An essential job requirement for a government minister in a totalitarian dictatorship is a willingness to suffer endless humiliation at the hands of the supreme leader. Deng Xiaoping (1904-97) delivers a master class in the art of self-abasement, when subjected to the sadistic whims of Chairman Mao. With his stupendous ability to absorb punishment, Deng is a fascinating combination: the ultimate hard man and Mao’s helpless plaything. His only motivation, the authors suggest, is political survival at any cost. Notions such as human dignity, pride, and principle at no point enter into the equation. Rather than the closet liberal with reformist urges dating back to the early 1950s that some scholars would have us believe, the authors show Deng to be very much Mao’s enforcer, efficiently rooting out internal opposition. And although, in the late 1970s, he began to loosen the straitjacket of Maoist economics under the slogan seek truth from facts—one of the late chairman’s own Delphic admonitions—by the end of his life he proved to be as intolerant as Mao himself, as demonstrated by the 1989 massacre in Tiananmen Square.

Source: A Survivor’s Tale | The Weekly Standard