A recent development in my life reminded me of Deng Xiaoping, preeminent leader who laid the groundwork of what China is today. I was totally immersed in the incredible epic during the two-week winter holiday. Now I'm finished until page 558 out of the total 745 -- still one quarter to go, but decided to have a "midterm review" before I go into the last chapters on the biggest showdown -- the Tiananmen Square massacre and Deng Xiaoping's step-down.
The author Ezra Vogel is a pundit on East Asia and professor emeritus at Harvard University, who is known in Japan for publishing the bestseller Japan as Number 1 in 1979. He was already 81 when he published the book after taking ten years of an unimaginably huge task of interviewing numerous insiders such as Deng's family, politicians and bureaucrats and examining a massive amount of materials in Chinese.
As a result, he recounts very detailed processes in which Deng performed his duties -- before publishing an important statement, for example, who wrote the first draft, and how many edits Deng made, which led to nine drafts before the final version. The meticulous clearance processes he tried to make with Mao Zedong; and how Mao grilled Deng, but kept him alive and on the back burner because Mao recognized Deng's rare talent and thought he could use Deng when necessary.
The author writes so well that I felt like I was working with Deng -- during the two-week Christmas and New Year holiday, which made me quite exhausted. This book is both extensive and intensive in the content. And in fact, I didn't know Deng Xiaoping was so hilarious. Every few minutes I did a belly laugh, became philosophical or was astonished. While the book is so well-written, I would not say it is a "page turner" because I had to stop every now and then to digest each part and compare it with my work or the current international politics.
It is also quite interesting that this book, even the Chinese translation, is available in China. Given the extraordinary access to the insiders quoted to tell what happened in secret meetings, I kind of imagine or am paranoid that there might have been a tradeoff between the author and the Chinese Communist Party about his receiving information and cooperating with their propaganda. Indeed, some parts, in particular about Hong Kong, sounded blatantly pro-China which brought me yet another belly laugh.
This long weekend I would put this book aside for a while to have a real holiday, finally, to store energy for the last chapters.
