Mao: The Unknown Story

His fellow Chinese in France remembered Deng, who was just over 5 feet tall, as a plump ball of energy, full of jokes. Since then, decades of life in the Party had caused him to metamorphose into a man of deep reserve and few words. One advantage of this reticence was that he kept meetings brief. The first session of the committee in charge of southwest China after the Communist takeover lasted a mere nine minutes, in contrast with those under the long-winded Chou En-lai, who once talked for nine hours. Deng was decisive, with the ability to cut straight through complicated matters, which he sometimes did while playing bridge, for which he developed a passion.

Deng had joined the Communists in France, but his grounding was in Russia, where he spent a year after being kicked out of France, and where he received Party training. When the Long March started in 1934, he was already chief secretary of the Party leadership, and he was a top army commander during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45. In the civil war after 1945 he became chief of the half of the Communist army which won the decisive Huai — Hai Campaign that clinched the Red victory and then took much of China south of the Yangtze. Afterwards, he was in charge of several provinces, including his native Sichuan, before Mao promoted him to the core leadership in Peking in the early 1950s.

He was deeply loyal to Mao, and during the suppression of intellectuals in the anti-Rightist campaign in 1957–58 he was Mao’s chief lieutenant. But he had a breaking-point, and supported Liu Shao-chi’s efforts to stop the famine in the early 1960s. He tried to keep at arm’s length from Mao — a fact that Mao took note of, remarking that Deng was “keeping a respectful distance from me as though I were a devil or a deity.”

When Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966, he tried all kinds of inducements to keep Deng on board, but failed. Deng was branded “the second-biggest capitalist-roader,” after Liu, and put under house arrest in 1967, and his children and stepmother were evicted from their home. He was subjected to denunciation meetings, though with much less physical abuse than Liu. Mao calibrated the punishment of his foes meticulously. He did not hate Deng the way he hated Liu, so he ordered that Deng “must be denounced … but differentiate him from Liu.” Unlike Liu, Deng was not separated from his wife, which gave him the companionship that often made the difference between life and death.

But even Mao’s “better” treatment was hell. In May 1968, Deng’s eldest son and a daughter were taken, blindfolded, to Peking University, and told to “expose” their father. Over sixty other people who had been imprisoned there had committed suicide or been tortured to death. Deng’s 24-year-old son, Pu-fang, soon threw himself out of an upstairs window, and was permanently paralyzed from the chest down. Deng and his wife were not told about this until a year later, when they were briefly allowed to see their other children shortly before being exiled from Peking in October 1969. In exile, Deng worked on the factory floor in a tractor plant in Jiangxi province, living under house arrest, with armed guards.

Mrs. Deng wept for days when she heard about Pu-fang. She later told Deng’s stepmother that she almost lost the will to live. Deng was forbidden to see his paralyzed son, and was deeply affected by what happened to his children. Once, after his youngest son, who had turned up starving and in rags, had to leave for his own place of exile, Deng collapsed on the factory floor. In June 1971, when the paralyzed Pu-fang arrived, Deng was visibly shaken. His son had been a buoyant young man. Deng nursed Pu-fang devotedly, helping him to turn every two hours to prevent bedsores, which was no light work (Pu-fang was big), and wiping his body several times a day, as the climate in Jiangxi was hot and humid.

The Cultural Revolution years, Deng was to say later, were the most painful time of his life. The pressure crept into his sleep. One night he woke up the whole building, screaming during a nightmare. But those years also helped him rethink the system the CCP had imposed on China. As a result, he turned his back on the essence of Maoism and Stalinism, and after Mao died he changed the course of China. In exile, Deng kept his mouth shut, tried to stay healthy, and waited for a chance to return to the political center.

AFTER TWO YEARS, in September 1971, came a ray of hope. Deng’s son Pu-fang was an electronic whiz, and had fixed up a radio that could receive short-wave broadcasts. This he did with his parents’ acquiescence, even though listening to foreign radio stations was a prison offense (and, moreover, one his father had helped enforce). It was from these foreign broadcasts that the Dengs first surmised that Lin Biao was dead.