Ezra F. Vogel (1930-2020) is the author of Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize, and of the international bestseller Japan as Number One. He was Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus at Harvard University.
A masterful new history of China's reform era. It pieces together
from interviews and memoirs perhaps the clearest account so far of
the revolution that turned China from a totalitarian backwater led
by one of the monsters of the 20th century into the power it has
become today...Vogel has a monumental story to tell. His main
argument is that Deng deserves a central place in the pantheon of
20th-century leaders. For he not only launched China's
market-oriented economic reforms but also accomplished something
that had eluded Chinese leaders for almost two centuries: the
transformation of the world's oldest civilization into a modern
nation...[An] illuminating book.
*Washington Post*
Ezra Vogel's new biography portrays Deng as not just the maker of
modern China, but one of the most substantial figures in modern
history...[A] meticulously researched book...Vogel knows China's
elites extremely well, not least because of his years as an
intelligence officer in East Asia for the Clinton administration.
This book is bolstered by insider knowledge and outstanding
sources, such as interviews with Deng's interpreters...The
definitive account of Deng in any language. Vogel eloquently makes
the case for Deng's crucial role in China's transformation from an
impoverished and brutalized country into an economic and political
superpower.
*The Economist*
A lively portrait of the man...Vogel provides a wealth of
fascinating material, from vivid accounts of Deng's political and
organizational skills in reviving the economy in the mid-1970s to
his up-and-down relations with Vietnam and its leaders. The author
also offers astute insights into the reformist roles played by Hua
Guofeng, Mao's immediate successor after his 1976 death, and by two
of Deng's own associates, both ultimately purged by him, Hu Yaobang
and Zhao Ziyang. The book is at its best in portraying the tense
interplay of personal relations and ambition among Mao's many
lieutenants. On the surface, lockstep Communist ideology prevailed
during Mao's rule, but behind the walls of Zhongnanhai, Beijing's
central leadership compound, the dual drive for self-preservation
and advancement fed a kind of political nihilism.
*Wall Street Journal*
When Chinese historians are able one day to ply their subversive
trade without control or censorship, their judgment will surely be
that their country should revere Deng Xiaoping way above his
predecessor Mao Zedong...Ezra Vogel's massive biography assembles
the case for Deng (1904-97) with narrative skill and prodigious
scholarship.
*Financial Times*
Vogel has gone to enormous lengths to document his
subject...Vogel's painstaking research provides plenty of
fascinating detail. The description of the period after Tiananmen,
for example--when the octogenarian was forced to call on a
lifetime's accumulated political wiles to defeat an attempt by
conservatives to almost completely reverse his reforms--is
eye-opening. The pages in which Deng effectively threatens to have
then Communist Party Secretary Jiang Zemin dismissed unless he
throws his support behind renewing the reform drive are very nearly
worth the price of the book alone...On the ways through which Deng
set about the enormous task of rebuilding the gutted economy,
shattered by decades of turmoil under Mao Zedong, Vogel is
exhaustive.
*Time*
Ezra Vogel's encyclopedic Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of
China is the most exhaustive English retelling of Deng's life.
Vogel, an emeritus professor at Harvard, seems to have interviewed
or found the memoirs of nearly every person who spoke with Deng,
and has painstakingly re-created a detailed and intimate chronology
of Deng's roller-coaster career.
*The Nation*
A virtue of Vogel's book is that it collects and organizes a huge
amount of material on the struggles within the elite power circles
in China over several decades. In these accounts we learn how Deng
tried to protect his allies and how he sought to undermine his
enemies; he fell, rose, fell again, then rose again to the pinnacle
position in the second generation of the Communist dynasty. Vogel's
materials will be very useful to students of elite power struggles
in China.
*New York Review of Books*
One of the virtues of Vogel's analysis is that he understands the
thinking of Deng's rivals as well as he does Deng's own...Deng was
infatuated with everything he viewed as modern, and wanted China to
have it all. By entering into Deng's vision, Vogel helps readers
see how the person who forged the world's most successful example
of modernizing authoritarianism believed that such a combination
would work.
*New Republic*
[An] exhaustive biography...Vogel's book is an encyclopedic look at
Deng's career.
*The Independent*
Deng was perhaps the most intriguing leader that I met while
traveling with Mr. Blumenthal and President Jimmy Carter. I had to
wait another 30 years, however, before a definitive biography would
be written about Deng, arguably the most globally transformational
leader of the 20th century. This year Ezra Vogel delivered it with
Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China.
*Wall Street Journal*
Vogel, one of the world's preeminent Asia scholars, has produced
the most comprehensive and authoritative account of Deng's career
as a revolutionary, party leader, and architect of China's reform.
Meticulously researched and highly readable, the book is not a
typical biography. It does not dwell much on Deng's personal life.
Instead, the focus of the book is Deng's unusual career trajectory,
his unique style of rule, and the strategic choices he made during
and after the Cultural Revolution...This book should be read by
anyone who wants to understand the domestic and international
dynamics that have led to China's rise as a great power.
*Foreign Affairs*
If anybody still nurtures the illusion that Deng was a closet
liberal, this book will bring them back to reality. For all the
changes he championed and the vicissitudes of his life, the
diminutive, blunt Deng has received much less biographical
attention than Mao, which makes Ezra Vogel's huge account
particularly welcome. The product of 10 years of work by a leading
China scholar, it is essential reading for anybody who wants to
understand the evolution of China to the status it occupies today.
It offers an enormous compendium of material about the lifelong
Communist whose story, even more than that of Mao, reflects the
dramatically varying fortunes of his nation in the 20th
century...Vogel is an admiring biographer who presents a treasure
trove of new information that will delight modern China scholars
for years to come.
*Times Higher Education*
Deng [is] a fit subject for a weighty, probing and judicious
biography, which is just what Ezra F. Vogel has produced...Vogel is
the master of this complex material. He had access to many who knew
and worked with Deng, including Jiang Zemin. Deng selected him as
Party leader in 1989 to succeed Zhao Ziyang, who had been sacked
and disgraced because of his opposition to the use of force in
Tiananmen Square. Vogel also spoke to two of Deng's children. The
documentary sources are copious and, in terms of access to
material, this study is unlikely to be bettered until the Party
opens its most sensitive archives--which could be a long wait. It
is hard to disagree with much of what Vogel writes and there is
much to admire, particularly his judicious contextualization of
Deng's motives.
*Literary Review*
A major biography of the man who may turn out to have done more to
transform the world than any other leader of the 20th century.
Deng's market Leninism has massively increased China's wealth,
while repressing democracy. Vogel's portrait is sympathetic,
although not uncritical.
*Financial Times*
This is the most ambitious biography of Deng Xiaoping by a western
scholar so far. Drawing on numerous Chinese sources, including the
Deng family, it tells the story of a man who, the author says, may
have had more impact on world history than anyone else in the 20th
century...This is a monumental work, carried out in the author's
retirement and intended to cap a distinguished career in Asian
studies. His diligent use of official papers and his privileged
access to members of the Chinese Communist elite make this
biography of Deng Xiaoping the most complete we are likely to have
under the present ruling order.
*Hong Kong Economic Journal*
Deng led a long and remarkable life, packed with drama and global
significance, one that deserves to be dissected in detail. So we
must be thankful to Harvard professor Ezra Vogel for devoting a
large chunk of his academic career to compiling a prodigious
biography, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, the most
ambitious account of the man so far. In writing this volume, Vogel
has done an enormous amount of work. He appears to have absorbed
the documents from every single Chinese Communist Party plenum
since 1921...There have been several Deng biographies before
this...but Vogel's can be regarded as the most comprehensive and
informative of the lot...There's no question that Vogel has gone
farther than anyone else to date in telling Deng's story. For that
he is to be applauded; there is a whole hoard of valuable material
here that we probably would not have gained otherwise.
*Foreign Policy*
China scholars might think they have read enough about Deng
Xiaoping. After all, at least three biographies of Deng were
available prior to the release of this massive new book. But Vogel,
one of the world's preeminent Asia scholars, has produced the most
comprehensive and authoritative account of Deng's career as a
revolutionary, party leader, and architect of China's reform.
Meticulously researched and highly readable, the book is not a
typical biography. It does not dwell much on Deng's personal life.
Instead, the focus of the book is Deng's unusual career trajectory,
his unique style of rule, and the strategic choices he made during
and after the Cultural Revolution. Vogel considers the extent to
which Deng fundamentally and irreversibly transformed China's
society, governance, and relations with the outside world...This
book should be read by anyone who wants to understand the domestic
and international dynamics that have led to China's rise as a great
power.
*Foreign Affairs*
The big picture is the key to this book. Those hoping for hidden
secrets and untold stories about Deng in Vogel's book will be
disappointed. Comprehensive as it is, the book is not an expose.
But it does ring with authority. The Harvard professor spent most
of the 10 years lining up interviews with people who had first-hand
experience of Deng. In the end he spoke to dozens, if not a
hundred, of people who knew something about the man...As a result,
his depiction of Deng is rich, balanced and colorful. Vogel
portrays a Deng who is determined, resourceful, at times
uncompromising and difficult, but always pragmatic...This is where
the strength of Vogel's book lies. It is all about the grand
historic view. And that is fitting: out of all of Deng's amazing
qualities, it is his grasp of a broad perspective and his keen
sense of history that enabled him to achieve what so many had
deemed impossible.
*South China Morning Post*
If you're going to read one book about modern China in the period
after Mao, then this is the book you should read. 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.
*Gates Notes*
From arguably the most important scholar of East Asia, this is an
important book on the force behind China's transformation in the
late twentieth century, whose full fruits are visible only today.
Deng ordered the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, but he was also the
person most responsible for modernizing China and opening it to
trade with the West. Again and again he survived threatening
challenges in the Chinese political bureaucracy, to emerge at the
top in the late 1970s. His role in subverting Chinese orthodoxy
from the inside is comparable to that of Gorbachev with respect to
the Soviet Union--and he deserves sustained attention such as this
landmark book offers.
*Huffington Post*
Not just a definitive biography of a world-class leader, but also
the most authoritative and riveting account of the secretly
contrived U.S.-Chinese strategic accommodation of 1978 and of how
that in turn facilitated China's domestic transformation.
*Zbigniew Brzezinski*
This is an impressive and important biography of one of the most
important men of the twentieth century. Deng Xiaoping transformed
China economically, politically, and socially. One of the most
significant achievements for his and my country was the
establishment of diplomatic relations between us. The book provides
an excellent account of this historic event.
*President Jimmy Carter*
Vogel offers a nuanced portrait of China's great reform leader Deng
Xiaoping and a shrewd analysis of the political maneuvers by which
he made such a large mark on history. By entering deeply into
Deng's vision for China, Vogel shows how the person who forged the
world's most successful example of modernizing authoritarianism
understood how such a system could work. And he shows how a major
leader can steer a huge country in a new historical direction. A
terrific accomplishment.
*Andrew J. Nathan, Columbia University*
A multilayered study of change and adaptability. At the core is one
man's response to the dangers of a complex revolution. Around him
is the transformation of the largest political entity in history
from rural disarray and helplessness to an industrial and
manufacturing giant. In between are ambitious and bewildered people
in search of leadership. Vogel has made Deng Xiaoping's vision
convincing, the Chinese maze comprehensible, and even the bit
actors come alive.
*Wang Gungwu, National University of Singapore*
Deng Xiaoping's skill, vision, and courage in overcoming seemingly
insuperable obstacles and guiding China onto the path of sustained
economic development rank him with the great leaders of history.
And yet, too little is known about the life and career of this
extraordinary man. In this superbly researched and highly readable
biography, Vogel has definitively filled this void. This
fascinating book provides a host of insights into the factors that
enabled Deng to triumph over repeated setbacks and lay the basis
for China to regain the wealth and power that has eluded it for two
centuries.
*J. Stapleton Roy, former U.S. Ambassador to China*
Deng could be tough, but he was direct and engaged. He was a person
we could do business with, and I liked him a lot. He played an
extraordinary role, bringing the world's largest nation into the
modern world. We are fortunate that Vogel, one of our foremost
China scholars, has now brought the man alive in this uniquely
researched biography.
*Brent Scowcroft*
A thorough picking-over of Deng Xiaoping's record and
accomplishments, setting him firmly as the linchpin linking an
antiquated authoritative thinking to modern growth and
acceleration...Vogel meticulously considers all facets of this
complex leader for an elucidating--and quite hefty--study.
*Kirkus Reviews*
[An] impressive and exhaustively researched biography...Vogel
reminds readers that it was under this pragmatic politician's watch
that the party made three moves that helped it outlast so many
other Leninist organizations.
*Miller-McCune.com*
This intensely researched doorstop delivers a step-by-step
political biography of the man who gets most of the credit for
China's spectacular rise to an economic juggernaut. Vogel recounts
how Deng (1904–1997), a leading figure from the 1950s on, was
banished when his preference for practicality over class struggle
angered Mao Zedong during the disastrous 1969–1975 Cultural
Revolution. Returning to power after Mao's 1976 death, he
eliminated the anti-intellectualism and chaotic policy swings that
characterized Mao's rule while opening the nation to Western ideas.
The result was China's emergence as the world's most dynamic
economy, with a free market but still with a disturbing absence of
political freedom (he gives a nuanced analysis of the Tiananmen
Square massacres)...Scholars will value it.
*Publishers Weekly*
If you want to understand China today, you must understand Deng
Xiaoping (1904–97)...Deng shared Mao's ambition to make China a
strong nation under party leadership, but he cannily built an
unassailable position within the party to take it in new
directions. Vogel interviewed dozens of leaders and China experts,
as well as Deng's family, did exhaustive documentary research, and
mines the scholarly literature (a good deal of it by his former
students) to analyze Deng's initial success in building China's
economy and international position, frustration in the 1989
Tiananmen massacre, and ultimate legacy...Massive but fascinating,
this is highly recommended for those with a serious interest in
modern China. Indispensable in understanding Deng, what he
accomplished, and where he fell short.
*Library Journal*
In an authoritative biography of Deng, Harvard sociologist Ezra F.
Vogel, a renowned specialist on China and Japan who rose to
international prominence in 1979 with the publication of Japan as
Number One: Lessons for America, has attempted the difficult task
of providing a comprehensive look at the experiences and influences
that shaped this remarkable individual. He has succeeded
superbly...Vogel's book provides extensive insights into how Deng
was able to use his experience, his network of associations among
China's aging revolutionaries, and the force of his personality to
direct China's course, all while allowing others to hold the top
government and party titles...For those of us who as U.S.
government officials participated in or monitored many of the
developments in China and in the bilateral relationship Vogel
describes, he has illuminated events in ways that would have been
invaluable to us had we had such a clear picture at the time. The
transformation of China that Deng set in motion is likely to
confront the United States with its most significant foreign-policy
challenge over the next several decades. We are fortunate indeed
that Vogel has written this timely and highly informative biography
of Deng Xiaoping, which provides a wealth of insights into one of
history's great leaders
*Wilson Quarterly*
Deng Xiaoping is one of the most influential men in modern history
and here his dramatic story, one intertwined with elite intrigues
in the Chinese Communist Party, is recounted in detail by one of
the most eminent scholars of Asia...Regarding the debate over
whether Deng was more despot than reformer, Ezra Vogel emphasizes
the successful consequences of his economic reforms, but does not
shy from criticizing his failures. The portrait that emerges is of
a visionary authoritarian who helped his nation overcome the
self-inflicted wounds of Mao Zedong and achieve enormous economic
advances.
*Japan Times*
This monumental book, not so much biography as political history,
is overdue.
*The Australian*
As one of the foremost scholars of modern China, Vogel is an
appropriate authority to pen such a thorough account of Deng
Xiaoping's tumultuous journey from political exile to paramount
leader of China. A detailed study into Deng's dedication to the
Chinese establishment of the People's Republic, to his reemergence
as unrivaled decision-maker of the Chinese people, the book details
how Deng's policies continue to shape the nation, and how it will
most likely require a number of generations before scholars can
fully appreciate his impact. In capturing the most turbulent period
in the modern 20th century in this 928-page tome, Vogel contributes
an important piece to the historiography of Chinese history.
*Choice*
[A] masterful biography.
*Indian Express*
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