Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping Volume 3

Selected Works #3

by Deng Xiaoping

Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping Volume 3

邓小平文选（第三卷）

Genres: China

418 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 1, 1993

Reviews

[Chet · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Some people are worried that China might go capitalist. We cannot say that their concern is entirely groundless. But we shall use facts, not empty words, to dispel their anxieties and to answer the people who, on the contrary, are hoping we will go capitalist. The press, television and all other mass media must pay attention to this task. We ourselves are imbued with communist ideals and convictions: we must make a point of fostering those ideals and convictions in the next generation or the next two generations. We must see to it that our young people do not fall captive to decadent capitalist ideas. We must make absolutely sure of that."
-Deng Xiaoping March 7th, 1985

The Western left in near unanimity insists that China is now fully capitalist. There are some notable exceptions to this line of argument coming from Western Marxist scholars, but to balance all of these voices out I've found it refreshing and illuminating to go directly to the source: Deng Xiaoping, architect of China's "reform and opening up."

All the current heckles and objections from Jacobin Mag et. al. are avant la lettre addressed here. Deng knew his proposals would worry communist stalwarts within his own party, and he went into painstaking detail to alleviate their concerns and explain his line of thinking. As the scholar Vijay Prashad concisely put it in a lecture series this year on China's current trajectory, "you can't socialize poverty." This same theme is repeated over and over in Deng's Collected Works. If China wanted to be not only socialist ideologically but also prosperous materially some compromise with the capitalist world would be necessary in the short term.

Diverging from my fellow leftists here in the States, I believe this compromise is ongoing, not some pathetic surrender too many of us have constructed in our own heads. Could the experiment veer into a full-blown surrender to neoliberalism? Of course. This is always a risk, and Trump, Pompeo, Pelosi and the gang are a big part of trying to make that risk a reality. But I disagree that we're already there, and I certainly disagree that we arrived at that surrender as soon as Deng "opened up" China.

Wherever we stand on the status of the PRC, we shouldn't only read Western sources. Nor should we be selective with our Chinese and Chinese diaspora sources so that we end up reading only "dissidents" who confirm bigoted Western ideas (a particularly notorious example being Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo). I would recommend the Collected Works of Deng Xiaoping to anyone hungry to learn more about contemporary China from within.

[Michael’ · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read only 15 of the 119 excerpts but that was enough. Deng introduces various new ideas like government control being socialist as long as the communist party is in charge and laws guaranteeing freedom of expression, introduced by Mao, being “bourgeois liberalisation” and not in line with the Chinese conception of human rights. Also, Taiwan is allowed to keep a bureaucracy and army if only it lets the PRC do its foreign affairs, not a very Marxist position. The only thing of value was his text on crime.