Deng xiaoping biography book

Unlike Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping did not pretend to be a poet, a philosopher or a calligrapher. The Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping, in a mere three volumes, offer few hints about the person himself. Unlike his master, Deng was a leader of few words. Since he left almost no paper trail, there is a well-known list of personal anecdotes dutifully rehearsed by every biographer: he took to cheese and coffee during his student days in France; he thrilled the American public by donning a cowboy hat at a rodeo in Texas in ; he enjoyed spitting into an enamelled spittoon in front of horrified foreign guests, including Margaret Thatcher; he could be blunt, if not scatological, in conversation; he was entirely devoted to the Communist Party, which he served throughout his career; he was a crafty, obsessive bridge player and died in retirement with one title intact – namely, honorary president of the All-China Association of Bridge Players.

Alexander Pantsov, a Russian-born professor of history at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio, has worked assiduously to discover more about the diminutive, barrel-chested man. He has spent many years combing Russian archives, gaining access to the personal dossiers on Deng Xiaoping and other top members of the Chinese Communist Party. He has collaborated once again with Steven Levine, a respected historian of modern China, to distil this material into a new biography, a sequel to their earlier book, Mao: The Real Story. But the strength of this work, oddly enough, lies not in the new archival sources from Moscow, which add disappointingly little of substance to what was already known of Deng. Instead, it is their even-handed treatment of him in comparison with previous biographers, an advantage that becomes ever more evident as the book moves away from the early years of their subject’s life. Their main rival is Ezra Vogel, who wrote an account lavishing such fulsome praise on the man ‘who lifted hundreds of millio

book by Ezra F. Vogel

Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China is a biography about Deng Xiaoping written by Ezra F. Vogel and published by The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press.

Translations

In May the Chinese University Press of Hong Kong published the first Chinese translation, unabridged, with versions using both Traditional and Simplified characters. In January Sanlian Publishing House published a Simplified Chinese version for Mainland China. The Mainland version was adopted from the Hong Kong translation, but was subject several minor changes due to censorship; most of the changes were centered on negative descriptions or adjectives describing Chinese leaders.

Publication and reception

The initial reviews praised Vogel's book as detailed and well-grounded, generally favorable, but not without criticism. Jonathan Mirsky of The New York Times described the book as "wide-ranging" and wrote that the coverage of Deng's changes to the Chinese economy is the "most valuable part of" the book. John Knight, a PhD candidate stated that the book "provides much insight into" Deng and that "for those interested in learning more about China's present, Vogel's study is a delightful read." Reviewers also mentioned controversial points. John Pomfret wrote in The Washington Post that Vogel "clearly believes that Deng — known in the West mostly for engineering the slaughter of protesters in the streets near Tiananmen Square on June 4, — has been wronged by history. His tome is an attempt to redress the balance."

In the London Review of Books, Perry Anderson sharply criticized Vogel as "a booster" and the book as "an exercise in unabashed adulation" in which "anything in Deng’s career that might seriously mar the general encomium is sponged away", noting how "Vogel devotes just 30 pages, out of nearly , to the first 65 years of Deng’s life". He a

Though the book is framed around the rise of Deng Xiaoping and his reforms that transformed China into an economic powerhouse, Ezra Vogel’s compelling biography examines how China went from being a desperately poor country to certainly one of the two most important countries in the world today.

A Communist revolutionary and military commander under the brutal rule of Mao Zedong, Deng emerged as China’s capable leader in for fourteen years. For all of Deng’s success leading China out of poverty, he cannot escape the central role he played in violent attacks on landlords in , or intellectuals in or the tragic killings in Tiananmen Square under his own leadership in

Deng was a strong believer of socialism although he supported a market economy and created an export model of economic development. Subsequently China’s economy grew at over 10% per year for 20 years.

As part of our work at the Foundation we strive to improve 10 or 20 million lives in the areas of global health and global development. We have discovered new approaches and created new tools to get vaccines, AIDS drugs and contraceptives to the people who need them, and advanced agricultural innovation to transform farmers’ lives so that they can feed their families.

But, China’s reforms coupled with the tenacity and hard work of its people has improved hundreds of millions of people’s lives in less than a generation. That is more human lives climbing out of poverty post World War II than any other country.

Today, about 15 percent of people in the world - over 1 billion people - live in abject poverty. Fifty years ago, 40 percent of the global population was poor. The massive reduction in poverty is due in part to the “Green Revolution,” in the s and s where researchers produced seeds that helped farmers vastly improve their yields. And because of China. One country alone has lifted million people out of abject poverty.

China in was one of the poorest countries i