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By 1984, economic reform was being introduced in the big cities, so much so that Old Guard Marxists began to decry the "spiritual pollution" of cosmetics and discotheques. But Deng persisted, likening the effect to mere "flies that come through an open window." By the late '80s, however, economic liberalization had spilled uncontrollably into political yearnings; soon labor unrest and student demonstrations for greater freedom panicked Deng. He sacked his popular heir apparent, party chief Hu Yaobang, for pushing political reforms. By this time the only title Deng held was honorary chairman of the Chinese Bridge Association (he had refused all high posts since his 1977 comeback, and in 1989 gave up the critical job as head of the Central Military Commission). Still, Premier Zhao Ziyang admitted to the visiting Mikhail Gorbachev that all major Politburo decisions had to be approved by Deng.
Prosperity, however, dictated its own momentum. The sudden wealth of the country had engendered a pandemic of official corruption, widened income disparities and brought on severe bouts of inflation. In April 1989, students turned public mourning for Hu Yaobang, who had died of cancer, into the protracted Tiananmen protests. One night in June, Deng called in the army.
His conservative rivals took advantage of the massacre to pull back the reforms--or at least slow their pace. And as Deng retreated into a self-critical silence, they seemed to succeed. But Deng, though increasingly frail, fought back. In February 1992, sensing that the populace was exasperated by conservative austerities, he emerged from seclusion to rout his opponents. His stratagem: leading high officials on a tour of Shenzhen and Zhuhai, his prosperous economic enclaves. Nearly deaf by now, he urged Chinese to "seize the opportunity" of such go-go, free-market examples. The result was an explosion of economic growth and the elevation of "Deng Xiaoping Thought" to gospel, an ironic turn for a man who shuddered at "cults of personality." But it was the final somersault he had to perform to ensure the survival of his legacy.
"Leaders are men, not gods," said Deng Xiaoping. Mao Zedong, the man who would be a god, lies embalmed and displayed in his mausoleum in Tiananmen Square. Deng has asked that his eyes be donated to medicine, his ashes be cast into the sea and no monuments be built to him. Mao had resided in Zhongnanhai, the walled district of Beijing that is China's new Forbidden City; Deng chose to live not in Zhongnanhai but in a block-long house called Miliangku (literally "rice-grain storehouse"), not far away. It was there that China's unquestioned leader, its emperor without portfolio, enjoyed his family, played his beloved games of bridge and drifted into senescence, dealing with the specters that haunt the capital and the realm. They were ghosts as hoary as the last Emperor of the Ming dynasty who hanged himself on Coal Hill, just east of Deng's home; the students gunned down outside Miliangku by a reactionary government in 1919; the many spirits of Tiananmen; the tens of millions who died of hunger in the Great Leap Forward. And finally there was that most troublesome shadow of all, Mao Zedong, Deng's friend and foe, his rival for the soul of a country so ancient it has had the misfortune both to forget its history many times over and to repeat it again and again. Only history will decide who was the greater.