Deng's reforms still incomplete
Power in China remains personal, and leadership requires a capacity to rally the disparate interests of Communist Party barons, army generals, economic technocrats and the general population. Mr.Deng, like Mao Zedong, did this through personal ties forged over the decades of leadership dating back to the Long March in the 1930s. That revolutionary generation has now departed, and its successors will not be able to rule the same way.
Formal leadership now passes to a handful of temporarily united party functionaries under President Jian Zemin. All agree on a general formula of "continued reform", but those plastic words are subject to radically different interpretations. While Mr. Deng gave primacy to accelerating economic development, Mr. Jiang seems more inclined to revitalize key tenets of socialist ideology and flex some of China's newfound military muscle.
Mr. Deng, whose career began in the 1920s, was not always a reformer. In the 1950s he helped lead the Anti Rightist Campaign, an orgy of denunciation and punishment that ruined hundreds of thousands of lives. A decade later, during the Cultural Revolution, he was himself purged as a rightist. After a brief return to power, he was purged again in 1976 as "an unrepentant capitalist roader."
Those experiences inoculated him against Maoist mass mobilizations, but did not teach him tolerance. His own legacy is stained by the relentless persecution of democracy campaigners like Wei Jing-sheng, and most dramatically by his dispatch of tanks against peaceful protesters in Tiananmen Square. China's official verdict on that shattering and costly episode may be re- examined in the years to come.
Deng Xiaoping is likely to be best remembered for his economic reforms. These transformed China from an impoverished country of giant agricultural communes, inefficient state industries and bureaucratic barriers to trade and investment into a global growth leader with rapidly rising living standards for many of its 1.2 billion people.
These reforms, however, are incomplete. Building up a market economy within a framework of central planning and alongside a still huge state sector has brought shortages of raw materials, systematic corruption and chronic inflation. Meanwhile, foreign investors have discovered that they cannot always count on Chinese law or contracts.
The late stages of Mr. Deng's rule brought policy inflexibility as major decisions about China's future direction were simply deferred. Now those issues must be faced, starting with the succession itself.
The long era of rule by Communist China's founding generation has finally come to an end. The world will now learn whether the regime it left behind is capable of leading China to a stable, prosperous an peaceful future.
-- The New York Times