THE LAST EMPEROR : How Deng Xiaping Assumed ‘The Mandate of Heaven’ to Fashion a New China After Ming, Marx and Mao

DENG XIAOPING WAS 65 WHEN MAO TSE-TUNG BANished him from Beijing and sent him and his family to distant Nanchang, in the southeast part of China. The energetic and ruthless commander had long been a favorite lieutenant of Mao, both in war and in peace. He stood less than five feet high, shorter than Napoleon, and in early Communist Party photographs, he looked like a schoolboy. Yet he had coordinated some of the biggest battles ever fought in China, battles that changed the course of China’s history and the lives of hundreds of millions. In a country increasingly obsessed with the correctness of political rhetoric, he had focused on getting results, regardless of the party line. Mao had counted on him to lead the bloody struggles to move economic power from the hands of feudal landlords into the hands of peasants, and later to save the country Mao had bankrupted with Communism. Year by year his responsibilities and reputation had grown.

Still, his career had been marked by reversals--he was knocked down so often and bounced back so strongly that he came to be called an India rubber ball by many Chinese. This time, however, the rebound would be slow and painful. It was 1966, the height of the Cultural Revolution, and Deng was denounced as a “capitalist roader.” But he would emerge as the new emperor, newly steeped in the wisdom of ancient China and leading the country with the blend of pragmatism and brutality that had marked his military and economic campaigns and would be clear to the world 20 years later at Tian An Men Square.

IN BEIJING, THE DENGS LIVED AT ZHONGNANHAI, THE HIDDEN fairyland of lakes and parks and palaces inside the Gate of New China off Tian An Men Square, where emperors and empresses had once taken their leisure. In Nanchang, they were quartered in a square, two-story bamboo house with a balcony overlooking a large courtyard surrounded by a new wooden fence and protected by a complement of guards who lived in the rear.

Deng, who had, by 1956, been reckoned the fourth man in the party, after Mao, Liu Shao-chi and Chou En-lai, was not allowed to leave the Nanchang compound except on Saturday night, when he went to the public baths. He chopped the wood for the stoves in the new quarters. He mopped the floors and swept the halls, and when spring came he, his wife and stepmother planted a good-sized garden on the grounds.

For Deng himself it was a mild punishment; not all of his family fared so well. His oldest son, Deng Pufang, 25, a brilliant senior physics student at Beijing University, had been taken prisoner by a savage Red Guard detachment in an effort to make him “confess” to the “treason” of his father. Pufang had been confined to a small closet (some of these closets had been painted red with the blood of the victims), and beaten again and again. Then--although he would later have no memory of how or why--he had “fallen” from a fourth-floor window.

Pufang did not die of his injuries; neither did he receive medical treatment. He was taken to the Beijing University Hospital, where he got custodial care, and was sent to a primitive “welfare” center, confined to a damp, dark room with 10 other crippled patients, unable to move.

Deng and his wife did not immediately know what had happened to their son. They were classic victims of the Cultural Revolution--kept under house arrest, cut off from contact with the world, hauled out to mass shouting sessions, beaten, reviled, spat upon, carted around the streets with great wooden placards around their necks. When they did learn of their son’s plight they bombarded the authorities with requests for medical help for him. The answer was no. Not until 1971 did the Dengs receive permission to have Pufang come to Nanchang.

The Dengs slept in the upstairs bedroom next to the balcony, and Deng used the room below as a study. He had brought books with him--Marx and Lenin, Chinese histories and classics, among them “The General Mirror for the Aid of Government” (“Cu Chi Tang Qian”), which covered 1,300 years of history and had been compiled in the 11th Century. A dynastic work of great distinction, studied and annotated by emperors, statesmen and scholars for centuries, it was designed as a practical handbook for the emperor, its 294 chapters telling how his predecessors had handled difficult questions. It was the same book Mao read in the Fragrant Hills as he prepared to leave for Beijing and assume the leadership of China.

Deng had had little time for such studies before Nanchang. His life had been action-oriented. One big job after another--leading the Red Army against Chiang Kai-shek, marshaling huge public-works programs, modernizing the Chinese economy. This was his first opportunity to reflect on China and its problems. He tried to understand the events of the past few years and what the future could be. Every day in late afternoon, after he had hoed the garden and done his chores, he would walk the perimeter of the courtyard, around and around, next to the fence, until he wore a deep path in the red soil.

From a window, his daughter Maomao saw her father: “Watching his sure but fast-moving step, I thought to myself that his faith, his ideas and determination must have become clearer and firmer, readying him for the battles that lay ahead.”

The Cultural Revolution would come to an end, Deng knew. What to do once the turmoil was over? How to harness the infinite capabilities of China--and what would he do should he once again take his place at the helm?

On Nov. 8, 1971, the guards appeared early in the morning and escorted Deng and his wife into town to a party meeting, the first they had been permitted to attend since autumn, 1966. That day or the next, Deng wrote a formal letter to Mao Tse-tung, presenting himself as ready in spirit and in strength to undertake any task Mao might set for him.

There is more than one informed Chinese who is certain that Mao told Deng that it was necessary to strike him down once again but also gave him an assurance that his day would come, just as it had in the past. Later, “Deng would be brought back.” If this was Mao’s intention, he made Deng pay a heavy price--the banishment, the crippling of his son.

Deng waited. Finally, word came down from Chou En-lai, who, knowing he was ill with cancer, had persuaded Mao to bring Deng back. If Deng would write a self-criticism to Mao--it needn’t be long or detailed--and ask for a chance to go back to work, a job would be waiting for him. On Aug. 3, 1972, Deng wrote what was required. He admitted that he had made mistakes but swore he was a true follower of Mao’s line.

In February, 1973, word came from the Central Committee that the Dengs were to return to Beijing. On March 10, Mao and Chou formally proposed to restore him to the inner circle as vice premier of the State Council. With no more ado, Deng rolled up his sleeves.

A visitor dropped in to see Deng in early 1973. He found him perusing “The General Mirror for the Aid of Government.” Like Mao had before him, Deng paid particular heed to the manner in which power shifted from one emperor to the next, how the Mandate of Heaven, a Chinese version of divine right, passed from the old ruler to the new. The “Mirror” makes clear that the Mandate of Heaven can be transferred in many ways--by a drop of poison, a dagger thrust or, in modern times, a bullet at the base of the skull. It can be lost by conquest of the realm, by plot, or by the slow decay of a dynasty, as in the case of the Manchus.

Mao Tse-tung had won the mandate in classic fashion as leader of a peasant revolt. Deng would rely on the “Mirror” to guide him toward claiming the mandate for himself.

But the “Mirror,” whose admonitions for swift and decisive action had served him so well through most of his career, would offer little guidance at the end, when the New China he had helped create began to question the myths of centuries--including the role of the emperor.

DENG WAS BORN IN A CORNER OF SICHUAN THAT WAS like a picture postcard of Old China. The doors of the houses were protected against evil spirits by red-and-gold-painted fairy-tale champions, wielding swords and clad in armor. It was a land of legend, of lazy warlords and slow streams, remote from the fierce winds of challenge springing up in China at the turn of the century.

Deng was a happy child. No one remembered him sulking, no one remembered him rebelling against anything. He was a sunshine boy, bright, happy-go-lucky, smart at his lessons. All Chinese children have a string of names. Deng’s reflected him in the mirror of his father’s eyes. His formal name was Xiansheng, which means to be a saint . His birth name was Xiaian, which means hoping to be a saint. His nickname was Xianwa, good boy . A saint he was not, but everyone remembered him as a good boy.

The earliest recollection some townsfolk had of Deng was that of him turning somersaults. At the age of 7 or 8 he would somersault for a quarter-mile, from the courtyard of the Deng house down a worn footpath. Then he would turn around and somersault back home, his small body going end over end, sometimes vanishing in the deep ruts.

Deng’s father, Deng Wenming, was captain of the town militia, a literate man well liked by the townsfolk, dedicated to education, culture and the betterment of China. He was a religious man, a Buddhist, and Deng Xiaoping, like Mao, was raised as a Buddhist.

His contemporaries remember Deng as brilliant and mischievous. His elderly uncle, Dan Yixing, a brother of Deng’s mother, called him “a very wise child.” Sitting in 1988 beside three broody hens on the steps of his home, Dan declared that as a child Deng Xiaoping could read a book three times and recite it from memory. Yes indeed, Dan said, Deng was a very good boy.

Deng was born into a family that had some inherited wealth and, more important, cherished a tradition of scholarship, public service and leadership. The Dengs had been responsible citizens for generations and had once held Mandarin status. One of Deng’s ancestors had won the rank of Hanlin scholar in the imperial examinations, which meant close relations with the imperial court and even the emperor.

Like his brothers, Deng was tutored at home. He went to Guang’an High School No. 2 as a boarding student in 1915, and late in 1916 took a small wooden boat to Chongqing, where he studied in a tutorial that prepared young Chinese for a work-study program in France. He enrolled in the program in 1920.

He didn’t get to study much. He was employed at the Creusot Iron and Steel works and the Renault auto plant and as a locomotive fireman, though he was hardly as tall as his shovel. He lived on a glass of milk and a croissant a day. He met Chou En-lai, lived in Chou’s flat for a while, and became a Communist in 1925. In 1926 he went to Moscow, returning to China at the end of that year.

DENG EMBARKED ON HIS MILITARY CAREER IN 1929, when he was sent into the sweltering back country of Guangxi Province, west of Canton, on a mission of desperation. There had been a peasant revolt in Guangxi, the Two Rivers Uprising, and the Shanghai underground ordered Deng and half a dozen other young Communists into the hinterland to find and organize the peasants against Chiang Kai-shek. The idea was to capture the southern metropolis of Canton and other big cities.

It was a wild notion, but the Shanghai Communists were desperate. Two years before, Chiang had split from the Communist-Nationalist coalition and turned on the Communists. He had almost wiped out their movement.

Deng and his companions slipped aboard a ship in Shanghai and cruised down the south China coast, making their way to Longzhou, on the Chinese-French Indochinese border. They pushed deep into the mountains, where there were no roads, only narrow footpaths. Wheelbarrows were the only wheeled transport. The peasants of the Two Rivers region had little in the way of weapons--mostly spears and pitchforks--and Deng had only sparse grounding in military tactics and strategy. For the most part he had to rely on his native wit.

To Deng, life was a coin to be spent for political ends--it was a philosophy he would abide by to his last days. In its first application, he encouraged the peasants to kill the landlords, who had kept them in poverty, and share their land and possessions. Doing so gave poor men and women a direct stake in the revolution. Once they had killed a landlord, they knew their own lives would be in peril. The killing of landlords by the peasants and the seizure of land and property were to become the hallmarks of the rural revolution that brought Mao to power.

Deng organized the peasants into units and did his best to teach them tactics, leading them out to capture “big cities.” But the ratio of troops against him was always three or four to one. He lost almost every battle he fought.

Still, Shanghai kept pressing him to fight big battles for big cities. And Shanghai was just repeating Moscow’s instructions. Josef Stalin and Leon Trotsky were battling, and Stalin was eager to prove that Trotsky was wrong when he claimed that Stalin had “lost” the China revolution. He needed results that would make the headlines.

It was a no-win situation for Deng, and before long he was yanked back to Shanghai and threatened with court-martial and loss of party membership, relieved of his military-political responsibilities, and subjected to a party inquiry. It was the first of the political reverses Deng would suffer. But he escaped with little more than a reprimand, and Shanghai sent him back to Two Rivers; no one else would take the rickety command.

What happened next is not entirely clear, but it is known that Deng Xiaoping went directly from dead-end Guangxi into the embattled camp of Mao Tse-tung at Ruijin, capital of the Central Soviet Zone of Jiangxi, which Mao controlled. Deng was an articulate and able supporter of Mao’s doctrine that the revolutionary war could be won only by guerrilla tactics, the organization of the peasants, and the use of small military resources to defeat Chiang’s exposed units. Soon he was made party secretary for Ruijin, an important post for a newcomer.

After another reversal, in which he was denounced by an anti-Mao faction, divorced by his wife and driven from his post, Deng started the Long March in October, 1934. He was an outcast in the ranks. But when Mao took over, after the march’s Russian-trained leaders had led them into defeats that killed two-thirds of their original 80,000, Deng Xiaoping got a job. At the Zunyi conference of January, 1935, when leadership was voted to Mao, Deng was present, sitting in a corner and taking notes for the army paper, Red Star, of which he had just become editor.

Deng’s wagon henceforth would be hitched to Mao’s star.

Mao made him a commander again. Years later, during an argument with Nikita S. Khrushchev, Mao would point to Deng and warn the Soviet leader: “Don’t underestimate that little fellow. He destroyed an army of 1 million of Chiang’s best troops. He has a bright future ahead of him.”

As 1949 opened, that “little fellow” and his Central Plains Army were completing the feat to which Mao referred, the destruction of 25 Nationalist corps, 5 armies and 56 divisions in 66 days. Between Sept. 12, 1948 and Jan. 11, 1949, the Communists destroyed 1.5 million Nationalist troops--12 armies and 149 divisions.

Mao took control of China.

IN 1958, MAO MOVED TO LAUNCH CHINA ON THE “GREAT Leap Forward.” With the stroke of his ink brush he placed China’s vast rural population into a commune, a bare-bones regime in which the peasants were forced to give up private property, even their shovels and hoes. They were housed in barracks, and their huts were torn down to provide the materials to build the new dormitories.

They worked in military formation, dressed in blue tunics and blue trousers, men and women indistinguishable at 100 feet, resembling battalions of blue ants. They shared a common poverty. They ate in a common mess from a common rice bowl. They owned their chopsticks--not much more.

Hardly had Mao started the communes when he imposed upon them a special task. They would devote themselves to industry as well as agriculture. They would provide the infrastructure for the Great Leap Forward under which, in 15 years, China would match England in steel production. The communes were directed to set up small smelting pots whose production, Mao fondly believed, would quickly surpass that of the few industrial steel plants China already possessed.

By the autumn of 1958, 90 million Chinese peasants had abandoned farm work for labor at ramshackle smelters set up in each commune. Into the smelting pots went every piece of iron or steel they could lay hands on--tools, soup pots, wagon hubs, water buckets, hinges, barbed wire, locks, even small tractors. The country looked as though it had been picked clean by iron-eating ants.

Fearful of not meeting quotas, communes reported remarkable figures to Mao proclaiming the mountainous production of homemade steel. The nation was as dazzled by the prospect of instant transition from feudalism to advanced Socialism as the Dutch had been by the tulip craze. Not a word of skepticism escaped the lips of Chou En-lai, Liu Shao-chi or Deng Xiaoping. They were as bamboozled by Mao’s sleight of hand as the sleepiest peasant from northern Shaanxi--or so it seemed.

The peasants were so busy turning out “steel” they had no time to harvest food. In late autumn, 1958, they were eating seed grain. Famine was widespread. The first estimate of the great Chinese journalist Liu Binyan was that 20 million died in the aftermath of the Leap.Gradually, as he collected reports, he raised this estimate to 30 million. Mao was unapologetic.

By 1959, Mao had turned over the day-to-day operations of government to Deng. While he knew that Chou En-lai and Liu Shao-chi were lukewarm to the communes and the Leap, he still considered Deng his ally. And Deng had proven himself to be a take-charge executive.

Seven years earlier, Deng had presided at the opening of the Chongqing-Chengdu rail line, which he would later count as his first major achievement in the long struggle to bring China out of its medieval morass. The construction, through incredibly steep mountains and river gorges, was the region’s first and only link to the rest of China. It took less than two years and set an example of achievement and efficiency for the country.

Deng had managed the project as Mao’s proconsul for all of southwest China, a region of extreme importance as Mao’s fears of American attack rose after the start of the Korean War in June, 1950. There, he was charged with creating a strategic stronghold that came to be called China’s Third Line.

The Third Line, vaster than all the public works of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, bigger than Stalin’s first Five-Year Plan, was unknown outside of China. It envisioned a massive shift of Chinese industry from coastal centers and exposed inland areas readily accessible to American air power to China’s most remote and inaccessible regions. That was something like picking up the whole of California’s high-tech industry and moving it bodily to the wilds of Montana--secretly. Even within China, the project’s dimensions were known only to a handful.

No one could have displayed greater energy, imagination, speed, concentration, or more thorough devotion to the job than Deng. Mao was ecstatic. Deng’s reward had been a place on the first team as Mao’s right-hand man for the whole of China.

Now, in January, 1962, after the failure of the Great Leap, Mao turned over economic direction to Liu Shao-chi, to whom he had given his title as president, and Deng Xiaoping.

The food crisis eased a bit. Deng and Liu bought 6 million tons of grain on the world market. Mao was furious. Grain had to be paid for in foreign exchange. It was a step backward, he felt, toward capitalism. But Deng and Liu had to have quick results. “Communism is not poverty,” Deng said. Deng was aggressive in restoring the economy. He seemed to think that if he got things moving, fed the people, started up the stalled factories, it didn’t make much difference if he used profit incentives.

Deng was never good at holding his tongue. As he took the financial reins in 1962, he said: “Any idea which cannot be carried out and does not hold water must be rectified no matter who initiated it.” A clean shot at Mao.

To make his point even more plain, Deng spoke the words that were to become his trademark: “It does not matter whether the cat is black or white. So long as it catches the mouse it is a good cat.”

With these words Marx went out the window. Lenin went out the window. So did Mao. Deng’s exile and the Cultural Revolution would soon follow.

IN 1973, THERE WAS NO FORMAL ANNOUNCEMENT OF DENG Xiaoping’s return to power. He simply walked in one evening at a reception for Prince Sihanouk in the Great Hall of the People and began to talk to guests as though he had just returned from a trip to Chongqing. No questions, no explanations.

There was everything to be done. Heavy industry was dead or nearly so. Workers spent their time reading newspapers, drinking tea, going to political meetings. The slogan “Make Revolution, Not Production” still prevailed.

Deng knew what he wanted to do, what he had to do. He had worked it out during those afternoons when he paced the perimeter of the courtyard at Nanchang. To do it he needed power. In January, 1975, Deng Xiaoping became vice chairman of the Military Committee and chief of staff of the People’s Liberation Army, then vice chairman of the Central Committee and a member of the Politburo Standing Committee. He now had the political and military clout to move fast and hard.

When the Fourth National People’s Congress met that month, Chou En-lai, emaciated, pale and barely holding himself at the podium, laid before his countrymen his vision of China’s paths to the future. It was not a long address; his limited strength did not permit that. But his words staked out an avenue for his country to follow. He called it the Four Modernizations.

The Four Modernizations were Chou’s goals for renewal and advance in agriculture, industry, science-technology and national defense. They were going to be achieved by the year 2000. The program was succinct and specific. More goods, more services, higher production quotas, an end to China’s backwardness.

Chou’s program was Deng’s program. Deng was the man who would fill it in. If and when it was achieved, the windy, lethal nonsense that Mao had imposed upon his country would be swept away.

With death gnawing at the heels of both Mao and Chou, Deng raced ahead. He raised the gross output of industry and agriculture in 1975 by 11%. Railroads were running. Factories were beginning to stir. Farmers had gone back to the fields. Food was flowing into the cities.

But Mao began to balk. The new directions being outlined by Deng and his men were cutting very close to his ideological imperatives. Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife and virulent leader of the Cultural Revolution, mobilized a powerful counterattack with the slogan “Criticize Deng Xiaoping and the Rightists.”

Deng plowed straight ahead. “Let them say we are restoring the old order,” he said. “Veteran cadres should be resolute in daring to do their work. The worst that can happen is to be overthrown.”

And once more he was. Mao, persuaded that Deng was chipping away at everything he had built, asked for a Politburo meeting to consider Deng’s position. Perhaps Deng would repent. But Deng refused to back down. From that moment he was suspended, and by the end of November, 1975, his drive for change came to a halt.

A VISITOR ARRIVING IN BEIJING ON THE EVENING OF the 11th Congress did not know he was witnessing a triumph for Deng Xiaoping. It was 1977, a year after the deaths of Mao and Chou, and Deng’s allies had ousted the Gang of Four. Mao’s chosen successor, Hua Guofeng, still occupied the place of honor. But Deng had bounced his way back to the top.

A few days after the Congress, he met with a group of American correspondents at the Great Hall of the People. The air crackled as though with electricity. He displayed no battle scars. He walked lightly on the balls of his feet like a bantamweight boxer. He shook hands with the air of a presidential candidate at a shopping mall, with a word and a smile for wives and female correspondents.

Formal recognition came in November and December of 1978. It had taken that long for Deng to ease party and state controls into his hands, deftly nudging Hua Guofeng aside without actually depriving him of office.

Deng talked of China’s historical problems. Communism, he said, was right for China, but it must be Communism with Chinese characteristics. It could not be Russian. China must find its own way. Although capitalism was not China’s road, that didn’t mean China could not pick out from capitalism good elements and use them to improve its society: solid management, a commodity economy, profit incentives.

Backwardness and poverty, Deng said again and again, did not mean Socialism. China was a big country. It had suffered for a long time. China must liberate minds. It might take a hundred years, but the nation would move forward steadily to the goal of matching the moderately developed European countries.

When he wrote his letter of self-criticism after the Cultural Revolution, he had had to disavow his axiom that it didn’t matter whether a cat was black or white as long as it caught the mouse. Now Deng’s cat was back; the central element in his approach was pragmatism.

MAO’S RED ARMY HAD SWEPT ACROSS CHINA, SHOUTing slogans, singing songs, hanging landlords and turning the land over to the peasants in a kind of national celebration. Deng brought his revolution into the rice paddies and the wheat fields with understatement, no beating of gongs, no ritual chorus, no one hauled off to the village execution square.

Mao had helped the peasants seize the land from the rich--then took it back for the communes. Mao had filled the peasants’ rice bowls--then emptied them with terrible famines. Deng gave the land back to the peasants, demolished the commune structure and watched the rice bowls overflow. He put money into people’s pockets, money they earned themselves. With Deng’s revolution there was no more barracks life, no more “blue ants,” no more egalitarianism. Under Deng the peasants earned money by their own efforts and spent it on their own.

The flow of cash began to surge through the atrophied arteries of China’s economy. Deng let the peasants divide the land as they pleased and plant what they wanted. The government contracted to buy bulk food grains, rice and wheat. For the rest the peasants were on their own. They could grow high-priced specialty crops and sell them in the market. They could hire labor, lease land and farm it for a profit. They could go into small industry--carpentry shops, stores, lumberyards, pottery kilns, slaughterhouses, truck and bus businesses. The back country began to blossom as never before, not in the age of the richest dynasties or most prosperous landlords.

The jingle of Deng’s dollars altered all that without words, propaganda, slogans. He pledged that there would be no more hysterical campaigns--no more hyperbole, model farms, model factories, model soldiers.

When Deng changed peasant life, he changed the country. He began to build roads and highways. The people turned the new highways into bazaars. From 1984 to June, 1989, everything, it seemed, was for sale. It was the age of the deal. Banners went up in villages: “To Be Rich Is Glorious.”

In Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan, every city of any size, Hong Kong-style hotels sprouted like condominiums in Florida. All were the products of international deals.

But tensions began to rise in the spring of 1988. There was inflation in the cities and price rises in the countryside in basic elements such as fertilizer, gasoline, oil, seed and pesticides.

The annual June pilgrimage of party leaders to the seashore resort of Beidaihe began as usual in 1988. The sea was warm, the weather pleasant, and talk was easy.

But quickly it became apparent that Deng was determined to press his economic program regardless of inflation and discontent. Party secretary Zhao Ziyang outlined Deng’s objectives. Prices must be freed. Let the market command whether they went up or down (everyone knew they would go up). If old-fashioned Communist factories could not compete, let them fail. That was what the new bankruptcy law was for.

Deng’s program sent shivers down the backs of the orthodox. This was abandonment of the last shreds of Marxism. Before June was over, Beidaihe was full of angry talk. The conservatives vowed they would not preside over the dissolution of Communism. Deng was resolute. The program was neither approved nor overturned.

When the extended Politburo plenary met again, Deng still did not have the votes and had to accept a compromise: All economic matters would be taken from Zhao Ziyang and assigned to Premier Li Peng.

No one had better party credentials than Li. He had been a ward of Chou En-lai and was known to all of Deng’s elders. Many thought of him as “our boy.” Wild rumors circulated and were carried abroad in August, 1988. One proclaimed: “Deng is finished!”

AS THE PARTY LEADERS MET IN BEIDAIHE, CHINESE Central Television presented in prime time the first of six episodes in a documentary titled “The Yellow River Elegy.” Whether Deng and his associates watched these programs is not clear. But an estimated 70 million Chinese did, and when it was rerun at the intervention of Zhao Ziyang a month later, every TV set in China was tuned in.

“Yellow River Elegy” attacked the historical, mythological and social foundations of China--the legend of the Yellow River, the Great Wall and the dragon. For millennia the Chinese had proudly described themselves as the Yellow River civilization. On the great and dangerous river China had been born. Here was the birthplace, south of Yanan, of the Yellow emperor, China’s first.

The documentary turned the legend into a dirge. It blamed the river and its worship for China’s failure to enter the modern world. While the Europeans were sailing the blue seas and discovering the world and its riches, China had paddled along the silted yellow waters of its birth river, hardly venturing out of sight of land. It was a yellow water empire, not a blue sea empire.

The TV scenario tore down ancient beliefs about the Great Wall. It had cost billions in treasure and millions in lives. It was built to keep the barbarians out. It did not. Rather, it kept Chinese in.

They did not venture abroad to strange lands, as Europeans did; they sat at home. And they imitated the Great Wall in their cities, their homes and their minds. They walled their courtyards--and kept people in. They walled their minds to keep thoughts out.

The dragon was traditionally the symbol of the all-powerful emperor who ruled China by grant of the Mandate of Heaven. The role of the dragon in Chinese society had limited the flexibility of China’s rulers, according to the documentary. They could not share power--there could be only one dragon. China could not enter the modern world, with a parliamentary system, a free-speaking, free-thinking public.

No more daring, no more explosive, no more controversial syllabus of ideas could have been presented to China. While Deng and the leaders argued about the economy and the fast track to modernization, the Chinese public was invited to throw off the shadows of myth and seek a modern path to greatness: The Yellow River Elegy Manifesto.

To anyone cognizant of the Chinese situation it was clear that a showdown was coming. It would determine China’s course for years. To anyone who understood Deng’s career it should have been obvious that he was not going to be defeated. He was the emperor, and in the end he would fight by the rules laid down in “The General Mirror for the Aid of Government.”

CHINESE POLITICS IS A TOUGH GAME, AND ONE OF its cardinal principles, as Mao would have put it, is that there can only be one sun in the sky.

In the Chinese tradition, as set forth in the Annals of the Twenty-Four Dynasties, no one can challenge the emperor with impunity. If the challenger is allowed to stand, it means the challenger is more powerful than the emperor, signaling the loss of the Mandate of Heaven.

Deng was governed by this tenet. If he saw himself challenged, he was bound to destroy the challenger.

The challenge that led to the Tian An Men Square massacre came with the death of Deng’s onetime secretary for the party, General Secretary Hu Yaobang, on April 15, 1989. Hu had been an eccentric. He didn’t talk like a Marxist. He carried on a private correspondence with Richard M. Nixon, served French snails at dinners and introduced the works of Albert Camus to the Chinese literati. He even launched a campaign to do away with chopsticks and replace them with Western knives and forks.

When a fresh-voiced young astrophysicist at the University of Science and Technology at Hefei named Fang Lizhi had stirred up a pro-Democracy movement in late 1986, Deng blamed Hu and removed him from his post. Hu had not been a hero to the students when he had been sent to squelch their demonstrations. But now, overnight, he became their icon.

As news spread of Hu Yaobang’s death, students at Beijing University didn’t quite know what to do. Finally one wrote a message on a long strip of computer paper and hung it out a window. It read: “Yaobang is dead. We mourn.” On April 17, posters appeared at Beijing University. One said: “Those who should die haven’t; those who shouldn’t have.”

On Tuesday, April 18, the first, rather timid student delegation of about 1,000 set out on the 10-mile march to Tian An Men. No one grasped that a major confrontation was at hand. The students saw the death of Hu as an occasion for a demonstration, but they were not clear as to what their objective should be. At first they spoke about student issues: dormitory conditions, bad food, lack of financial support. There was no leadership.

The government seemed similarly uncertain. It deployed police and plainclothesmen. It put a watch on the students outside the Gate of New China. It circulated warnings. But there was a lack of decisiveness. At this point, neither Deng nor his deputies, Zhao Ziyang and Li Peng, was acting in accordance with “The General Mirror for the Aid of Government.”

Confrontations occurred between students and police as the crowds grew. Repeated efforts were made by authorities to regain control of Tian An Men. Tactically, the government had lost the first round. Its failure to act decisively emboldened the students. They had asserted territorial rights to the square--and won. By April 20, the pattern for the future had been squared off, although none knew it. If the government wanted the students out, it had a choice--drive them out by force or yield to demands for negotiation with no certainty that an agreement could be reached or enforced.

What might the end be? From the beginning that had been clear.

Deng had never been comfortable with protest. When he came into power he had encouraged Democracy Wall, a 200-yard expanse at the corner of Xidan and Chang-an avenues, just down from Tian An Men Square, that had turned into the greatest arena of free expression China had ever known, featuring exhibitions of big-character posters, small-character indictments and debate of almost any question. It was the most exciting place in Beijing. Deng was nervous about the wall, but thought it better to let the steam out than bottle it up.

The more people spoke, however, the closer they came to criticizing not Mao and the Gang of Four, but Deng and his new party. Deng ignored the dissent for the moment and went off to the United States in February, 1979. But not long after he returned, he ordered Hu Yaobang to crack down and make the students shut up. Hu loyally did his best. By the end of 1979 all the posters were down: Democracy Wall had been scrubbed clean. The brief interlude was over.

Deng’s reaction against Democracy Wall was in character. He used the word “democracy” a lot, but there was nothing in his career to suggest that he was a supporter of genuine democracy. His reaction to Democracy Wall set the pattern.

In the weeks of Tian An Men, several exits from the climax of bloodshed and massacre presented themselves. Deng took none of them. The Deng of 1978 would have taken advantage of the chance for peace, but not the rigid elder that Deng had become by 1989.

He lumbered into a declaration of martial law. Defiance was the response of the students and citizens. Ignoring the precept of “The General Mirror for the Aid of Government” that action must be swift and decisive, Deng did nothing to put martial law into effect. However, soon word spread of quiet troop movements from the provinces to Beijing and within the capital region.

By the weekend of May 27-28 the air had fizzled out of the Tian An Men balloon. Students were drifting home. Never had conditions been so favorable for a peaceful settlement. But the government did not move. Deng was going to make plain that he had the will to use force. As the imperial edicts had said in the past, the people must “obey--and tremble.”

The decision to move on Tian An Men over the weekend of June 3-4 was probably taken on Friday, June 2. Deng had approved it but left the details to President Yang Shangkun. The 27th and 38th armies would carry out the operation. The 27th was one of the People’s Liberation Army’s best, headquartered at the Shijiazhuang base, southwest of the city. The 38th was Beijing’s garrison army. The armies were strengthened by units from each of China’s military districts. If blood was to be spilled, all would share in the spilling.

By early morning Sunday, June 4, Beijing had been given its lesson.

SINCE TIAN AN MEN, DENG HAS SLIPPED FURther from the public eye, but he firmly holds the cords that manipulate the other political players. Just as the dowager Empress Ci Xi had controlled the political stage from behind a silken curtain, so Deng, with the aid of Yang Shangkun, directs events in the Great Hall of the People and within the Central Committee at Zhongnanhai. A whisper is enough.

Gradually, it has become apparent that the big loser at Tian An Men was Deng Xiaoping himself. He saved his mandate at the price of mortgaging its content to elderly men and women opposed to his objectives. He had been willing to abandon the reality of Marxist practice in order to jump-start China on an accelerated path to the high-tech future. Now, it seems, he has sold his future for the sake of a fuzzy present.

Again and again Deng and Yang Shangkun tried to convince themselves and others that China was the victim of an international conspiracy. But to those who had seen the television coverage, the only conspiracy was that of the government. China’s great writer Lu Xun had written on March 18, 1926, after Beijing’s police opened fire on unarmed students: “Lies written in ink can never conceal facts written in blood.” The leaders scrubbed and scrubbed, but they could not erase the blood from the paving blocks of Tian An Men.

The death of Deng began to be mentioned in 1991 as a political fact that soon must be reckoned with. Deng had won the Mandate of Heaven fair and square, and it had been ratified by popular acclaim. But who was to succeed him?

No precedent cited by “The General Mirror for the Aid of Government” offered a clue. There was no mechanism in the structure of Deng’s New China whereby an orderly succession was assured. Thus it was not chauvinistic historicism that impelled Mao to pore over the “Mirror” during a lifetime; that drove Deng to its pages during his enforced sojourn in Nanchang, or that caused Hu Yaobang to abandon Albert Camus in favor of the “Mirror” after he lost his job as secretary of the Chinese Communist Party in January, 1987.

The reality of China is that when no one holds a clear advantage, a “time of trouble” is bound to ensue. As the “Mirror” notes, during an interregnum, military power becomes decisive. Common sense dictates that military power will play a prime role in the future. No one, not even students and intellectuals like Fang Lizhi, believes that China could be ruled in the 20th Century by some variant of democracy. It is an ideal, but China would probably not achieve it by the year 2100.

Deng has taken steps looking to the future. He brought in two able new men as vice premiers, Zou Jiahua, head of state planning and an engineer, and Shanghai Mayor Zhu Rongji. Both are pragmatists, neither a student of the “Mirror” or “Das Kapital.”

On a tipsters’ sheet, both would be listed as the kind of men who could lead China back to the Deng Xiaoping time of incentives and profit making. To get on that path again will be a formidable task. Only time will determine whether China has the heart for it. No one familiar with the gap between China time and Western time is likely to start marking off days on the calendar. But the path awaits.

The watchwords of Deng’s terminal administration have became caution, stability, don’t rock the boat, don’t disturb the urban masses and don’t destabilize the peasants. At all costs, don’t let sparks from the meltdown of the Soviet Union come over the border. Talking of the future in 1991, Yang Shangkun sounded like a man trying to tiptoe into the 21st Century without wandering into a minefield. There was not a single new idea in the first five-year plan of the ‘90s, not an upbeat prediction for the year 2000. The brave visions of the early Deng revolution had faded into gray. China, Yang insisted, was still “on course.”

But after 2000, new soundings might be taken. Not to worry, a cheerful intellectual said. The change would not take long, possibly less than a hundred years.