Recurring in time across China's history has been the story of the rise and decline of successive dynasties. Since the 1900s, Chinese historians have strenuously attacked this traditional way of looking at history as violating any claims in China to development and progress. They feel that such an idea lies behind the concept of "an unchanging China," which has been so damaging to foreign assessments of China's development. Such historians have looked for the deeper rhythms of economic growth and change, territorial expansion, developments in the arts, and environmental factors as examples of what we should be studying instead. Nonetheless dynasties have risen and fallen across well over three millenniums, and it is not completely absurd to depict the People's Republic as the latest manifestation of this historical phenomenon.
For the historian, therefore, Deng's death raises a different but also absorbing set of echoes and parallels to the past. The 15 years between 1978, when Deng returned to power after two major purges that failed to remove him from active contention for the leadership, and 1993, when his health obviously began to fail, have left him an ineradicable role in future accounts of China. These parallels seem to fit fairly neatly into two molds. One, familiar from several earlier dynasties, is the role of the man who has the delicate task of consolidating the work of an ambitious, tough, erratic though canny, and self-aggrandizing reunifier of China. Mao Zedong, like a select number of earlier Emperors, played the unifier's role in drawing China together again in 1949 after a half-century of nightmarish domestic turbulence, civil war and foreign invasion. It fell to Deng Xiaoping, again like certain historical precursors, to take this mixed legacy and secure the positive aspects of the reunification in both its territorial and its economic dimensions. Deng, like these predecessors, could be completely ruthless in pursuit of these goals. He could also be vindictive and two-faced. But like them, he made China more prosperous, made restitution to a significant number of the victims from the founding phase, showed a certain flexibility in moving to recruit new bureaucratic talent from those who had not been in the original band of the "faithful," and released the harshest of the constraints that had been imposed on writers and artists.