New Left Review 97, January-February 2016

Rebecca Karl

LITTLE BIG MAN

The claims Alexander Pantsov and Steven Levine make for their new biography of Deng Xiaoping are bold and clear. [1] Alexander Pantsov & Steven Levine, Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life, Oxford University Press: New York 2015, $34.95, hardback, 610pp, 978 0 199 39203 2. They emphasize—repeatedly and in italics, no less—that theirs is an impeccably ‘objective’ treatment, a proposition they first demonstrate by offering a mise en scène of the June 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square, to which Deng is central. This narrative device announces that they will not whitewash Deng’s role in authorizing the bloodshed, in pointed contrast to Ezra Vogel’s massive hagiography, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (2011), which is far more ambivalent on the topic. In presenting this story so directly, Pantsov and Levine want to earn our trust, even if their retelling sheds no real new light on Deng’s role in this tragic and bloody episode. Their objectivity is further presented as a matter of evidentiary sourcing, whose volume and scope is indeed impressive. They draw on the extensive documentary sources published in Chinese and on English-language research, but also on the cpsu Archive in Moscow, which contains files on over 3,000 Chinese Communist leaders, including two previously unexamined personal dossiers on Deng himself. Since Deng not only trained at Moscow’s University of the Toilers of the East in the 1920s, and worked with Comintern agents as a ccp cadre in the 1930s and 40s, but also led successive Chinese delegations to the Kremlin during the acrimonious negotiations leading up to the Sino-Soviet split in the 1950s, there are good reasons to hope that these Russian-language sources might provide a fresh angle on the question of how the diminutive Deng became larger-than-life Deng Xiaoping. Yet all of these sources add up to less than they might.

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