On a freezing January afternoon in 1992, Deng Xiaoping, China’s former paramount leader and now a revered elder statesman, set off on a month-long trip around China’s south in defence of the reforms he had set in motion to open up China’s economy and transform the country into the political and economic powerhouse we know today.
In The Southern Tour: Deng Xiaoping and the Fight for China’s Future (Bloomsbury Asian Arguments, 2024), Jonathan Chatwin travels 3,000 miles in the footsteps of Deng’s legendary “southern tour”, pursuing the stories of his journey and examining its legacies in the country today. Jonathan Chatwin is an independent writer whose last book, Long Peace Street (Manchester University Press, 2019), retraced the history and development of Beijing’s central west-east access Chang’an Jie. Paul French caught up with Chatwin to talk Deng, legacy and how it’s all remembered in today’s China.
Can you give us a quick explainer on the southern tour and why Deng saw it as so essential?
In 1988, there was an inflation crisis which led to the so-called ‘conservatives’ within the Chinese Communist Party leadership – named after their desire to ‘conserve’ a Soviet-style planned economy – imposing stricter controls on economic growth, slowing the freewheeling of the economy over the previous few years. This ‘rectification’ process continued after the Tiananmen protests, which seemed to those conservatives to confirm that economic liberalisation had been too much, too fast. Deng retired officially in November of 1989 but was determined that China shouldn’t slow down its economic liberalisation – to him, the protests of June proved the need to continue making people’s lives better in order to secure the authority of the party. He tried to reignite the economy in 1990 and 1991 but didn’t manage to persuade the new leadership, so in January 1992, nine months before the all-important 14th Party Congress, he set off to two Special Economic Zones, Shenzhen and Zhuhai, as well as Shanghai, to make his case and try to pivot China back towards more ambitious reform and opening.
Southern tours also have a long history in China going back to earlier dynasties. Can you tell us a little more about that?
The Chinese term nanxun, which later came to be applied to Deng’s 1984 and 1992 journeys south, traditionally applied to the tours of inspection and pilgrimage that go all the way back to the emperors of Chinese legend. The most well-known of these today are the Qing dynasty tours of Kangxi and Qianlong – partly because both had magnificent scroll-paintings produced, recording and mythologising them. Perhaps surprisingly, Mao resurrected this tradition, particularly in his journeying before the Cultural Revolution, and in the Southern Tour that preceded Lin Biao’s death in the early 1970s, using his journeys away from the capital to rally support.
How instrumental was the southern tour in the opening up and development of Shanghai? People often forget Shanghai was really the last big Chinese city to be allowed to reform and grow.
The idea of opening Shanghai to foreign investment and liberalising the economy there was worrisome for the leadership in the 1980s, particularly the most powerful conservative (and one of the ‘eight elders’ of the party), Chen Yun, who came from that area. Shanghai, like a number of other coastal and river towns in China, had been a ‘treaty port’ in the 19th century and, therefore, a symbol of foreign exploitation. Shanghai was also something of a cash cow for the communists, so they didn’t want to risk that. Deng had been there in 1990 and 1991 and talked with Zhu Rongji, who was mayor and later would run China’s national economic policy, about more ambitiously developing the area of Pudong, to the east of the Huangpu River, which at that time was still relatively undeveloped – mainly warehouses, factories and small conurbations. He hadn’t succeeded. However, post-1992, Pudong would begin to develop more quickly, eventually becoming the iconic cluster of skyscrapers we know today. In many ways, Pudong is the most visible legacy of Deng’s southern tour.
How do you see Deng’s legacy in China today?
Those who lived through that era are often nostalgic – not just for the increase in living standards, but for the swirl of political debate that went on during the 1980s and to which Tiananmen put a stop. To understand Deng, you need to understand that everything he did was designed to keep the party in power. He was also profoundly influenced by the Cultural Revolution, during which he was purged twice, and avoiding returning to the ‘backwardness and poverty’ of that era was key in his ambitions. However, his relentless pursuit of growth at all costs, predicated on cheap labour, debt-fuelled housing and infrastructure, and a wilful ignorance of environmental impact, created a model of growth that was flawed and, as the current leadership has discovered, unsustainable.
Perhaps more importantly, how do you think the Party sees Deng’s legacy today – in particular, Xi Jinping?
When he came to power, Xi went to Shenzhen – and returned in 2018 and 2020 – in obvious and knowing homage to Deng. So a lot of people, both within and outside China, thought, here’s the guy to reinvigorate reform and opening after the lost decade of Hu Jintao. It obviously hasn’t worked out that way, and Deng is infrequently referenced by Xi.
Deng is problematic for a few reasons. Firstly, he deployed power as a party elder with no official role – not something Xi wants to endorse. Secondly, if the party is eternally right, why did Deng need to fix the economic mess Mao had created, and why did he lose not one but two General Secretaries in the late 1980s – Hu Yaobang in 1987 and Zhao Ziyang in 1989? Finally, he was popular, and Xi is fundamentally worried about anyone who might invite negative comparisons.
To my mind, there are very few, if any, public monuments or tributes to Deng on display across China. Do you think this is deliberate? Is his legacy downplayed at a time of reduced emphasis on reform?
There is that famous statue of him, which is on the cover of the book, at the top of Lotus Hill in Shenzhen, and the billboard which still stretches across a street corner there with his face superimposed on the skyline. The statue was warehoused for a number of years before its unveiling, so even in the 1990s his legacy was somewhat complicated. It seems amazing to me, in particular, that there is no memorial to him in Pudong.
He was always a relatively modest man, however, and disliked the cult of personality approach of Mao – which makes his adoption of Maoist techniques in 1992, and the subsequent mythologisation of the Southern Tour through the 1990s and early 2000s all the more interesting.
