How the New Left won the battle of ideas for 21st-century China

We are all used to Western assessments of Deng Xiaoping. You may even be convinced by them, as I was for a long time.

Ezra Vogel, for example, wrote in Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China: “It was [Deng] who would finally realise the mission that others had tried for almost two centuries to achieve, of finding a path that would make China rich and powerful.”

And, according to Orville Schell and John Delury in Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-first Century, “Once in power, he did not hesitate to foment a new kind of frenzy – for making money. By the mid-1980s, he had named his counterrevolution gaige kaifang, ‘reform and opening-up’.

“Deng’s strange hybrid reform combined Vladimir Lenin’s recipe for a disciplined and well-organized state and Milton Friedman’s celebration of free market economics.”

The last sentence is especially absurd. Mao Zedong was a great party disciplinarian in the mould of China’s first emperor Qin Shi Huang and his totalitarian school of Legalism. Mao and Deng hardly needed lessons from Lenin.

Once the Gang of Four was eliminated, Deng took over a highly disciplined party. He also inherited much else on the economic and social fronts from Mao, without which gaige kaifang would not have succeeded. That was the story Western neoliberals tried to bury but which China’s New Left, now more like the middle-aged Left, has successfully recovered.