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In a different historical sense, Deng replayed many aspects of the role of Chinese and Manchu statesmen during the waning years of China's last dynasty, the Qing, in the second half of the 19th century. Profoundly conscious of the advanced technological power of the West, these statesmen sought ways to graft elements of foreign technology and organizational skills onto their own economic and political infrastructure, so that they could achieve the delicate task of strengthening their country rather than undermining it from within. This selective and gradualist approach allowed China to keep at least a measure of faith that it was somehow preserving its own inner value system even while using the West in a host of developing areas. During this 19th century period--as during the 1980s and into the present--the effects of this attempt on the worlds of political culture were profoundly ambivalent. It turned out to be impossible to relegate foreign ideas to neatly circumscribed compartments; and by the end of the 19th century the pressure from the world of ideas had led to strident and insistent demands for new structures of justice, new realms of freedom for aesthetic endeavor and the dissemination of information, and abandonment of autocracy for either a genuinely circumscribed constitutional monarchy or a popularly based republican form of government. Under these and other pressures, the last dynasty fell in 1911.
Deng Xiaoping has left his successors with as delicate a balancing act as did these statesmen of a century ago. China now, as then, is a colossal country with a huge population, difficult to control from the center, uneven in economic growth and development, with wealth concentrated on the eastern coast. Regional interests and power bases are strong; there are massive disparities of income, and a decreasing willingness to contribute a requisite flow of taxes to the center in Beijing, since that center is often seen as both corrupt and ineffective. Periodic assertions of central police power can cow citizens recurrently but not remove deep-seated centers of unrest. At the same time, ebullient economic growth in many regions and sectors of the economy fuels a certain optimism, an optimism bolstered at the present by the incredible windfall of Hong Kong, which will return to Chinese-mainland control in July of this year. Behind the rhetoric of homage and mourning now under way in China, all those currently holding senior office--and the many who are unimpressed by these leaders and would dearly love to serve in their stead--will be sharing at least one thought in common: How on earth will we keep the lid on all this now that Deng is gone?
Jonathan D. Spence teaches modern Chinese history at Yale University and is the author of 10 books on China.