In 1957 Deng had been Mao's right-hand man in implementing the attack on intellectuals, but he did not instinctively dislike them as Mao did. Mao, who denigrated them as “bourgeois intellectuals,” time and again found ways to humiliate them and to send them to be educated by performing physical labor. Deng never had an opportunity to study at a university, but he had once been on track to receive a higher education and made his best effort to enter a French university. His wife had studied physics at China's premier university, Peking University, and three of his five children had also studied
...more
