美国《外交政策》：邓小平不可告人的秘密
邓小平真正改变了中国，这部有关他的最新传记是迄今最完整的、也是最有雄心的。但是新出版的由傅高义（Ezra Vogel）执笔的这部《邓小平传》是否也留下了盲点？
邓小平是你知之甚少的20世纪最重要的领导人——除非你是中国人。尽管中华人民共和国的大多数人完全明白，正是拜邓所赐，他们得以摆脱贫穷，中国得以跻身世界领先的工业国家行列。然而在世界其它地方，T恤衫上印着的始终是毛主席的头像。邓在1997年去世，毫无疑问，在他的祖国以外，他很少被当作是世界上最成功的当代政治家。
这有很多原因。毛之所以成为了一个全球性的象征符号，是因为他发动的波澜壮阔的文化大革命与当代全球性的年轻人反叛权威这一点是个完美的切合。即使全世界现在已更清醒地认识到他的罪行世所罕见，但罩在他头上的那种蔑视法律的时髦光环依旧没有消失。（在某些情况下，毛那种赤裸裸地拥抱群众暴力的激情或许还增添了他的吸引力。）与此相反，邓的市场化改革更加微妙，更加循序渐进，他的武器不是令人热血沸腾的游行，而是达沃斯论坛上的讲话。其成果尽管令人瞠目结舌，但很难说散发出了让人心潮澎湃的魅力。
不过，邓的一生是漫长的、非凡的，充满了戏剧性，对全世界来说也意义深远。他的一生值得被仔细爬梳。所以，我们必须感谢哈佛大学的教授傅高义（Ezra Vogel），他把自己学术生涯中的很大一部分花费在编撰这部煌煌巨著——《邓小平与中国的转型》（Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China）上，这是到目前为止有关邓的最有雄心的作品。傅高义做了大量的工作。他似乎仔细研读了中国共产党自1921年到现在发布的所有会议文件。（我不能说自己很羡慕他有这份苦功，但，这事儿总要有人去做。）
在此之前也出过几本邓的传记——从用词简约的杨炳章（Benjamin Yang）、文雅的前外交家理查德・伊文思（Richard Evans），到一丝不苟的分析人士迈克尔・马蒂（Michael Marti），但是傅高义的作品可以算作是最完整、最有信息含量的一本。（莫里斯・迈斯纳 Maurice Meisner 曾经写了一本书，认为邓小平和他的时代活力非凡，但是那本传记中并没有太多内容。）傅高义的作品鉅细靡遗，这当然算是件好事。但是这本928页的书中，有些地方也读得让人疲惫不堪。比如部分章节名称是“经济调整和农村改革，1978－1982”这种。如果你想专门了解邓的职业生涯，你绝对可以在这本书里找到；但是如果你想了解他的生活，那么你恐怕会觉得这本书有点令人失望。傅高义或许并不赞成工作是最重要的，但在某种程度上，事实的确如此。一本传记，从文体上说，就应该讲一个故事，最好还是读者不必费力就能解读的故事。基本事实是文学重要的组成部分。威廉・陶伯曼（William Taubman）在创作赫鲁晓夫的传记时，也进行了大量的研究，但他还是用讽刺的语气完成了对赫鲁晓夫的描摹。而傅高义则相反，似乎相当快地就跳过了他心目的英雄经历过的困苦、黑暗的一面。邓小平一生中大量的谜团、令人惊愕的幕后阴谋，以及四川人的辛辣气息，在书中基本没有反应。（译注1：此处提及的几本书的详情见文后注释。）
傅高义自20世纪60年代就经常去中国，多年来，他与邓的亲属和中共内部高层官员建立起了密切的关系，这种接触无疑丰富了他的作品。每当傅高义揭示出一些真正的爆料，往往都不是来自文件，而是披露了内部人士的观点。我最喜欢的一句是邓的小儿子所说的：“我父亲认为戈尔巴乔夫是个傻瓜。”
你可以认为，这样不经意的一句话是邓的职业人生的基石，也是中国与苏联采取完全不同路线的根本所在。1956年，已经度过30年坎坷职业生涯的邓率领中国代表团到莫斯科参加苏维埃共产党第20届代表大会。就是在这次会议上，赫鲁晓夫发表了决定苏联未来命运的反对斯大林个人崇拜的“秘密讲话”。（译注：2）像其他外国与会者一样，在赫鲁晓夫清算斯大林罪行和政策失误时，中国人并不在场，但是他们很快就了解到了足够的信息。
戈尔巴乔夫在那时还是个年轻的自以为是的家伙，后来他努力推进赫鲁晓夫在政治开放方面的想法，但从未建立起与之配套的经济政策。邓在那时则已经是一个经历过数十年血腥政治斗争的老练的官员，因此他能够得出和戈氏完全相反的结论。他意识到，如果你的政治体制把领导人们奉若神明，那么把他们还原成人的结果就会从根本上变得不稳定。最好还是把神继续供在神坛上，同时把精力放在改善人民的日常生活上来。当他在70年代末掌权之后，邓就决定首先把经济放在第一位。尽管他和其他数百万人都在文化大革命中被毛整肃，但他依然确定要维护毛主席在中华人民共和国的超级英雄地位。
这被证明是一项令人惊异的成功战略。邓和他的党内同志们在1979年所进行的改革成为了人类历史上最大规模的脱贫行动。在过去三十年里，中国拥抱了市场，让数亿人摆脱了贫困。如傅高义所写：“当邓在1978年成为最高领导人之时，中国与世界的贸易总额只有不到100亿美元。三十年之后，这个数字已经扩大了一百倍。”
毫无疑问，邓扩大了很多中国人的个人自由空间，尽管他曾经无情地捍卫中共的领导地位，拒绝从根本上进行民主改革。1989年6月，邓选择用残酷的武力镇压北京和其他城市的学生示威抗议，这给他的声誉留下了不可磨灭的污点。但是经济自由化没有止步，他向那些保守派批评人士证明了自己捍卫共产党地位的能力，这一点不可小觑。傅高义花了大量篇幅描述邓在1992年的“南巡”，他在南巡中高度评价自己在70年代末期实施的经济特区计划。这次出行让经济改革者们更加大胆，让他们在与对手的较量中获得了巨大的优势。中国从此没有走回头路，今天，世界都为之叹为观止。
在邓小平76年的职业生涯中，前半段他一直追随着伟大领袖，同样也会忽视他人的生命。（据傅高义所写，邓在多年担任军队政委期间，因无惧在必要时牺牲士兵的生命而名声在外。）但渐渐地——或许是在50年代末饿死4500万人的灾难性的“大跃进”时——邓放弃了“毛主席永远正确”的幻想。1961年，邓在党内一次会议上发表讲话，说他笃信老家四川的一句谚语：“不管黑猫白猫，抓到耗子就是好猫。”邓用他自己的方式向党呼吁把经济效率放在革命精神之前，毛当然理解这种呼吁是对他的路线的一种挑战。就是这种意见分歧让邓在文化大革命期间，后来又在1976年周恩来去世之后陷入了几乎致命的绝境。邓小平总共被他的对手打倒了三次——但每一次他又积蓄了更大的力量东山再起。
1977年，邓第三次重返党内，这已是党令人瞩目地实现了打倒毛的极端教条主义的遗孀江青和她的盟友（臭名昭著的“四人帮”）之后的事。傅高义明智地紧接着邓的这一次回归而大书特书。据我测算，在这本928页的书中，对1978年-1979年间事件的描述足足有263页，邓在这段时期最终成为了中国的最高领导人，并开始了他的改革计划。他从其它东亚国家借鉴了许多经验，但没有公开这么说。那些国家已经找到了一条威权制度下以市场为导向的现代化之路。（或许最有讽刺意味的是，）其中就包括了“变节”的台湾省。
美国人总是凭直觉把改革和创新与年轻划等号，但是邓在开展这一惊心动魄的变化历程时，已经年过七旬。傅高义高超地把中国巨变的政治细节呈现在读者眼前。
然而，他在描述邓不那么光彩的一面时，并没有展示出大师风范。仅举一例，傅高义在描述1957年反右运动时，说邓在毛的命令下主导的这场运动是“对55万名被戴上了右派帽子的知识分子的疯狂攻击，这场运动摧毁了中国许多最优秀的科学技术人才，让另外许多人被边缘化。”他写到：“一些知识分子自命清高，肆意批评政府官员，其实这些官员也有自己的困难处境。这让邓非常恼火。”仅此而已吗？傅高义丝毫没有提到这场运动受害者遭到虐待、被逼自杀、在劳改营中被判刑，以及被流放，有时长达几十年之久。
当然，传记作家用其书中主角的视角审视一切，这个理由无可厚非。如果我们仅听对邓小平的批评之词，对他的一生就会有很多地方无法了解。但问题是，傅高义有些过于倾向于用党的逻辑来解释某些事件，比如说天安门大屠杀或西藏问题，有时人们就很难明白为什么其他人可能会有不同的想法。80年代初，邓粗暴地阻止了党内知识分子的一些自由对话，傅高义一本正经地说：“西方人认为全能的上帝能够批判尘世间的统治者，但这并不是中国传统的一部分。”或许我在这儿漏看了什么，但邓和他的同志们倾毕生之力，根据一名德国犹太人（译注：此处应指马克思）的深奥理论来改造中国。这跟中国传统有关吗？奇怪的是，傅高义只要一提到中国传统，就说党确定了中国人的价值观，不知为何，对党的批评就不能形成中国价值观。
傅高义并非一贯殷勤有加，他的确提到了一些黑暗面，但总是小心翼翼，避之唯恐不及。他对邓在1978-1979年间成为最高领导人的描述丝毫不含讽刺意味，而是说：“那是邓为了党国的福祉而排挤了华国锋的一刻。”他还提到，北京的民主墙在1978年下半年开始出现了很多批判性大字报，那里成了一个非同寻常的多元思想的集中地。“在那里贴大字报的年轻人受到了他们新近获得的自由的鼓舞，但由于生活在一个封闭的社会中，他们缺少经验和智慧来提炼他们的判断。”让《人民日报》来写的话也不过如此了。
毫无疑问，到今天为止，傅高义是最详细地讲述了邓小平的一生的传记作者，他应当为此赢得掌声。如果不是他，很多珍贵的历史资料可能我们就不再有机会知晓。但是，这个故事仍然不完整。我在想，照此速度，那些被不为人知的故事是否还有可能大白于天下。
译注1：杨炳章（Benjamin Yang）《邓小平政治评传》（Deng: A Political Biography，1998）；理查德・伊文思（Richard Evans）邓小平传；迈克尔・马蒂（Michael Marti）《中国与邓小平的遗产：从共产主义革命到资本主义演变》；莫里斯・迈斯纳 Maurice Meisner 《比较毛泽东与邓小平时代》；威廉・陶伯曼 （William Taubman）《赫鲁晓夫全传》是得到了广泛关注的一本政治人物传记，有评价称之为“在宏大的历史叙述中加上入木三分的政治与心理分析，使之充满了喜怒哀乐，印证了一个时代重要人物的成长。”
译注2：该报告原题为《关于个人迷信及其后果》，也被经常称为《赫鲁晓夫的秘密报告》。这个令全球震惊的报告全面清算了斯大林时期个人迷信、血腥统治、残酷迫害的种种罪恶，开启了“去斯大林化”的关键一步。
本文原标题：The Skeletons In Deng's Closet ，作者：Christian Caryl
Deng Xiaoping is the most important 20th-century leader you know almost nothing about -- unless you're Chinese. While most people in the People's Republic are perfectly aware that Deng deserves most of the credit for lifting them out of poverty and heaving China into the ranks of the world's leading industrial nations, in the rest of the world Chairman Mao is the one on the t-shirt. No question about it: Outside of his homeland, Deng, who died in 1997, has to be the least celebrated of the modern era's most successful statesmen.
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There are many reasons for this. Mao became a global icon because the rhetoric of his Cultural Revolution dovetailed perfectly with a contemporary worldwide youth rebellion against authority, lending him an aura of outlaw chic that endured even after the world gained a much clearer understanding of the epic nature of his crimes. (In some circles, Mao's frank enthusiasm for mass violence may have actually contributed to his appeal.) Deng's market-oriented reforms, by contrast, were subtle and cumulative, the stuff of Davos speeches rather than rousing marches. It took a while for their full impact to become apparent, and the results, while astonishing, were not exactly calculated to appeal to the higher emotions.
And yet Deng led a long and remarkable life, packed with drama and global significance, one that deserves to be dissected in detail. So we must be thankful to Harvard professor Ezra Vogel for devoting a large chunk of his academic career to compiling a prodigious biography, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, the most ambitious account of the man so far. In writing this volume, Vogel has done an enormous amount of work. He appears to have absorbed the documents from every single Chinese Communist Party plenum since 1921. (I can't say I envy him the task, but hey, someone's got to do it.)
There have been several Deng biographies before this -- from the curmudgeonly Benjamin Yang, the suave ex-diplomat Richard Evans, the meticulous analyst Michael Marti -- but Vogel's can be regarded as the most comprehensive and informative of the lot. (Maurice Meisner wrote a book of marvelous verve about Deng and his era, but it doesn't actually contain that much in the way of biography.) Vogel has left no stone unturned, and this is mostly a good thing. But sometimes -- in a 928-page book with chapter titles like "Economic Readjustment and Rural Reform, 1978-1982" -- it wears. If you want to know the particulars of Deng's career, you'll be well-served here; if you want to know his life, you might find this book a bit frustrating. Vogel would probably object that it is the career that matters most, and of course that's true -- up to a point. But a biography, by the very nature of the beast, should also be a story -- preferably one that doesn't pull its punches. Brutal candor is a vital literary device. William Taubman set the standard with his fantastically well-researched yet bracingly sarcastic portrait of Khrushchev. Vogel, by contrast, is a bit too quick to skip over the rougher, blacker sides of his hero's past. The massive ambiguities, the jaw-dropping plot twists, the spicy Sichuanese reek of an unlikely life never quite filter through.
Vogel has been traveling to China since the 1960s, and over the years he has cultivated close relationships with Deng's relatives and leading members of the Chinese Communist Party, a level of access that has unquestionably enriched the book. When Vogel reveals something truly fresh about his subject, it's usually not because of a document, but rather because insiders have shared their views. My favorite quote comes from Deng's youngest son: "My father thinks Gorbachev is an idiot."
You could argue, in fact, that this casual remark is the keystone of the whole Deng story -- and of the remarkably different paths taken by China and the Soviet Union. In 1956, already 30 years into an eventful career, Deng was the head of the Chinese delegation that traveled to Moscow for the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the one where Nikita Khrushchev gave his fateful "secret speech" on Stalin's personality cult. Like the other foreigners, the Chinese weren't actually in the hall when Khrushchev gave his epochal reckoning of Stalin's crimes and personal failures, but they learned the contents soon enough.
Gorbachev, still a young whippersnapper at the time of the speech, later strove to emulate Khrushchev's attempts at political liberalization while never quite managing to formulate a coherent economic policy. Deng -- at the time of the speech already an experienced functionary with decades of bloody political struggles under his belt -- drew the opposite conclusion. If your political system treats its leaders as deities, he realized, bringing them down to human size is likely to have a profoundly destabilizing effect. Better, instead, to leave the gods in place while focusing your energies on improving the people's daily lot. When he came to power in the late 1970s, Deng correspondingly decided to put economics first. Even though he and millions of others had personally born the brunt of Mao's wrath during the Cultural Revolution, he made sure to preserve the Chairman's status as the superhero of the People's Republic.
It proved an astonishingly successful strategy. The reforms that Deng and his party comrades unleashed in 1979 turned out to be the largest poverty-reduction program in human history. Over the past three decades, China's embrace of markets has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. As Vogel writes, "When Deng became preeminent leader in 1978, China's trade with the world totaled less than $10 billion; within three decades, it had expanded a hundredfold."
Deng thus unquestionably expanded the realm of personal freedom for many Chinese, even as he ruthlessly defended the ascendance of the Communist Party and deferred fundamental democratic reforms. In June 1989, Deng chose to suppress the student demonstrations in Beijing and other cities with a brutish display of force that has stained his reputation ever since. But economic liberalization continued -- not least because he had demonstrated his credentials as a defender of the Communist Party to his conservative critics. As Vogel shows with great verve, Deng's "Southern Tour" in 1992, when he sang the praises of the Special Economic Zones that he had launched at the end of the 1970s, galvanized the economic reformers and enabled them to gain a crucial edge over their opponents. The Chinese have never looked back, and today the world marvels at the results.
Deng spent the first half of his 76-year career in the party as a Mao acolyte -- and he followed his master in the somewhat cavalier disregard with which he held human life. (As Vogel notes, during Deng's long years as a military commissar he had a reputation as a man who was not shy about expending his soldiers' lives when the occasion demanded.) But somewhere along the way -- perhaps during the catastrophic Great Leap Forward that took the lives of some 45 million people at the end of the 1950s -- Deng lost his illusions about the chairman's infallibility. In 1961, Deng gave a speech to the party faithful in which he proclaimed his allegiance to an old proverb from his home province of Sichuan: "It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice." This was Deng's way of appealing to the party to put economic efficiency ahead of revolutionary spirit -- a call that Mao correctly understood as a challenge to his own approach. It was a difference of opinion that later got Deng into near-lethal trouble in the Cultural Revolution, and again after Zhou Enlai's death in 1976. Altogether Deng was purged three times by his enemies -- and each time he returned to accumulate even greater power.
Vogel quite rightly puts a lot of work into the period immediately following Deng's third comeback in 1977, after party notables engineered the overthrow of Mao's ultra-doctrinaire widow Jiang Qing and her allies (the notorious "Gang of Four"). According to my count, Vogel devotes a whopping 263 pages of his 928-page narrative describing the events of 1978-1979, when Deng finally achieved his status as China's top leader and embarked on the reforms. Without saying so publicly, he got many of his ideas from other East Asian countries that had already blazed the path of authoritarian, market-oriented modernization, including (perhaps most ironically) the "renegade province" of Taiwan.
Americans instinctively associate the values of experimentation and reform with youth, but Deng was in his mid-70s when he embarked on this breathtaking change of course. Vogel does a masterful job of reconstructing a great deal of the political minutiae that went into the turn-around.
However, he's less masterful when it comes to reconstructing some of Deng's less savory moments as a leader. To name but one example, Vogel describes the 1957 Anti-Rightist Movement, which Deng oversaw on Mao's order, as a "vicious attack on some 550,000 intellectual critics branded as rightists" that "destroyed many of China's best scientific and technical minds and alienated many others." Deng, he tells us, "was disturbed that some intellectuals had arrogantly and unfairly criticized officials who were trying to cope with their complex and difficult assignments." Huh? Nowhere does Vogel explain that the victims of the campaign were tortured, hounded into suicide, or sentenced to terms in labor camps or internal exile that sometimes ended decades later.
To be sure, there is good reason for a biographer to focus on the way his subject saw the world; we would miss much of Deng's story if we only listened to his critics. The problem here is that Vogel bends so far backward to explain the party's logic on, say, the Tiananmen crackdown or Tibet that it sometimes becomes difficult to understand why anyone might possibly think differently. About one instance in the early 1980s, when Deng harshly dismissed some liberal talk from party intellectuals, Vogel primly informs us that "Western notions of a transcendental God that could criticize the earthly rulers were not part of Chinese tradition." Maybe I've missed something here, but Deng and his comrades spent their entire lives reshaping Chinese society according to the esoteric theories of a German Jewish intellectual. Chinese tradition? Oddly enough, whenever Vogel brings up the subject, it's the party that gets to decide what constitutes Chinese values. The critics somehow never do.
Vogel is not always officious. He does mention some of the darker sides of the story. It's just that he is often a bit too eager to tiptoe around them. He describes Deng's ascendance to the status of preeminent leader in 1978-1979, entirely without irony, as the moment "when Deng began to push aside Hua Guofeng for the good of the party and the country." He tells us that some of the critical texts put up to public view on Beijing's Democracy Wall, the place where a remarkable spirit of pluralism was allowed to flourish for a few months starting in late 1978, "were posted by other young people who were inspired by their newfound freedom but, having lived in a closed society, lacked the experience and wisdom to inform or temper their judgments." People's Daily couldn't have put it better.
There's no question that Vogel has gone farther than anyone else to date in telling Deng's story. For that he is to be applauded; there is a whole hoard of valuable material here that we probably would not have gained otherwise. But it's still not quite the whole story. I wonder, at this rate, if it will ever be told.
