Deng Xiaoping Quotes

It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice.

He took over, and he said: 'If I have to shoot 200,000 students to save China from another 100 years of disorder, so be it.'" - Recalling how former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping dealt with the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests

If there is one leader to whom most Chinese people express gratitude for improvements in their daily lives, it is Deng Xiaoping. Did any other leader in the twentieth century do more to improve the lives of so many? Did any other twentieth-century leader have such a large and lasting influence on world history?

We no longer know what socialism is, or how to get there, and yet it remains the goal.

Keep a cool head and maintain a low profile. Never take the lead - but aim to do something big.

When you open window both flies and air come in.

it doesn't matter if the cat is black or white as long as it catches the mouse

If you don't have something to say, keep your mouth shut . . . the purpose of meetings and talks is to solve problems.

In China, once collective farms were disbanded in 1978 under the leadership of the reformer Deng Xiaoping, agricultural output doubled in the space of just four years. A

Elon Musk (of Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity), Jeff Bezos (of Amazon), and Reed Hastings (of Netflix) are other great shapers from the business world. In philanthropy, Muhammad Yunus (of Grameen), Geoffrey Canada (of Harlem Children’s Zone), and Wendy Kopp (of Teach for America) come to mind; and in government, Winston Churchill, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Lee Kuan Yew, and Deng Xiaoping. Bill Gates has been a shaper in both business and philanthropy, as was Andrew Carnegie. Mike Bloomberg has been a shaper in business, philanthropy, and government. Einstein, Freud, Darwin, and Newton were giant shapers in the sciences. Christ, Muhammad, and the Buddha were religious shapers. They all had original visions and successfully built them out.

the economy “is like a bird. You can't hold it in your hand but have to let it fly. But it might fly away, and that is why you need a cage to control it.

understood Deng Xiaoping when he said: if 200,000 students have to be shot, shoot them, because the alternative is China in chaos for another 100 years…Deng understood, and he released it stage by stage. Without Deng, China would have imploded.36

Deng Xiaoping later told Hu Yaobang that when the article “Practice Is the Sole Criterion for Judging Truth” first came out, he did not notice it, but when the controversy became heated, he looked it up and read it. The article, he said, was a good one

China the Communist Party still pays lip service to traditional Marxist–Leninist ideals, but in practice it is guided by Deng Xiaoping’s famous maxims that ‘development is the only hard truth’ and that ‘it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice’. Which means, in plain language: do anything it takes to promote economic growth, even if Marx and Lenin wouldn’t have been happy with it. In Singapore, as befits that no-nonsense city state, they followed this line of thinking even further, and pegged ministerial salaries to the national GDP. When the Singaporean economy grows, ministers get a raise, as if that is what their job is all about

These were not just Mao's mistakes, they were all our mistakes. Many of us made mistakes; we lacked experience and had poor judgment.” He added, “We are very poor. We are very backward. We have to recognize that. We have a lot to do, a long way to go and a lot to learn.

In his pursuit of economic modernization, Deng liked to say that he was groping for stones as he crossed the river.

冷静观察、沉着应付、韬光养晦、有所作为

As Deng Xiaoping once said, “I don’t care if the cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.” The Stoics had their own reminder: “Don’t go expecting Plato’s Republic.

China as the present-day economic superpower is the legacy of Deng Xiaoping.

Even with Putin set to remain as prime minister, many wanted to believe that Putin planned eventually to cede political control to a new generation of leaders. With Medvedev at the helm, Putin could become Russia’s Deng Xiaoping, officially handing over the reins while wielding power from behind the scenes to ensure the fulfillment of his policies—as Deng did for another five years until his death in 1997. Many

Deng reaffirmed as well the correctness of the party's strategic goal of quadrupling the economy between 1980 and 2000 and making China a moderately developed country by the middle of the twenty-first century.

Two other issues are contributing to tension in Sino-American relations. China rejects the proposition that international order is fostered by the spread of liberal democracy and that the international community has an obligation to bring this about, and especially to achieve its perception of human rights by international action. The United States may be able to adjust the application of its views on human rights in relation to strategic priorities. But in light of its history and the convictions of its people, America can never abandon these principles altogether. On the Chinese side, the dominant elite view on this subject was expressed by Deng Xiaoping: Actually, national sovereignty is far more important than human rights, but the Group of Seven (or Eight) often infringe upon the sovereignty of poor, weak countries of the Third World. Their talk about human rights, freedom and democracy is designed only to safeguard the interests of the strong, rich countries, which take advantage of their strength to bully weak countries, and which pursue hegemony and practice power politics. No formal compromise is possible between these views; to keep the disagreement from spiraling into conflict is one of the principal obligations of the leaders of both sides.

What do you and the ASEAN countries want us to do?” Lee replied, “Stop the radio broadcasts.

In the same way, current Chinese growth has nothing to do with Chinese values or changes in Chinese culture; it results from a process of economic transformation unleashed by the reforms implemented by Deng Xiaoping and his allies, who, after Mao Zedong’s death, gradually abandoned socialist economic policies and institutions, first in agriculture and then in industry.

Deng explained to his hosts that he had come to Japan for three reasons: to exchange documents ratifying the Treaty of Peace and Friendship; to express China's appreciation to Japanese friends who in recent decades had dedicated themselves to improving Sino-Japanese relations; and like Xu Fu, to find a “secret magic drug.” Japanese listeners laughed, for they were familiar with the story of Xu Fu, who, 2,200 years earlier, on behalf of Emperor Qin, had been dispatched to Japan to find a drug that would bring eternal life. Deng went on to explain that what he really meant by the “magic drug” was the secret of how to modernize. He said he wanted to learn about modern technology and management.

Meanwhile, Mme Mao and her cohorts were renewing their efforts to prevent the country from working. In industry, their slogan was: "To stop production is revolution itself." In agriculture, in which they now began to meddle seriously: "We would rather have socialist weeds than capitalist crops." Acquiring foreign technology became "sniffing after foreigners' farts and calling them sweet." In education: "We want illiterate working people, not educated spiritual aristocrats." They called for schoolchildren to rebel against their teachers again; in January 1974, classroom windows, tables, and chairs in schools in Peking were smashed, as in 1966. Mme Mao claimed this was like "the revolutionary action of English workers destroying machines in the eighteenth century." All this demagoguery' had one purpose: to create trouble for Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiao-ping and generate chaos. It was only in persecuting people and in destruction that Mme Mao and the other luminaries of the Cultural Revolution had a chance to "shine." In construction they had no place. Zhou and Deng had been making tentative efforts to open the country up, so Mme Mao launched a fresh attack on foreign culture. In early 1974 there was a big media campaign denouncing the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni for a film he had made about China, although no one in China had seen the film, and few had even heard of it or of Antonioni. This xenophobia was extended to Beethoven after a visit by the Philadelphia Orchestra. In the two years since the fall of Lin Biao, my mood had changed from hope to despair and fury. The only source of comfort was that there was a fight going on at all, and that the lunacy was not reigning supreme, as it had in the earlier years of the Cultural Revolution. During this period, Mao was not giving his full backing to either side. He hated the efforts of Zhou and Deng to reverse the Cultural Revolution, but he knew that his wife and her acolytes could not make the country work. Mao let Zhou carry on with the administration of the country, but set his wife upon Zhou, particularly in a new campaign to 'criticize Confucius." The slogans ostensibly denounced Lin Biao, but were really aimed at Zhou, who, it was widely held, epitomized the virtues advocated by the ancient sage. Even though Zhou had been unwaveringly loyal, Mao still could not leave him alone. Not even now, when Zhou was fatally ill with advanced cancer of the bladder.

Mao asks Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, “How do you get a cat to bite a hot pepper?” Zhou says, “You hold him down, pry his jaws open, and shove the pepper into his mouth.” Mao says, “No, that’s force. We want the cat to bite the pepper of his own free will.” Deng says, “You take the pepper, wrap it in a delicious piece of fish, and, before he knows it, the cat has bitten the pepper.” Mao says, “No, that’s trickery. We want the cat to know he’s biting the pepper.” Zhou and Deng say, “We give up. How do you make a cat bite a hot pepper?” “It’s easy,” Mao says. “Stick the pepper up the cat’s ass. He’ll be glad to bite it.

One especially prominent time loop lashes together two of the city’s most celebrated high-rises -- the Park Hotel and the Jin Mao Tower -- binding the Puxi of Old Shanghai with the Pudong New Area. Each was the tallest Shanghai building of its age (judged by highest occupied floor), the Park Hotel for five decades, the Jin Mao Tower for just nine years. This discrepancy masks a deeper time-symmetry in the completion dates of the two buildings: the Park Hotel seven years prior to the closing of the city (with the Japanese occupation of the International Settlement in 1941), the Jin Mao Tower seven years after the city’s formal re-opening (as the culmination of Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour, in 1992).

Today Hindu revivalists, pious Muslims, Japanese nationalists and Chinese communists may declare their adherence to very different values and goals, but they have all come to believe that economic growth is the key to realising their disparate goals. Thus in 2014 the devout Hindu Narendra Modi was elected prime minister of India thanks largely to his success in boosting economic growth in his home state of Gujarat, and to the widely held view that only he could reinvigorate the sluggish national economy. Analogous views have kept the Islamist Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in power in Turkey since 2003. The name of his party – the Justice and Development Party – highlights its commitment to economic development, and the Erdoğan government has indeed managed to maintain impressive growth rates for more than a decade. Japan’s prime minister, the nationalist Shinzō Abe, came to office in 2012 pledging to jolt the Japanese economy out of two decades of stagnation. His aggressive and somewhat unusual measures to achieve this have been nicknamed Abenomics. Meanwhile in neighbouring China the Communist Party still pays lip service to traditional Marxist–Leninist ideals, but in practice is guided by Deng Xiaoping’s famous maxims that ‘development is the only hard truth’ and that ‘it doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice’. Which means, in plain language: do whatever it takes to promote economic growth, even if Marx and Lenin wouldn’t have been happy with it. In Singapore, as befits that no-nonsense city-state, they pursue this line of thinking even further, and peg ministerial salaries to the national GDP. When the Singaporean economy grows, government ministers get a raise, as if that is what their jobs are all about.2

Bush went off to a tour of “the caves” beneath the city that had been arranged for him by Deng Xiaoping. It was a memorable Christmas Day. “Dig tunnels deep,” Mao had ordered his people, “store grain everywhere.” Mao’s mission: to create a means by which his people might survive a nuclear assault from the Soviet Union. The result: a vast project to create enormous underground shelters across China. Bush was met at an intersection and taken to a clothing store, where his tour guide pressed a concealed button that operated a trapdoor. They climbed down into the tunnels. Bush walked from room to room. There was enough space, he thought, for thousands in this subterranean kingdom.

did not require the proposed sale of U.S. FX-15 fighter jets. At the end of their discussion, Reagan asked Lee Kuan Yew to carry the message to Taiwan President Chiang Ching-kuo that it would be difficult to supply all of Taiwan's requests and that President Chiang should not press for high-tech weapons at the moment, but that he, President Reagan, would not let Chiang down. A

This wider history notwithstanding, I believe India still constitutes a special case. Its distinctiveness is threefold. First, the tradition of the thinker-activist persisted far longer in India than elsewhere. While the men who founded the United States in the late eighteenth century had fascinating ideas about democracy and nationhood, thereafter American politicians have merely governed and ruled, or sometimes misgoverned and misruled.1 Their ideas, such as these are, have come from professional ideologues or intellectuals. On the other hand, from the first decades of the nineteenth century until the last decades of the twentieth century, the most influential political thinkers in India were, as often as not, its most influential political actors. Long before India was conceived of as a nation, in the extended run-up to Indian independence, and in the first few decades of freedom, the most interesting reflections on society and politics were offered by men (and women) who were in the thick of political action. Second, the relevance of individual thinkers too has lasted longer in India. For instance, Lenin’s ideas were influential for about seventy years, that is to say, from the time the Soviet state was founded to the time it disappeared. Mao’s heyday was even shorter—roughly three decades, from the victory of the Chinese Revolution in 1949 to the repudiation by Deng Xiaoping of his mentor’s ideas in the late 1970s. Turning to politicians in Western Europe, Churchill’s impassioned defence of the British Empire would find no takers after the 1950s. De Gaulle was famous for his invocation of the ‘grandeur de la France’, but those sentiments have now been (fortunately?) diluted and domesticated by the consolidation of the European Union. On the other hand, as this book will demonstrate, Indian thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries still speak in many ways to the concerns of the present. A third difference has to do with the greater diversity of thinkers within the Indian political tradition. Even Gandhi and Nehru never held the kind of canonical status within their country as Mao or Lenin did in theirs. At any given moment, there were as many Indians who were opposed to their ideas as were guided by them. Moreover, the range of issues debated and acted upon by politicians and social reformers appears to have been far greater in India than in other countries. This depth and diversity of thought was, as I argue below, in good part a product of the depth and diversity of the society itself.

Such indirection and ambivalence typify the politics of Wong's work. He's not in any conventional sense an ideological filmmaker. "It's never been my intention," he said at the Cannes press conference for 2046, "to make films with any political content whatsoever." A cautious man allergic to grand pronouncements, he doesn't make message movies, much less give political speeches or man the barricades. The rise of China has been the biggest story in the world for the last 20 years--no place has felt this more deeply than Hong Kong--yet Wong's work is notable for its apparent lack of interest in post-revolutionary China, either in its Maoist incarnation or today's hyper-capitalist model launched by Deng Xiaoping, whose death appears in a news report Lai watches in Happy Together. It's not that he doesn't thing about political issues, but he weaves his ideas (and they are intuitions more than ideological stances) into the intricate fabric of his work. This makes him ripe for interpretation, especially by critical admirers who, almost to a one, prefer to think of him as being some sort of social radical whose political ideas bubble beneath the surface of his work.

(Later in 1978, the Chinese premier Deng Xiaoping visited Pyongyang and, upon seeing the shining gold idol, expressed concern over how Beijing’s money was being spent. The gold covering was stripped and replaced by an equally shiny copper.) She

In the Deng Xiaoping era China had the highest growth rates in the world, but it now appears that much of the investment in the last quarter century was economically useless.

If you could even find Marx outside of university classrooms (where he was increasingly presented as a humanist philosopher instead of a revolutionary firebrand), it was on Wall Street, where cheeky traders put down Sun Tzu and heralded the long-dead German as a prophet of globalization. Capitalism had certainly yielded immense progress in countries such as China and India. In 1991, when Indian finance minister Manmohan Singh announced plans to liberalize India’s economy, he quoted Victor Hugo: “No power on Earth can stop an idea whose time has come.” Over the next twenty-five years, India’s GDP grew by almost 1,000 percent. An even more impressive process unfolded in China, where Deng Xiaoping upturned Mao-era policies to deliver what he called “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and what the rest of the world recognized as state-managed liberalization. China is now as radically unequal as Latin America, but over five hundred million Chinese have been lifted out of extreme poverty during the past thirty years.1

As early as November 1966, the Red Guard Corps of Beijing Normal University had set their sights on the Confucian ancestral home in Qufu County in Shandong Province. Invoking the language of the May Fourth movement, they proceeded to Qufu, where they established themselves as the Revolutionary Rebel Liaison State to Annihilate the Old Curiosity Shop of Confucius. Within the month they had totally destroyed the Temple of Confucius, the Kong Family Mansion, the Cemetery of Confucius (including the Master’s grave), and all the statues, steles, and relics in the area... In January 1967 another Red Guard unit editorialized in the People’s Daily: To struggle against Confucius, the feudal mummy, and thoroughly eradicate . . . reactionary Confucianism is one of our important tasks in the Great Cultural Revolution. And then, to make their point, they went on a nationwide rampage, destroying temples, statues, historical landmarks, texts, and anything at all to do with the ancient Sage... The Cultural Revolution came to an end with Mao’s death in 1976. In 1978 Deng Xiaoping (1904–97) became China’s paramount leader, setting China on a course of economic and political reform, and effectively bringing an end to the Maoist ideal of class conflict and perpetual revolution. Since 2000, the leadership in Beijing, eager to advance economic prosperity and promote social stability, has talked not of the need for class conflict but of the goal of achieving a “harmonious society,” citing approvingly the passage from the Analects, “harmony is something to be cherished” (1.12). The Confucius compound in Qufu has been renovated and is now the site of annual celebrations of Confucius’s birthday in late September. In recent years, colleges and universities throughout the country—Beijing University, Qufu Normal University, Renmin University, Shaanxi Normal University, and Shandong University, to name a few—have established Confucian study and research centers. And, in the opening ceremonies of the 2008 Olympics, the Beijing Olympic Committee welcomed guests from around the world to Beijing with salutations from the Analects, “Is it not a joy to have friends come from afar?” and “Within the fours seas all men are brothers,” not with sayings from Mao’s Little Red Book. Tellingly, when the Chinese government began funding centers to support the study of the Chinese language and culture in foreign schools and universities around the globe in 2004—a move interpreted as an ef f ort to expand China’s “soft power”—it chose to name these centers Confucius Institutes... The failure of Marxism-Leninism has created an ideological vacuum, prompting people to seek new ways of understanding society and new sources of spiritual inspiration. The endemic culture of greed and corruption—spawned by the economic reforms and the celebration of wealth accompanying them—has given rise to a search for a set of values that will address these social ills. And, crucially, rising nationalist sentiments have fueled a desire to fi nd meaning within the native tradition—and to of f set the malignant ef f ects of Western decadence and materialism. Confucius has thus played a variety of roles in China’s twentieth and twenty-first centuries. At times praised, at times vilified, he has been both good guy and bad guy. Yet whether good or bad, he has always been somewhere on the stage. These days Confucius appears to be gaining favor again, in official circles and among the people. But what the future holds for him and his teachings is difficult to predict. All we can say with any certainty is that Confucius will continue to matter.

The held fast to Deng Xiaoping's dictum: 'Hide your strength and bide your time'.

1989 played out a little differently in China, of course. When thousands of students converged upon Tiananmen Square in Beijing to demand a little democracy--Hey hey, hey ho, Maosim has got to go--they were greeted with a decidedly old school response. Deng Xiaoping, the chain-smoking gnome with the twinkling eyes who then ruled China, simply reached for his totalitarian rulebook, flipped toward the index--Democracy protesters, suitable response--and followed directions. He shot them. And that was that. Except, of course, it wasn't...

The fateful moment for the Chinese economy, crippled by central planning and collectivized production, was when Deng Xiaoping, China’s long-term leader after Mao’s death, announced that the country would pursue “Socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which is to say a market economy under an authoritarian technocracy. This was in 1977, as good a year as any for marking the birth of modern China. Deng and his associates undertook a job akin to that of a political bomb squad, laboriously dismantling most of the economic ideology installed by Mao without blowing up political continuity at the same time. That they succeeded is in many ways the single most important political fact of contemporary China.

I had come to expect that Chinese friends would make financial decisions that I found uncomfortably risky: launching businesses with their savings, moving across the country without the assurance of a job. One explanation, which Weber and Hsee call “the cushion hypothesis,” is that traditionally large Chinese family networks afford people confidence that they can turn to others for help if their risk-taking does not succeed. Another theory is more specific to the boom years. “The economic reforms undertaken by Deng Xiaoping were a gamble in themselves,” Ricardo Siu, a business professor at the University of Macau, told me. “So people got the idea that taking a risk is not just okay; it has utility.” For those who have come from poverty to the middle class, he added, “the thinking may be, If I lose half my money, well, I’ve lived through that. I won’t be poor again. And in several years I can earn it back. But if I win? I’m a millionaire!

When he visited developing countries, he made a point to say they reminded him of China three decades ago. “Can other developing countries achieve a performance similar to that achieved by China over the past three decades?” he asked in a speech he called “The China Miracle Demystified.” “The answer is clearly yes.” He advised poor countries that if they want to get richer, they needed to delay political reform or fall victim to the chaos of post–Soviet Russia. He argued for the virtues of being free not from repression but “from the fear of poverty and hunger, of which I hold vivid childhood memories.” When he wrote in his own name, not on behalf of the Bank, he was even more strident: he dismissed the “optimistic, and perhaps naïve, argument put forward by some scholars that democracies … are more likely to undertake economic reforms.” He quoted Deng Xiaoping, who once said, “The United States brags about its political system, but the president says one thing during the election, something else when he takes office, something else at midterm, and something else when he leaves.

China, despite many imperfections in its economic and political system, has been the most rapidly growing nation of the past three decades. Chinese poverty until Mao Zedong’s death had nothing to do with Chinese culture; it was due to the disastrous way Mao organized the economy and conducted politics. In the 1950s, he promoted the Great Leap Forward, a drastic industrialization policy that led to mass starvation and famine. In the 1960s, he propagated the Cultural Revolution, which led to the mass persecution of intellectuals and educated people—anyone whose party loyalty might be doubted. This again led to terror and a huge waste of the society’s talent and resources. In the same way, current Chinese growth has nothing to do with Chinese values or changes in Chinese culture; it results from a process of economic transformation unleashed by the reforms implemented by Deng Xiaoping and his allies, who, after Mao Zedong’s death, gradually abandoned socialist economic policies and institutions, first in agriculture and then in industry. Just

The three main takeaways you should learn –   1. You should be able to identify Classical and Romantic Play in other people, and their natural motivations. It has immense predictive power.   2. You should be able to identify what situations you are playing Romantically, and what situations you are playing Classically. You should always know which is which.   3. If you’re playing Romantically, you absolutely must learn when to stop and shift gears to Classical. Contrast George Washington, Otto von Bismarck, Mustafa Kemal, Deng Xiaoping, and Tokugawa Ieyasu with Hideyoshi Toyotomi, Napoleon Bonaparte, Adolf Hitler, Alexander of Macedon, etc. Choosing “Romantic Play indefinitely” has, historically, a very predictable outcome.   Please study this thoroughly. This concept is incredibly useful, and potentially life-changing.

When China decollectivized under Deng Xiaoping’s household responsibility reforms in 1978, the peasant family sprang back to life and became one of the chief engines of the economic miracle that subsequently unfolded in the People’s Republic.25

When nations break out of institutional patterns condemning them to poverty and manage to embark on a path to economic growth, this is not because their ignorant leaders suddenly have become better informed or less self-interested or because they’ve received advice from better economists. China, for example, is one of the countries that made the switch from economic policies that caused poverty and the starvation of millions to those encouraging economic growth. But, as we will discuss in greater detail later, this did not happen because the Chinese Communist Party finally understood that the collective ownership of agricultural land and industry created terrible economic incentives. Instead, Deng Xiaoping and his allies, who were no less self-interested than their rivals but who had different interests and political objectives, defeated their powerful opponents in the Communist Party and masterminded a political revolution of sorts, radically changing the leadership and direction of the party. Their economic reforms, which created market incentives in agriculture and then subsequently in industry, followed from this political revolution. It was politics that determined the switch from communism and toward market incentives in China, not better advice or a better understanding of how the economy worked. W

people is much more on the economic rather than the militant. There is a deep irony with regard to the protest of November 1998, however humble that was compared with its predecessor. The people who took to the streets in 1998 to voice their discontent were precisely those whom Deng Xiaoping had exhorted to drive the economy forward, precisely those whom China’s late paramount leader had told in his revolutionary statement of the 1980s that “to get rich is glorious.” These were the very inheritors of his vision for a commercially viable and prosperous China. That they were on the streets, protesting their financial losses,

Finally, under Mao Zedong the project of destroying the old core of Chinese identity was carried to a grim conclusion with a violent and totalistic resolve. But, like a forest fire that clears the way for new growth, it may have ironically also helped prepare the way to usher in a spectacular new kind of economic growth under his successor, Deng Xiaoping.

Instead, Deng Xiaoping and his allies, who were no less self-interested than their rivals but who had different interests and political objectives, defeated their powerful opponents in the Communist Party and masterminded a political revolution of sorts, radically changing the leadership and direction of the party.

The Chinese worker-students who had gone to France during the war had been as unlucky as Vietnamese and Indian soldiers. Still, they returned to China radicalized by their harsh exposure to Europe. Deng Xiaoping later recalled the ‘sufferings of life and the humiliations brought upon [us] by… the running dogs of capitalists.’ Upon arrival in France, I learned from those students studying on a work-study program who had come to France earlier than two years after World War I, labour was no longer as badly needed as in the war time… and it was hard to find jobs. Since wages were low, it was impossible to support study through work. Our later experiences proved that one could hardly live on the wages, let alone go to school for study. Thus, all those dreams of ‘saving the country by industrial development,’ ‘learning some skills,’ etc., came to nothing.

The best way to beat the enemy is probably to go to their homeland. As our former leader Deng Xiaoping put it, we'll cross the river by touching the stones.”49

Morgan had described customary property owned by tightly bonded kin groups; real-world Communist regimes in the former USSR and China forced millions of unrelated peasants into collective farms. By breaking the link between individual effort and reward, collectivization undermined incentives to work, leading to mass famines in Russia and China, and severely reducing agricultural productivity. In the former USSR, the 4 percent of land that remained privately owned accounted for almost one-quarter of total agricultural output. In China, once collective farms were disbanded in 1978 under the leadership of the reformer Deng Xiaoping, agricultural output doubled in the space of just four years.

Pengembangan tenaga-tenaga produktif adalah juga sejenis revolusi jenis yang sangat penting. Pengembangan tenaga-tenaga produktif adalah revolusi paling fundamental dipandang dari sudut perkembangan historis.

For Bao Tong, these passages were evidence that Zhao Ziyang had been a marked man before 1989. “This had nothing to do with the students,” Bao told me. He believes that Deng used the students as a tool to oust his designated successor. “He had to find a reason. The more the students pushed, the more of a reason Deng Xiaoping had. If the students all went home, then Deng Xiaoping wouldn’t have had a reason.” According to Bao’s theory, the gradual escalation of tensions between the Communist leadership and the students may not have been due to mishandling by a divided party, but part of a deliberate strategy.

Does it even matter? Soon the party’s institutions were ignored and Deng’s elderly supporters were brought into play to stack the decision-making process. What happened during those seven weeks was that the old patriarch Deng Xiaoping engineered a coup, during which he circumnavigated the institutions of state in order to oust the party leader he himself had chosen. But the major difference would be in terms of legacy. Bao Tong believes history has been too kind, remembering Deng as the architect of Chinese reform; he believes Deng’s role in June 4th points to a more complicated truth. “What’s really important is that Chinese people need to know that he was a dictator.

so many scientists from Los Alamos [science and technology labs] have returned to Chinese universities and research institutes that people have dubbed them the “Los Alamos club”’.73 Although the Thousand Talents Plan was only established in 2008, the systematic transfer of technology from the West has been under way for much longer. When China began to open up under Deng Xiaoping in the late 1970s and early 1980s, a program was developed to send technically talented young Chinese to the West. Many of the brightest students were sent to Germany and the United States to obtain PhDs in physics; some stayed on and achieved senior positions at top universities, from where they could send information to China.

Deng Xiaoping went on with his efforts to normalize life in China and implement the Four Modernizations Program. Entrance examinations for universities and colleges were reinstituted.

It was Zhang Zhidong who suggested this guiding ideology during the reforms of the late Qing. 'Chinese learning at the base' meant preserving the political system of the late Qing, and 'Western learning for application' meant introducing and utilizing Western experience to strengthen the political system, consolidate rule, and prolong the life of the declining Qing dynasty. In Den Xiaoping's era, 'Chinese learning as the base' preserved the road, theory, and political system left behind by Mao, and 'Western learning for application' was aimed at developing the economy and thereby bolstering and prolonging the political system that Mao left behind. However, since the political system of the Mao era was mainly imported from the Soviet Union, it would be more accurate to say 'Soviet learning as the base.' Economic reforms drew China into a new era, but the reforms were led by the bureaucratic clique that was the ultimate victor in the Cultural Revolution. They controlled all the country's resources and the direction of reform, and in objective terms decided who would pay the cost of reforms and how the benefits of reform would be distributed.

That’s the same basic thing that reformed the People’s Republic of China. The mere existence of successful parallel systems in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and especially Singapore is what drove Deng Xiaoping to adopt capitalism. Ezra Vogel’s book is excellent on this.

Deng Xiaoping’s decision to shift Chinese economic policy away from orthodox Marxism, starting in 1978, and the US decision to recognize the People’s Republic of China (and derecognize the Republic of China on Taiwan) in 1979 were critical turning points.

With investment levels so high and already being misallocated on a massive scale, the central government might have preferred higher consumption. But China’s myriad institutional constraints, which we will discuss in more detail later in the chapter, meant that consumption could not have grown quickly enough except through a surge in household borrowing. Unsurprisingly, given what the Chinese leadership had just seen occur in the United States, there was no interest in a similar experience. That is why the government chose to focus on boosting investment. The most straightforward response to the global financial crisis was a massive boost in infrastructure and housing investment to offset the decline in foreign spending. This simultaneously magnified China’s long-standing imbalances while shifting them inward. China was able to sustain growth even as its current account surplus fell at the cost of a nearly unprecedented surge in Chinese indebtedness. Unproductive investments have failed to pay for themselves.2 The danger is that the Chinese government, having reached the limits of its ability to generate rapid growth through debt-funded investment, will once again attempt to shift the costs of its economic model to the rest of the world through trade surpluses and financial outflows. The only way to prevent this is to rebalance the Chinese economy so that household consumption is prioritized over investment. That means reversing all of the existing mechanisms transferring purchasing power from Chinese workers and retirees to companies and the government—reforms at least as dramatic and politically difficult as the reforms implemented by Deng Xiaoping beginning in 1978. Unfortunately for China, the choices of the past few decades have become politically entrenched. It is easy for an antidemocratic authoritarian regime to suppress workers’ rights and shift spending power from consumers to large companies. Stalin did it, after all. The problem is that years of state-sponsored income concentration creates a potent group of “vested interests”—Premier Li Keqiang’s preferred term—that will fiercely resist any reforms that would shift spending power back to consumers. Any successful adjustment

does not refer to political rivalries

毛時代教給他們的東西，認為西方工人受著剝削，鄧對他們解釋說，其實不是那麼回事：日本工人掙的錢能夠買房子、買車、買那些中國還根本沒有的家電。鄧小平在日本不僅看到了他過去只是讀到過的東西，他還要學習日本人是如何組織工人、

在醫院裏對越南最高計劃官員黎德壽（Lê Thanh Nghi）說，中國已經無力為越南的重建提供大量援助。中國被文革搞得元氣大傷，自己的經濟也捉襟見肘。周恩來說：「你們越南人得讓我們喘口氣，恢復一下元氣。」但是就在同一個月，中國其他官員歡迎了柬埔寨

在鄧失勢後，「四人幫」採取了更強硬的立場，要求越南譴責蘇聯的「霸權」。[9-17]中國激進派的這種要求對黎筍來說太過分了，他拒絕簽署聯合公報，未舉行常規的答謝宴會就離開了北京。[9-18]

文件只是籠統地談到了毛的錯誤，但鄧小平說，15年之後將有可能對毛澤東再作一次評價。他這樣說的意思似乎很清楚，黨如果在1980年過於嚴厲地批評毛澤東，有可能造成分歧，削弱人民的支持；若干年以後，黨能夠與現在的情緒和人事問題拉開距離，也許有可能對毛澤東進行更加具體和坦率的評判。[

鄧小平在遼寧時說，中國的領導人，包括他本人在內，必須承認我們辜負了十分有耐心的中國人民。

誰也不清楚哪一種民主適合中國，要對這個問題進行認真思考。他讓胡耀邦組織一個二十到三十個人的班子，搞清楚相關問題，然後準備一篇論述民主實踐的兩到三萬字的文章，在五四運動60周年時發表。鄧小平說，文章要表明社會主義民主將超越資產階級民主。[8-29]

回答毛澤東在文革中給國家造成的災禍時，鄧小平說：「這不是毛主席一個人的錯，而是我們大家的錯，我們很多人都犯過錯誤；我們缺少經驗，缺少判斷力。」他又說：「我們很窮，也很落後。必須承認這一點。我們有很多事情要做，有很長的路要走，要學習很多東西。」[10-

小平和胡喬木都深知毛澤東對理論問題的敏感，因此挑選的都是受到毛器重的人，研究的題目也很合毛的心意，如「三個世界」理論、蘇聯的性質、資本主義危機、批判修正主義和帝國主義等等。鄧小平從一開始就用了不少時間和精力尋找那些毛澤東可以接受的理論觀點，以便自己能有更大的自由去實施他認為有利於黨和國家的政策。

As times change and social mechanisms evolve, it seems to me, different survival instincts come into play. In social terms the Cultural Revolution was a simple era whereas today's society is complex and chaotic. One of Mao Zedong's remarks sums up a basic characteristic of the Cultural Revolution. 'We should support whatever the enemy opposes,' he said. 'and oppose whatever the enemy supports.' The Cultural Revolution was an era when everything was painted in black and white, when the eney was always wrong and we were always right; nobody had the courage to suggest that the enemy might sometimes be right and we might be sometimes be wrong. Deng Xiaoping, in turn, said something that captures the zeitgeist of our current age: 'A cat that catches the mouse is a good cat, no matter whether it is black or white.' In so saying, he overturned Mao's system of values and pointed out a fact long evident in Chinese society: right and wrong often coexist in a single phenomenon and interact in a dynamic of mutual displacement. At the same time, his comment put an end to the argument about where socialism and capitalism belong in China's economic development. So China moved from Mao Zedong's monochrome era of politics-in-command to Deng Xiaoping's polychrome era of economics above all.

As times change and social mechanisms evolve, it seems to me, different survival instincts come into play. In social terms the Cultural Revolution was a simple era whereas today's society is complex and chaotic. One of Mao Zedong's remarks sums up a basic characteristic of the Cultural Revolution. 'We should support whatever the enemy opposes,' he said. 'and oppose whatever the enemy supports.' The Cultural Revolution was an era when everything was painted in black and white, when the enemy was always wrong and we were always right; nobody had the courage to suggest that the enemy might sometimes be right and we might be sometimes be wrong. Deng Xiaoping, in turn, said something that captures the zeitgeist of our current age: 'A cat that catches the mouse is a good cat, no matter whether it is black or white.' In so saying, he overturned Mao's system of values and pointed out a fact long evident in Chinese society: right and wrong often coexist in a single phenomenon and interact in a dynamic of mutual displacement. At the same time, his comment put an end to the argument about where socialism and capitalism belong in China's economic development. So China moved from Mao Zedong's monochrome era of politics-in-command to Deng Xiaoping's polychrome era of economics above all.

中越之間的嫌隙越來越深。當1966年周恩來和鄧小平會見胡志明時，他們對越南人的抱怨有深切感受：胡志明說，中國軍隊的傲慢表現就像歷史上經常入侵越南的中國軍隊一樣。鄧小平回答說，駐紮在那裏的10萬中國軍隊只是為了防範西方可能的入侵，

東及其少數幾個追隨者為何能把全國人民帶入大躍進這樣的災難？他指出，1957年對知識分子的打擊讓他們變得噤若寒蟬，因此無法阻止毛澤東犯下可怕的錯誤。人民大學的哲學教授張顯揚走得更遠，他將「四人幫」稱為「法西斯專政」。

論，反映著高層幹部是多麼重視毛澤東的名譽問題，因為毛在歷史上的地位，決定著他們自己的政治前程和他們親屬及同事的待遇。

特向鄧小平讀了他連夜親筆寫好的紙條，解釋他為何建議中國不要這樣做的原因。卡特說：「中國挑起的武裝衝突，將使美國對中國的普遍政策以及

和平解決臺灣問題的未來產生嚴重關切。」[11-74]鄧小平解釋了他為何要堅持自己的決定，但是他向卡特保證，即使中國軍隊發動進攻，也會在10天到20天後撤出。鄧小平又進一步堅持說，中國攻打越南的好處將是長期的。如果中國這一次

他對卡特說，北京只有在兩種情況下才會對臺灣動武：一是臺灣長期拒絕與北京談判，二是蘇聯涉足臺灣。[11-77]

但是，與毛和周相比，鄧關注與中國有關的重大問題時更有系統性，也更加坦白直率。在會見外賓前，鄧小平不接受口頭的情況簡介；他會閱讀下屬準備的有關來訪者及其來訪目的和應討論議題的文件。像過去毛和周的情況一樣，通常會有一名外交官先行會見外賓，由他把來訪者的意圖告知鄧小平，鄧小平再接見他們。

國在1972年尼克遜訪華後改善了中美關係，隨後減少了對越援助，越南人把這視為中國人背叛越南抗美戰爭的一個標誌。[9-13]

來，並答應在未來五年為他們提供十億美元的援助。[9-14]那時蘇聯正在與越南加緊合作，

專家方毅說，毛澤東就是（中國）歷史上最大的暴君。早在1967年2月就敢批評文革的譚震林說，毛澤東的做法違背了他自己的教導。但是當黃克誠——他自己的上級彭德懷挨整時，他也受過嚴厲批判——在一次重要會議上為

的兩次大災難——大躍進和文革，是由於制度造成的，這種制度允許一人統治，容不下不同的聲音。因此中國需要建立法

小平感到意外的是，李光耀告訴他，東南亞各國更害怕中國而不是越南。李光耀然後描述了

和東盟各國想讓我們做些什麼？」李光耀答道：「停止電台廣播。」鄧小平說，他需要時間考慮一下。這讓李光耀很

簽署了支持蘇聯外交立場的協定。[9-19]越南與蘇聯的這些協議把越中關係推向絕境，促使中國加強了與柬埔寨的關係。[

內的老幹部們確實開始批評說，務虛會上的觀點很危險，理論家們近乎在批評毛澤東時代發生的一切事情。一些在毛時代擔任要職的老幹部擔心，對毛澤東日益高漲的批評有可能使自己也受到牽連。有些人開始懷疑，胡耀邦等人在務虛會上是不是在搞反毛反黨的「修正主義」。

Within a year, food production was inadequate to support the communes as agricultural workers focused on producing steel rather than farming. It is estimated that twenty to thirty million people starved to death, although detailed statistics were not kept. Sadly, reports later found that more than twenty million tons of grain were being held by the government to be exported abroad at the height of the famine. Deng Xiaoping was at the heart of the disaster. Frank Dikötter, in his book Mao’s Great Famine, blames Deng specifically for ordering the extraction of grain from starving peasants despite the domestic need.

December

In the early 1980s the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping coined the term ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’, which appears to translate as ‘Total control for the Communist Party in a Capitalist Economy’.

your hand but have to let it fly. But it might fly away, and that is why you need a cage to control it.

De ce fait, Deng Xiaoping n’avait pas les mêmes priorités que Margaret Thatcher ou Ronald Reagan ; mais il y avait entre eux une convergence certaine, puisqu’ils avaient tous les trois pour objectif ultime de bâtir une économie plus dynamique, plus rationnelle, plus productive et plus compétitive. C’est évidemment à partir de Washington et de Londres que la primauté de l’économie de marché s’est imposée à travers le monde. Mais il ne faudrait pas sous-estimer en la matière le rôle emblématique qu’a joué la réussite fulgurante de la Chine.

According to the standard accounts in many books, China’s growth was achieved by “groping stones to cross the river,” a proverb that Deng Xiaoping cited often to foreign visitors.23 The proverb connotes that China lacked an overarching strategic plan, and that it instead just experimented before luckily stumbling upon one that worked.

[There is a] gulf that can exist between different emotional and perceptual worlds—all 'Chinese'—in recent times [post-Deng Xiaoping].

Ever willing to use the dead to suppress the living, these tough old fighters now operated under the banner of Zhou Enlai’s memory to pressure the Central Party leadership into diverting the attacks on Deng Xiaoping that Mao had personally inaugurated.

鄧小平本人的支持使中方團隊的成員不必再擔心將來可能受到向外國人洩密的指控。為了增強雙方的信任，避免被中方猜忌有不可告人的動機，世行人員在中國期間沒有舉行任何未邀請中方參加的會議。中方團隊及其在北京的上級深知他們被委以打開國門的重任，他們熱切地希望弄清中國需要面對的獨特問題。世行團隊也清楚他們在中國對外開放中扮演的歷史性角色，同時意識到這是個瞭解中國的特殊機會，因此也努力與中方建立良好的長期合作關係。這個考察計劃是世行到那時為止承擔過的最大的針對單個國家的研究項目。世行當時還沒有像後來那樣變成一個龐大的官僚機構，因而給予它的下屬團隊相當大的自主權去適應當地需要。麥克納馬拉訪華後不久，會講漢語的菲律賓華人林重庚被任命為世界銀行中國項目的首席經濟學家。他是哈佛經濟學博士，有在東南亞和非洲為世行工作的經歷；他也是1980年世行團隊在中國的實際領導者；1985年世行在中國設立駐京辦事處後，他出任該辦事處的首任駐華首席代表，並一直任職到1990年。他把中國和世行在1980年代的特殊關係描述為「天造地設」。[1