WATCH THIS (LARGE) SPACE

Rebecca Lee attempts to define

Deng Xiaoping's place in Chinese history, before the obituarists get there first

Xian, China IN THE seventh month of the 37th year of his reign the first Emperor of China, a megalomaniac obsessed with the search for an elixir of immortality, after a lifetime of violence perished in his carriage while on a tour of the provinces, at a place called Sand Hill. He had unified the central king- doms by ruthless military action and held his empire together by the savage suppres- sion not only of any potential military threat but also of any potentially dissenting opinions. The burning of all unapproved books — notably the ancient classics of poetry and history — ordered in 213 BC, three years before his death, was typical of a policy which has provided a paradigm for all subsequent totalitarian states, including that which currently occupies the same large patch of the earth as his once did. To identify Mao with Qin Shi Huangdi is old hat — Mao did so himself. The paral- lels are too numerous (and mostly too hor- rifying) for the comparison to be entertaining, except for the odd specula- tive detail on the fringe. Though Sima Quian, China's Herodotus, does not spell it out, it takes only a small amount of naughty imagination to suppose that one of the reasons the First Emperor wanted that elixir was the same reason Mao might have wanted it. The First Emperor was, after all, buried with hundreds of (one sup- poses unwilling) women. And as the wicked, wicked BBC has recently revealed, a little something to reach the parts etc. and keep them performing even after most of the other bits have given up the ghost would have come in handy in the Great Helmsman's latter years.

Anxious not to lose their hold on power, the deceased Qin Shi Huangdi's immedi- ate entourage concealed the fact of his death and kept up a pretence of food and government business being sent into his carriage and dealt with. A fake imperial edict was dispatched to the eldest son and heir denouncing him as unfilial, and a sword was provided with it with which he could administer the appropriate punish- ment to himself: something the dimwit promptly did. Apart from this, there was a good deal of skulduggery to be done as they proceeded back towards the capital, and the kitchen cabinet were hard at it. But it was summer, which can get pretty hot in the north China plain, and the body of the late unlamented emperor in its closed carriage began to stink. So another imperial order was sent out to the accom- panying officials, instructing them to load their carriages with dried fish. The great historian does not say if any reason was given for this command — nor, of course, what the dutiful officials thought of it. But on a clear day in China one can still some- times smell those fish.

In due course the younger son, who benefited from the intrigue, took the throne, but after only two years the dynasty collapsed. It was quickly replaced — after a period of confusion — by a new dynasty, the Han, which pursued more (but not very) liberal policies, prospered mightily, extended the bounds of the empire halfway across central Asia and lasted 400 years. That was a nation con- temporary with, and every bit as great as, Rome.

The Chinese have every right to take a cyclical view of history because they are the only people with enough of the stuff for the really major things to have repeat- ed themselves not just once but twice. A single repetition is not sufficient to prove the case, and crafty historians with dubi- 'Fancy dinner?' ous ideological intent can always contrive to argue that the business is linear, despite common sense telling us that in fact we are all just going round in circles. Two repeti- tions, however, really wrap it up, for any but the most bigoted believers in Progress — none of whom, one hopes, is numbered among readers of this magazine.

The second time around was in the sixth century AD, when after centuries of divi- sion and turmoil a successful military com- mander again brought the whole of China under unified rule, founding the Sui dynasty. He too was a megalomaniac, obsessed with the search for an elixir of immortality, he too was succeeded by a less able man who let the dynasty collapse; and it in turn was replaced by a new dynasty, which was to last for centuries and whose name is a byword for the glories of classical China — the T'ang.

The point of this little turn down memo- ry lane is that the key to one's view of what will happen to China after Deng dies the inevitable (sometimes, it seems, the only) question people ask about the place — hangs on whether you think he is the second emperor in the dynasty that Mao founded, or the first emperor of the suc- ceeding dynasty. Harrison Salisbury's valu- able dual biography of Mao and Deng, called The New Emperors, clearly points to the first option. But the matter is not as certain as it might seem. For a start, Deng was not Mao's chosen successor. The actual second emperor who took over in 1976, Hua Guofeng, was removed after Deng's return to effective power in 1978 and lapsed into apparently well-deserved obscu- rity. And, given the way in which China has moved since then, it is not difficult to con- tend that the Mao dynasty has to all intents and purposes collapsed, and that what we are seeing now is its more reasonable suc- cessor, laying the foundations for another few hundred years of cultural glory.

If the dynasty we are talking about is the Communist — whatever that may mean in China — dynasty, then Deng is undoubted- ly a party man first, and his demise will mean a change, very possibly of dynasty, which is highly likely to involve a period of great uncertainty and violent stirring of the pot. Out of which may just emerge — why not? — a modern China fit not just to face the world but maybe to take it over. But if all this communist jargon has been, over the years, a smokescreen — as some have always contended — for more traditional Chinese forms of political struggle, then the shift of power has already taken place, and we are already into the next dynasty: the one, that is, that lasts four centuries and rules at least half the world.

This could be a Problem. It is one thing to confront an Evil Empire that can hardly afford to buy you a cup of coffee; quite another to square up to a fully functional Alternative which simply does not accept that it is a backward version of yourself striving to catch up. To illustrate the point, consider this Jurassic prospect: China run by Lee Kuan Yew, Singaposaurus Rex smil- ing an inscrutable, toothy smile as it munches BMW's last Land-Rover.

It is incumbent upon any member of the free world to believe as an article of faith that the truth, the whole truth, of China's history since 1949 will in due course become known, just as we now all know what once we may have assumed (but not known for certain) about the USSR and its satellite regimes — or about Germany in the Nazi years, or Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. The odd thing about the case of China is that political power has turned so violently in the hands of those who held it, though still within the confines of the closed system, that gobbets of the truth are spat out from time to time, though always tontextualised' in a way that throws the best possible light upon those who happen to be in charge at the present.

Thus, in the currently approved version of history, the Cultural Revolution was a catastrophe (well, yes it was, but that's not the whole story) and Deng Xiaoping, among millions of others, was a victim. But for the millions of young Chinese who had the freedom to roam over their mother country for a few years doing as they pleased (and not all of them spent their time destroying things) it was the best time of their lives, which would have otherwise, before and after, been characterised by a suffocating lack of personal choice. But the Chinese, who have the longest history because they have been writing history for longer than anyone else, have also been rewriting it for almost as long as they have been writing it. George Orwell, whether he knew it or not, was describing China in Nineteen Eighty-Four.

It was in 1984 that Deng Xiaoping estab- lished the first Special Economic Zone, at Shenzhen on the border with Hong Kong. It is, perhaps, his most spectacular success. If he were in the investment business (I did say if, whatever some may say about the Deng family's private interests), the returns on this one would have left all the Boeskys and Buffetts and Slaters and Soroses standing at the bus stop. In a decade Shenzhen has gone from paddy fields to an electrified city of more than 2 million people earning comfortably more than five times the national per capita income.

It was in the same year, of course, that Deng clinched the deal on Hong Kong's reversion to China. One might — at the risk of appearing politically incorrect (dicy, in China) — contend that his historical predecessor, the Qing dynasty chief minis- ter Li Hongzhang, who put the place out to British management in the 19th century, had made an equally astute investment, considering the returns. When he present- ed his latest budget on 2 March, Hong Kong's financial secretary, Sir Hamish Macleod, was clearly operating at the very limit of his own imagination and that of the highly capable officials who work for him to find ways in which to give away even part of yet another Herculean sur- plus. Tax breaks, tax cuts, increased allowances: he tried everything, and still had to stuff a few more billions into the reserves. It would not have been excessive if the staff of the government central sec- retariat (not very many people, it won't surprise you to know) had been sent out over their lunch half-hour to carpet the streets with newly minted coins (which, these days, no longer carry the Queen's head — but who cares?).

Whatever the current quibbling, in 1997 the term of the time deposit expires and the owners will see a very tidy turn on their (nominal) outlay. And not long after 1997, the separation of Hong Kong and Kowloon, Kowlooh and the New Territo- ries, the New Territories and Shenzhen, Shenzhen and the developing towns of the Pearl River delta, the delta and Guangzhou city, will diminish; the steady torrent of people into this merging metropolis will accelerate, and by the sec- ond decade of the next century this rag- bag development (think of London's history) will be the world's largest urban sprawl, overtaking even Tokyo-Yoko- hama-Osaka, with a population of maybe 50 million. It is this, rather than any national achievement, which may turn out to be Deng's greatest legacy.

It will at least be concrete. Indeed, it will be the greatest accumulation of con- crete the world has ever known. Whereas the more general effects of all that Deng and his allies have done will be far less unambiguous. It is important to refer to allies because, unlike Mao, Deng, much to his credit, has never been a one-man loon show.

While still compos mentis he by all accounts abhorred palace politics, person- ality cults and all the corrupt features which now characterise the declining years of his reign. Yet it is also right to assign him absolute pre-eminence among those `They're Jill-boots.' who have striven to increase China's power and glory by allowing its people to pursue their own enrichment; none who shared his objectives had anything like his power with- in the system; and certainly none of those with equivalent power had anything like his vision.

In the spring of 1992, nearly three years post-Tiananmen, during which economic policy had gone backwards, Deng headed south. The domestic propaganda organs were in the hands of the conservatives, and he could not get his message out. So he set off into the provinces, going deliberately within range of the Hong Kong press, who naturally splashed pictures of him and his entourage, and also carried every word passed out from his carriage about the magnificent success enjoyed by this part of the empire which, far more than any other, had taken his hint and gone for it.

The 'Southern Tour' (the actual term used in the press was one which refers to an Imperial progress) did the trick. The conservatives caved in, and the 'China Boom', as it is known to New York stock- brokers, was born. Chaps with Michael Douglas braces who at the beginning of 1992 couldn't have found Guangzhou in an atlas (let alone pronounced it) became, by the end of that year and all through the next, very excited about China.

Some of the fizz has gone now but it served its purpose. Under the bubbles, bil- lions in real liquid has been flowing into Deng's country, and as a consequence it really is beginning to get rich — an aston- ishing achievement considering its colossal size and unwieldiness. With more apologies to Jurassic Park, the Brontosaurus Chinensis (he of the force 8 sneeze) is now cantering tremendously across the landscape.

Into the sunset? Sunset of the British Empire, yes, visible on the right as one passes by. Of communism in the Far East, yes, that's going too: going, if not quite yet gone. Of the Chinese Communist Party? Quite a different matter. It is, as I suggest- ed earlier, a matter of how you define a dynasty. Only last week Deng's favourite daughter-cum-interpreter repeated her father's wish to visit Hong Kong, but not before 1997. For the sake of historical tidi- ness, one cannot help hoping he does last out that long — not least because if he went now, at the present uncertain moment in China's history, with public policy in almost every area poised delicately betwixt and between, his departure could throw historians into embarrassing paroxysms of reminiscence.

Like all kitchen cabinets, Qin Shi Huang- di's found their own goose cooked in the end. The Chief Eunuch duly arranged for his confederate, the Chief Minister, to be denounced and subjected to the 'five penal- ties', then (perhaps mercifully) killed. The dread eunuch then went one better and got rid of the second emperor himself: but the cousin he set up in his place had the nous to introduce, at the first available opportu- nity, a rusty blade between his benefactor's ribs, following which he had the insuffer- able fellow's family exterminated to the third degree, before himself being dis- placed after a less than significant innings of 46 days. Ripping material for the author of Jurassic Park and Rising Sun, you might be thinking. But remember, they say that history in that part of the world does not go forward: it repeats itself. So, watch this (large) space.