Deng’s Daughter Promoting Book That Fills Historical Gap

It is one of those cases in which the book tour is much more interesting than the book.

“My Father Deng Xiaoping” is a fawning, cliche-riddled, 500-page biography about China’s paramount leader that ends in 1952, more than 25 years before Deng came to power.

But on a promotional tour to France and the United States, the book’s author, youngest daughter Deng Rong, is breaking tradition and filling in the historical gap with details that will occupy China scholars for years to come.

“This is unprecedented,” said UCLA political scientist Richard Baum, author of a recent book on the Deng Xiaoping era. “There has never before been a book tour by a high-level official or relative of a high-level official since the Communists came to power.”

Deng Rong, 45, one of five Deng Xiaoping children who remain extremely close to their father and active in his affairs, arrived in New York on Friday after spending a week in Paris, where she granted interviews with several leading French publications.

On the most sensitive subject, her father’s health, Deng Rong confirmed accounts that he needs help standing up but denied that he is dying.

“Because he’s old,” Deng Rong told Romain Franklin, interviewer for the French daily newspaper Liberation, “he has problems with his legs and therefore needs a little help. . . . But he is nonetheless still able to get around.

“He carries himself well for a man of 90. He has no particular illness. He’s just old. It’s natural.”

In the interviews, which barely touched on the contents of the book she was ostensibly promoting, Deng Rong described the bloody 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tian An Men Square as a tragic necessity brought about by weak leadership at the center of the Communist Party.

In the Liberation interview, she compared the Chinese army actions to the treatment of demonstrators in the United States during the 1970s--an apparent reference to the May, 1970, killing of students at Kent State University by National Guard troops--and the 1993 raid by U.S. federal agents on the religious sect compound near Waco, Tex.

Repeating a theme of Chinese hard-liners in the wake of Tian An Men, in which hundreds and perhaps thousands of citizens died, Deng Rong placed the blame on then-Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang.

“If at the beginning (of the demonstrations) the party leaders had been more firm,” she said, “the troubles would not have been as serious. Zhao Ziyang has an irrefutable responsibility.”

Most observers predict that, when Deng Xiaoping dies, his successors will attempt some form of fence-mending reassessment of the Tian An Men incident. Some have speculated that Zhao might be allowed to return from political exile to the center stage.

But Baum said Deng Rong’s harsh characterization of Zhao indicates that the Deng camp still has strong feelings that could block his return.

In the interviews, Deng Rong insisted that her father, who retired in 1989, does not “rule from behind the scenes like some people claim.”

Still, she confirmed that on at least two occasions, the Tian An Men crackdown and a 1992 “southern tour” campaign to invigorate the Chinese economy, the elder Deng placed himself back in active service.

Some political analysts have predicted a bitter succession battle after Deng’s death.

But Deng Rong said in the Liberation interview that the process of succession had already taken place. “Today, the new leadership team is in place with (Communist Party leader and President) Jiang Zemin at the head.”

If a succession battle does occur, it could boomerang against the family of Deng Xiaoping. Some have speculated that the international book tour is intended to put a positive spin on Deng’s role in history before the painful period of reassessment.