Deng Xiaoping And The Transformation Of China [Paperback]

Winner, Lionel Gelber Prize, Lionel Gelber Foundation in partnership withForeign Policyand the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy, University of Toronto
Finalist, National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography
Honorable Mention, Bernard Schwartz Book Award, Asia Society
Honorable Mention, PROSE Award in European & World History, Association of American Publishers
AnEconomistBest Book of the Year
AFinancial TimesBest Book of the Year
AWall Street JournalBook of the Year
AWashington PostBest Book of the Year
ANew York TimesBook Review Editors Choice
ABloomberg NewsFavorite Book of the Year
AnEsquire ChinaBook of the Year
AGates NotesTop Read of the Year

Perhaps no one in the twentieth century had a greater long-term impact on world history than Deng Xiaoping. And no scholar of contemporary East Asian history and culture is better qualified than Ezra Vogel to disentangle the many contradictions embodied in the life and legacy of Chinas boldest strategist.

Once described by Mao Zedong as a needle inside a ball of cotton, Deng was the pragmatic yet disciplined driving force behind Chinas radical transformation in the late twentieth century. He confronted the damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution, dissolved Maos cult of personality, and loosened the economic and social policies that had stunted Chinas growth. Obsessed with modernization and technology, Deng opened trade relations with the West, which lifted hundreds of millions of his countrymen out of poverty. Yet at the same time he answered to his authoritarian roots, most notably when he ordered the crackdown in June 1989 at Tiananmen Square.

Dengs youthful commitment to the Communist Party was cemented in Paris in the early 1920s, among a group of Chinese student-workers that also included Zhouló,