State’s Chinese Recall Titan and Tyrant

From the office suites of Monterey Park to the holiday-festooned streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown, word of the death of Chinese senior leader Deng Xiaoping reverberated with the impact of a titan felled.

There may have been little surprise--he had been sick so long, after all--but Deng’s death evoked throughout California’s vast Chinese community the sort of talk reserved for the truly awesome forces of history. Admirers credited him with prodding his nation toward modernity by opening it to the ways--and the commerce--of the West. Critics recalled him as the author of the infamous Tiananmen Square crackdown and the last craggy soldier of China’s repressive old guard.

“It signifies the end of the old last era--the last generation that was against democracy,” said Marina Tse, a Duarte schoolteacher active in the San Gabriel Valley’s Chinese American community. “I’ve been thinking: How long do we have to wait for him to be gone for things to move on?”

Deng’s death prompted concern about the future of China’s burgeoning trade ties with the West, including among many business people in Southern California who have looked to China as a land of opportunity. But most local observers said the ailing Deng had already been moved to the sidelines and predicted China was unlikely now to reverse the course he set.

“I don’t think they can stop the open-door policy,” said David H. Ma, a Monterey Park consultant who has advised Chinese officials hoping to do business in the United States.

Across a spectrum of ideology, local Chinese Americans of many walks of life praised Deng as a forceful visionary who tugged a closed society toward the modern age. “His contributions to the economic development of China are unmatched in history. . . . He lifted 200 million people out of poverty,” said historian L. Ling-chi Wang, a Chinese American professor at UC Berkeley.

Wang credited Deng with defining a closer relationship between China and the United States in 1979 and managing to survive repeated purges. “He was a survivor--sort of like Nixon,” Wang said.

Yining Xie, who grew up in China and now runs the Alhambra-based China Press newspaper, observed of Deng: “I think he’s the greatest man in China. He led the nation to modernization.”

Xie said Deng’s reforms touched the daily lives of Chinese. Before 1978, Xie said, “I had no idea about what is a television. I never tasted a beer.” That would be unfathomable today in a land that now serves Heineken and Budweiser, Xie said.

Nancy Yee, executive director of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, said of the late “paramount leader”: “He was a great man. He lifted the iron curtain and opened China to the world.”

Even some who have clashed with the heavy-handed methods of Deng’s government managed praise for his role in history.

UC Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien, who has met Deng several times, said he wrote a protest letter to him after Chinese troops cracked down on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, causing what many now estimate to have been 1,000 or more deaths. Tien refused to visit China for five years after that, but he called Deng “a major thinker in the modern history of China.”

News and rumors about Deng’s health had swirled through the Chinese-language press and on the street. One Chinese-language newspaper in Los Angeles hit the streets with an extra edition hours after Deng’s death was announced.

“This story is very critical for the Chinese community in the L.A. area,” said Andrew Sun, city editor of the Chinese Daily News in Monterey Park.

People of Chinese ancestry make up the largest Asian group in the nation and about half--or nearly 800,000--live in California, mostly in Los Angeles and San Francisco. California has the largest Chinese population outside Asia. Many are first-generation immigrants who pay close attention to what’s happening in their ancestral land. But the Chinese American community is notably diverse--several communities, really--with roots tracing to the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong and other spots in Asia.

In San Francisco’s Chinatown, the oldest such enclave in the United States, word of Deng’s death traveled slowly and held little surprise. The twin barriers of time and distance have dulled much of the reaction in the neighborhood, which was decked out for the second week of Chinese New Year events.

Asked about Deng, an older man of Chinese descent on Grant Avenue simply replied: “I’m American-born. We don’t think too much about it.” The Chinese leader’s death, he added, would probably have little effect on the land of his ancestors because “all the change has been made already.”

Consultant Ma, who has been active in China’s pro-democracy movement, observed that Deng’s death could offer China a fresh start, saying: “I hope what Mr. Deng’s death can do is liberalize and release China from the old dictatorial control and allow China to go forward into the 21st century with a new face, a new look.”

Times staff writer Maria La Ganga in San Francisco contributed to this report.