If (('gtm=off') const isAppRedirect = ('appRedirect') Ĭonst isAndroid = /Android/i.test(erAgent) Ĭonst isIphone = /iPhone|iPad|iPod/i. When he reached the top, Deng saw an opportunity to creatively destroy much of the economic system he had helped build for five decades as a loyal follower of Mao-and he did not hesitate. In the fifty years of his tumultuous rise to power, he endured accusations, purges, and even exile before becoming China's preeminent leader from 1978 to 1989 and again in 1992. Deng returned home in 1927 to join the Chinese Revolution on the ground floor. Yet at the same time he answered to his authoritarian roots, most notably when he ordered the crackdown in June 1989 at Tiananmen Square.ĭeng's youthful commitment to the Communist Party was cemented in Paris in the early 1920s, among a group of Chinese student-workers that also included Zhou Enlai. Obsessed with modernization and technology, Deng opened trade relations with the West, which lifted hundreds of millions of his countrymen out of poverty. An insightful and sublime book about the history of Hong Kong, as a gate to China that tracks its establishment as a Colony of the British Empire following the Opium Wars to the history of the negotiations and events that led up to the transfer of sovereignty from British hands back to the People's Republic of China. He confronted the damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution, dissolved Mao's cult of personality, and loosened the economic and social policies that had stunted China's growth.

Once described by Mao Zedong as a 'needle inside a ball of cotton,' Deng was the pragmatic yet disciplined driving force behind China's radical transformation in the late twentieth century.

The Gate to China by Michael Sheridan