Like all Chinese rulers, Deng Xiaoping officially died with a successor at his bedside, the disconsolate family at the door and loyal mandarins in the anteroom at Zhongnanhai inside the Forbidden City.
Emperors always died that way. The choreography reassures the masses. It symbolizes the smooth transition of power, and Communist stage managers kept the scenario when Mao Tse-tung died.
Yet to someone who followed the patriarch’s gradual eclipse from paramount leader to party puppet, Beijing’s Forbidden City seemed a strange place for Deng to die. A loyal Marxist who detested ostentatious trappings, he despised Mao’s cynical choice to move his Communist court to Zhongnanhai, inside the imperial palace grounds.
Deng, the 5-foot-tall farmer’s son from Sichuan, preferred to live in an old-style Chinese courtyard house at the end of a hutang (alley) a few blocks from Ti’anan Gate.
No one I know ever found out the name of the alley, though an old woman once told me it was called Half Moon Alley in pre-Communist days but now was simply known as Deng’s Alley.
I kept away from Deng’s Alley because the ubiquitous plainclothes police in white shirts and gray trousers, with shirttails flapping, always pounced from doorways to demand credentials accompanied by terse orders to”move on.” One could do a little snooping here and there in China, but not around Deng’s house. Deng’s family lived behind iron gates of the size and kind that bar access to state-owned ammunition factories.
Officially retired from all public functions, Deng lived out the last of his 92 years as an infallible patriarch whose name was invoked each time conservative forces fiddled with his free-market policies. In the process, the old puppet master became a party puppet himself.
His mumblings were conveyed like edicts by his daughters, Deng Nan, 47, and Deng Rong, 46, the only people apparently able to interpret the slurred words of a man debilitated by uncontrolled trembling, finally diagnosed in the medical report as Parkinson’s disease. The two daughters became the voice and ears of their father. (In Mao’s final years his wife settled scores with her enemies in the name of the Great Helmsman.)
Over the last years, Deng’s exhortations to the party and the people always supported the continuation of his economic reforms, which have benefited mostly a privileged class that includes his two sons, three daughters and 11 grandchildren. All held prominent positions or were connected to lucrative enterprises.
Keeping an eye on the man and his state of health became a vital part of China-watching. Had he died years ago, the power struggle for succession would have plunged China into chaos. When he died last week, his influence evaporated. The power clique around Jiang Zemin had become sufficiently confident to silence the filial oracles from the house in the hutang.
Deng no longer had a voice. In fact, the Deng clan’s fortunes plummeted recently after his son-in-law, He Ping, was forced to resign as director of the powerful armament department of the People’s Liberation Army and as president of the Poly Group, the army enterprise running the arms export industry.
He Ping is married to Deng Rong, who refurbished the patriarch’s fading image some years ago with her doting and much-publicized book “Deng Xiaoping, my father.” Her verbal reports starting “my father says . . .” could make or unmake people and companies.
Periodic rumors of Deng’s death proved premature but always managed to sow havoc on the Hong Kong and Shanghai stock exchanges. Many of these rumors were manipulated by strange personalities with devious motives.
I once was introduced in a bar to the chauffeur of a friend of Deng’s daughter. After many beers he volunteered that he had driven the great man to the Military Hospital 301 where the patriarch had regular medical checkups.
“He was vomiting,” the chauffeur revealed. “He was (pale). I think he is already dead,” he concluded before draining another beer.
There were other similar characters, but the chauffeur became famous because he had peddled the same story to diplomats and journalists for a week–before he fell ill with acute alcohol poisoning and was never heard from again.
On another occasion a minor party official offered to supply me with medical evidence that Deng was suffering from terminal prostate cancer and had less than a year to live. The young man asked me for my visiting card and promised to call a few days later.
He never did. A week later, the American consul called and asked if I could verify that a certain Mr. Wang, who had applied for a visa to the U.S., was in my employment.
Though retired and visibly ill, Deng as patriarch remained a key player in the power struggle between party factions. Reformers, or Dengists, used pronouncements issued in his name to keep the economy on its freewheeling track and to undermine hard-liners advocating more central control, more socialism and less capitalism.
In 1992, with conservatives gaining the upper hand, the hard-pressed Dengists whisked the ailing old man off in secret to the southern boom town of Shenzhen, opposite Hong Kong, where he was displayed nationwide on state television in prime time.
We all watched a visibly feeble patriarch stumble through a city park supported by his daughter, Nan. His hand trembled and his gaze was fixed at a point in the distance. He wore that mystified and fixed smile of an old man no longer certain what is happening around him. His daughter leaned closer to catch his mumble. Later we discovered it was the historic moment when the patriarch muttered those fateful words: “To be rich is glorious.”
That phrase relaunched China’s stalled economic program, silenced the hard-liners and encouraged an entire nation to forsake its last socialist vestiges and embark on the greatest entrepreneurial crusade the world has ever known.
A few days later a Chinese friend who had watched the same newscast and claimed he could read lips told me the old man actually had asked his daughter: “Where are we?”
Imperial edicts in China often kindled collective madness.
Mao’s fatal command to his Red Guards, “Destroy the old to build the new,” was meant metaphorically. Yet it resulted in one of history’s most destructive rampages as the Guards systematically reduced to rubble temples, ancient manuscripts and China’s most precious artistic treasures.
Perhaps Deng’s last utterance of national importance was during a visit to Shanghai three years ago. The old man loved Shanghai in winter; it gave him a chance to escape the bitter cold of Beijing.
During a much-publicized tour of Shanghai’s new economic zone, he apparently whispered two slurred words: “Faster! Faster!”
The exclamation was hailed by city fathers as imperial encouragement to request–and receive– further development funds for Shanghai. The city became China’s fastest-growing metropolis.
A few months later some junior Shanghai bureaucrats who were present at the historic tour told me the old man had simply wanted to end the tedious visit so he could have his lunch and his nap.
Hong Kong, the mecca of Asian speculators, was the usual origin of nearly every report about Deng’s imminent meeting with Karl Marx in some socialist paradise–a euphemism Deng himself coined in his sunset years.
There was no way to verify such rumors until the weekly Tuesday or Thursday briefings that the Foreign Ministry offered to the media.
“Sir,” a young eager beaver would ask, “are you aware that the Ulan Bator Workers Monthly reported that Mr. Deng is dead? What is your reaction?”
The spokespeople always had three possible replies: “I have no comment to make.” Or: “This is just further rumor-mongering by forces hostile to the People’s Republic of China.” Or: “Mr. Deng enjoys a state of health consistent with his age.”
This left Deng-watchers in a quandary when the rumors were fierce. One remedy was to drive past Deng’s Alley for a quick glance in case any changes had occurred near that forbidding iron gate.
One could also get lucky.
An elderly neighbor sitting in the April sun one afternoon became talkative. She said sometimes late in the evening she heard what she called “modern music” coming from the Great Leader’s house. Then there had been a night when she heard a scream. A flatbed tricycle had once delivered a bundle of straw at the gate.
Oh yes, she said, she had seen the little man. “He goes for a stroll in the alley when the hibiscus blooms. If you want to wait I can get you another chair. We can wait together.”
Deng never did come out that afternoon to smell the hibiscus, but the old woman did add something to my Dengist knowledge. She said the Dengs must be rich because she had found no evidence the family kept either pigs or hens in the house.
