Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra F. Vogel
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Continuity as Illusion


I question whether even the Chinese understand China. Perhaps because if they did the result might be mass suicide.

Much better, like the Catholic Church, to re-shape the meaning of words to the needs of the day while keeping the form constant. A sort of rationality can thus be maintained within the most irrational of situations. Then again, perhaps that is exactly what they’re up to: ‘The corrupt pope I’d dead, let us make him a saint.’

Deng's practical repudiation of the Maoism that almost killed him while maintaining the forms of Maoist 'thought' is the theme of this breath-taking political biography. Among other reasons for reading it is that none of the Chinese literature of the last 30 years is comprehensible without it.

Could it be that the Communist Party of China, indeed the entire Chinese political system, is merely an enormous irony enacted for the edification of unknowledgeable foreigners who believe that there must really be some underlying logic to Chinese society? Its purpose then would be to keep us busy (or entertained) by expressions that mean precisely the opposite of their literal translations. Either that or they really are mad.

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