Nationalists. Deng was deeply impressed when he saw what Mao had achieved. Deng, after all, knew from his own disheartening experience just how hard it was to set up a viable base area.
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This was just the beginning of a long professional relationship between the two men.

The history of the Chinese Communist Party during the civil war is a tale of intrigue and intricate factional maneuverings. Different groups within the party vied for supremacy, and there was a period in the early 1930s when being associated with Mao was not necessarily a plus. Party headquarters accused Mao of exceeding his authority, and Deng—now characterized as a leader of the “Mao faction” in the party—was accused of “defeatism” and purged. He was harshly criticized and stripped of his post; he may have been imprisoned for a while. Not long before, he had married for a second time. But now, as the party leadership ratcheted up the pressure, his second wife publicly renounced him, demanded a divorce, and then quickly married another man. Deng, who had previously enjoyed a reputation as a talkative extrovert, withdrew into himself. For the rest of his life, he would be known as someone who was careful with his words.
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As good Communists learn early, however, history waits for no man. In 1934 Nationalist pressure finally forced Mao to abandon his Jiangxi stronghold, and the Communist forces resolved to set off for another base on the other side of the country. It was this trek that would later become known as the “Long March.” It took them more than six thousand miles, wandering over much of western China on their way to a Communist refuge in the far northwestern part of the country. The journey took them through some of China’s most formidable terrain: mountains, swamps, and deserts. Nationalist troops harried them along the way. Illness and hunger took an additional toll. The Communists began their trek with eighty-six thousand troops and ended it a year later with ten thousand. In objective terms, it doesn’t seem like much of a victory, but the fact that anyone had survived at all counted as an achievement. The party’s mythmakers stylized the march into an epochal triumph.

It certainly marked an important watershed. It was in the course of the Long March that Mao succeeded in besting his opponents within the party and became its undisputed leader—a development that boosted the career of Deng, now regarded as one of Mao’s most loyal deputies. During the march, Deng had the job of overseeing the party’s propaganda effort, though the difficulties of the trip gave
him scant opportunity to show off his talents. A few months into the journey, he contracted typhoid and nearly died.

But he did make it to the end, and in 1937 he was ready when the Japanese invasion of China gave him his next chance to make a mark. The armies of Imperial Japan had begun their push into Chinese territory six years earlier, taking advantage of the power vacuum resulting from the seemingly endless fighting among Communists, Nationalists, and warlords to assert control over the resource-rich northeastern region of Manchuria. In 1937 Japanese forces seized upon a pretext to advance far into the Chinese interior. By the end of the year, they had occupied Shanghai and the capital of Nanjing.

Once again, albeit begrudgingly, the CCP and the Nationalists joined forces to combat the common foe. As part of a new effort to expel the invaders, Deng was dispatched to an important job in the Eighth Route Army, a Communist force based in the interior province of Shaanxi. Deng became the political commissar of the most powerful unit in the army, the 129th Division, commanded by his fellow Sichuanese Liu Bocheng, a talented strategist with a gift for command. Liu, who had lost an eye during an earlier campaign, had ample combat experience from the warlord era and had also studied in the Soviet Union.

The two turned out to be a highly effective team. For the rest of the war, they showed themselves to be one of the most effective Communist units in the field. Deng’s hands-on knowledge of the business of war would prove enormously beneficial decades down the road, when his close relationships with top generals would stand him in good stead. But running the 129th Division also provided valuable lessons in civilian administration. For eight years, Deng and Liu controlled a large swath of territory centered on Taihang Mountain in eastern Shaanxi, and they bore responsibility for making sure that the local population, whose support was crucial to the continued existence of the base, was able to maintain a reasonable standard of living. Deng followed the usual Communist practice of killing or imprisoning the landlords and dividing up the land among the peasants. Yet unlike some other leaders, he eschewed radical Marxist doctrine in favor of giving farmers incentives to produce. “People should be taxed according to the average production of recent years and any amount exceeding that average should entirely belong to the producer,” Deng declared.
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Deng did find time, in 1939, to head back to Mao’s headquarters in far-off Yanan to marry a young university-educated activist named Zhuo Lin. (Like Deng, she came from a relatively well-to-do family; her father was a prosperous pork
merchant.) This time the marriage stuck. The two remained together for fifty-eight years and had five children. They were married in front of Mao’s cave in Yanan—as visible an example of solid Chinese Communist pedigree as you could get.

As the war with Japan drew to a close in the 1940s, Mao’s old feud with Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT came back out into the open. Deng was now the highest Communist Party official in a key northeastern region of the country, and the forces he and Liu commanded played a crucial role in the decisive phase of the civil war, the Huai Hai Campaign of 1948–1949. The Central Plains Army of Deng and Liu formed the core of an overall Communist force that numbered half a million men opposing a larger and much better-equipped Nationalist army. By the end of the campaign, Deng had risen to become the political commissar for the army. He earned a reputation as a ruthless, hard-charging leader. He wanted results, and he was not overly worried about the casualty rate needed to achieve them. The climactic battles of the Huai Hai Campaign, which caused hundreds of thousands of Nationalist casualties, effectively finished Chiang’s armies as a fighting force. KMT resistance collapsed; Chiang fled to Taiwan. From then on, it was a rout.

In 1949 Mao’s forces moved into Beijing, which the Communists declared to be the capital of the new People’s Republic of China. Deng’s impressive military record over the years positioned him for a swift rise now that Communist power was firmly established on the mainland. He assumed responsibility for governing the southwestern region of the country, including the especially unruly Guangdong Province, which had been a heartland of Nationalist support during the civil war. He rose to the occasion, and in 1955 he joined the Politburo Standing Committee and assumed the rank of general secretary of the party’s Central Committee. In 1956 he gave one of the two main reports at that year’s important party congress; the other was delivered by chairman-in-waiting Liu Shaoqi, the man who would soon become one of his main political allies.

As the party’s leading expert on foreign relations, Deng traveled to Moscow in 1956 for what would be one of the great turning points in twentieth-century history. This was when Khrushchev gave his “Secret Speech” to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In the speech—officially titled “On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences”—Khrushchev presented a startling indictment of Stalin and his rule, including details of the Great Terror (though dwelling specifically only on its victims among the Bolsheviks) and Lenin’s suspicions about the man who became his successor. The Chinese delegation was not allowed to attend the actual speech but, like other foreign Communist Parties present for the Congress, received a copy of it the next day. The speech was a terrible shock for
party stalwarts, both Soviet and foreign. For devoted Communists, Stalin had been something akin to a demigod, the leader whose own infallibility was ensured by the perfection of Marxist doctrine. To see him dethroned in this way by the current Soviet leader was traumatic. Some of those who got wind of the speech committed suicide, and the Polish party chief died of a heart attack shortly after being apprised of the speech’s contents.

Deng’s reaction seems to have been entirely clearheaded: he immediately understood its profound systemic implications—and the implicit challenge it posed to Mao, an unrepentant Stalinist. His report to Beijing was correspondingly critical, and in the years to come Khrushchev’s de-Stalinizing policies would become a major factor in the deepening split between the USSR and Communist China. The Chinese accused Khrushchev and his Kremlin of debilitating “revisionism” and aspiring to seize the mantle of leadership in the Communist world. Just as importantly, perhaps, Deng would retain for the rest of his life a vivid image of the destabilizing effect that questioning the legacy of a longtime party leader could have—a point that informed his thinking when it came time to address Communist China’s approach to reform at the end of the 1970s.