DENG XIAOPING will be commemorated in Chinese history as the leader who supervised the transition of the world's most populous country from feudalism to high technology. For a significant part of this century he shaped the destiny of more than one fifth of humankind. As a soldier and politician he helped make China communist, but in old age he gave them television sets and washing machines, and opened China's doors to Coca Cola and McDonald's.
The last of the surviving leaders of the Long March, Deng Xiaoping was born in northern Sichuan, in a hamlet with no roads, to the first concubine of a wealthy landowner. He left home as a teenager and never returned. At the age of 16 he went to Marseilles in France as a member of the communist youth movement and spent five years studying and organising. He also acquired a lifelong taste for croissants.
He returned home via Moscow and soon became chief secretary of the outlawed Communist Party's Central Committee. As a young revolutionary he fought in the Shanghai underground. His fortunes dipped in 1933 when he was attacked inside the party by pro Moscow elements and he lost his position - and was deserted by his second wife.
But the following year on the 6,000 mile Long March he forged a friendship with Mao Zedoig and went on to direct field armies for the communist side in China's civil war. He displayed a ruthlessness in waging ideological warfare, approving the killing of landlords to prevent future retribution against peasants who got their land, but he also launched innovative programmes to reward incentive. An American military observer who met him at the time was astonished at the knowledge of this "short, chunky and physically tough man" whose mind was "keen as mustard".
Three years after the communist victory of 1949, when his protege had accomplished daunting tasks in strengthening the defences of the war shattered country, Mao brought Deng to Beijing. He put his golden boy in charge of his anti rightist campaign in 1958, launched after his famous dictum, "Let one hundred flowers bloom, let one hundred schools of thought contend" had lured opponents into the open.
Deng had resisted the idea of allowing open criticism but vigorously pursued the attacks on the intelligentsia. Thirty years later Deng estimated that 500,000 people were repressed by the party during this period, and criticised himself as 60 per cent right - "It was necessary and correct" - and 40 per cent wrong.
THIS upheaval was followed by Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward in which Deng also played an enthusiastic role - though he appears to have been chastened by the effects of short sighted Utopian engineering by an all powerful leader. Mao's ideas, such as abolishing money and personal property and belting down all domestic metal implements to make steel, proved, catastrophic. Up to 30 million died.
To rectify matters, in 1961 Deng succeeded in reintroducing private farming and markets. He defended the reforms, stating that it didn't matter what colour the cat was as long as it caught mice, a saying which became the standard excuse for every change of course in the years ahead.
He was to pay for this during the Cultural Revolution a few years later when Mao, seeing enemies everywhere in the wake of his man made disaster, had him banished as a potential plotter to Jiangxi province. Deng was put under house arrest, every member of his family was attacked his home was ransacked, and he was branded the country's "number two capitalist roader".
Nevertheless Deng escaped the fate of the "number one capitalist roader", President Liu Shaoqi, who was left to die in prison. In 1973 the sands of power in Beijing shifted once again and he was recalled to the party leadership. Mao needed the help of a dynamic figure still respected by the military. Mao put him in charge of the country's recovery.
Deng was an unlikely "strong man". Henry Kissinger dismissed him as a "nasty little man". He chain smoked and spat in public. But this almost comic figure, whose feet hardly reached the floor when he sat facing world leaders, saw that things needed, to change and he set about seizing the power necessary to reverse China's fortunes with a new slogan, "Seek truth from facts".
As Mao neared the end of his life, his wife Jiang Qing and three cronies - the "Gang of Four" - attacked Deng as a rightist in a bid to appeal to the still strong socialist beliefs of the people and seize power themselves. But Deng hit back at them as being responsible for a generation of "mental cripples" and gained the upper hand. The four ended up in jail.
After Mao's death Deng emerged as China's most powerful figure. His hour came in August 1977 when he was confirmed as the country's de facto leader at the' Eleventh Party Congress. He began again a series of reforms, first by assembling a new generation of young cadres and infusing them with the notion that poverty was not communism.
Communism was the right road for China but it could pick out of capitalism what was good for China, he said. It would be a new communism "with Chinese characteristics". Mao helped"the peasants seize the land from the rich and make it into communes, but Deng now gave it back to the peasants. China became a rural construction site as farmers began making money and building brick houses in every village and town.
DENG BECAME a hero in the United States as a counter revolutionary, and on a visit to the US was lionised by the captains of industry and honoured at a Texas rodeo where he appeared in a tengallon hat.
But under Deng the Communists Party of China remained firmly in charge.
Deng could not tolerate dissent. One prominent opponent, Wei Jingsheng, was jailed for 15 years in 1979 after accusing Deng of failing, to see that democracy was essential to true reform, and still languishes in prison. In 1983 he cracked down on crime and spiritual pollution from the west and in 1986 dealt swiftly with student protests in Beijing.
With the opportunities offered by the introduction of capitalist ways in a society without capitalist regulation, corruption swept the upper levels of Chinese powers and the anger of young people which erupted in the biggest ever pro democracy protests of Tiananmen Square in 1989 could not be contained so easily.
It was Deng, the former soldier who could command the loyalty of the People's Army, who ordered in the tanks on June 4th to crush the challenge to the party's authority. "Democracy can develop only gradually," he said.
Deng's own authority was then challenged within the party as in the post Tiananmen years conservatives began putting the brake on reforms. Deng could not command a ready platform to counter the hard liners. He had formally relinquished all titles in 1990, keeping only the honorary chairmanship of China's Bridge Association, reflecting his lifelong passion for the card game.
As his reforms were obstructed by increasingly assertive conservatives, Deng played a masterful end game. He made a carefully, planned visit in January 1992 to the south, culminating at Shanzhen, the city on the border of Hong Kong which had become a catalyst of modernisation. He was received enthusiastically by people who sensed that his appearance meant that a new power struggle was under way, and wanted him to win.
The wily old party scrapper was using the tactics of Mao in the Cultural Revolution - going round the leadership structures to rally proletarian support. In this case the proletariat consisted of reform minded officials and entrepreneurs, who now seized the chance to plough ahead enthusiastically with bold experiments.
For days his visit went unreported in the official media as the struggle was fought out behind the scenes in Beijing. But with Hong Kong newspapers giving it big publicity, it eventually became news in China too, and the party organs fell into line. The momentum of reform received the impetus it needed. It was a triumph of opportunism.
Deng made a revealing remark to local officials on that trip.
"Without the achievements of reform and opening up to the outside world we might not have been able to pass the test of the June 4th incident, and if we failed to pass the test there would have been a chaotic situation that might have led to civil war."
MANY Chinese people will see Deng as a discredited leader who was ultimately responsible for Tiananmen Square. But it was this, unprepossessing, blunt spoken little man who almost alone became responsible for the boom which has transformed China into an emerging world economic superpower.
He will always be honoured in China for one of his greatest achievements - taking on Margaret Thatcher and securing the agreement to take over Hong Kong in 1997. The British found him "short tempered, bossy, spitting and chain smoking", according to a contemporary account. But he was more than her match.
He did not live to see his day of triumph however, and even if he had, it is doubtful if he would have realised what was going on. He had long ago stopped playing bridge as his health deteriorated. The father of five children, of whom his crippled son, Pufang, Was the favourite, he lived out his last days in their care in a three storey cement block and steel construction in a narrow lane near Tiananmen Square.
His home had steel walls and bullet proof glass and a wide lawn at the back. The house also contained an auditorium where he could watch films and have informal conferences with party leaders before his mental and physical health made this impractical. In fact he was not seen in public after appearing at the festivities for the 1994 Chinese New Year, then a feeble man, who had to be supported by each arm.
Deng was the subject at the start of 1997 of a state television 12 part documentary on his life, but without any details of his present circumstances and without interviews with his wife or children. By then China had to all intents and purposes entered the post Deng period. The documentary was clearly intended to associate President Jiang Zemin, who personally supervised its making, with his achievements and policies.
For its own purposes, the current leadership conferred on him the cult of personality he always disdained.