February 21, 1997

Big Man And Some Little White Lies

Eric Ellis, the AFR's China correspondent until last year, recalls a visit to the ancestral village of the Great Designer

DENG Xiaoping once famously said that to get rich was glorious. It was a sentiment his near-forgotten cousins at his ancestral village in remote Sichuan Province took to heart.

Anyone who made the tough six-hour drive up shocking roads from Chongqing to Paifang Village in Guangan County to meet the Dengs saw his brand of socialism with Chinese characteristics displayed in all its corrupt glory. Deng's ruddy-faced cousins are hale and hearty country folk who might have made a decent living tending flocks of chickens were their cousin not quite so ambitious.

Instead they had a better living forced on them by government propagandists keen to portray Deng Daren, or Deng Big Man as he was colloquially known among Sichuanese, as a true man of the land.

When I dropped in to Paifang a year ago, the communist machine clicked into full speed.

First the ancestral home, now a museum, was portrayed as a modest smallholding when the truth was that the Dengs were rich landlords, Comrade Xiaoping's father exactly the type of landlord that Mao's communists unleashed their fury on after the 1949 revolution.

State propagandists did their best to keep the interior spartan to keep the facade of Deng's supposedly selfless struggle intact, but there is no escaping, even today, that this was and still is the spacious compound of a feudal landowner where the young Deng probably was waited on by servants in relative comfort.

Photographs from his career on the walls show Deng meeting only politically correct leaders and statesman - no Third World despots, Kim Il Sungs and Stalins of erstwhile Chinese acquaintance on display here.

If the photos are any guide to whom the old man bequeaths his legacy, it should be noted there's plenty of President Jiang Zemin and little of Premier Li Peng. The current National People's Congress chairman and China's one-time superspook, Qiao Shi, features prominently in the pamphlets handed out.

Behind the family home, along a small path beside a creek, one is taken to what were likely outbuildings of the expansive Deng estate, though today propagandists portray them as peasant smallholdings.

And it's here where anyone got about as close to Deng as was possible in the last reclusive years of his life, if one discounts the times Hong Kong golfers were unable to visit the courses that sprouted up in semi-tropical southern Chinese spa towns because the old man was taking the waters at the time.

A man in his 50s and bearing a remarkable likeness to The Great Designer introduced himself as his cousin. On the wall of what Westerners could mistake as a barn for the animal droppings sprinkled inside but what the official news agency Xinhua insisted was a kitchen, texts of Deng's greatest speeches were stacked up, as were some of the few propaganda posters published of Deng.

The cousin, as if on cue, seemed bemused by the sudden attention from these out-of-towners, remarking that he has probably met more foreigners than anyone in Paifang Village.

"My cousin, Comrade Xiaoping, is a very modest man, very frugal," he said. "He is a very good man and is very mindful of his family responsibilities."

And when conversation with this smiling fellow is exhausted - it doesn't take long - the Xinhua operatives in their ubiquitous bad suits and monochromatic sunglasses slip Cousin Deng a sizeable wad of renminbi. No need to launch the chickens into the socialist market economy today.

But this is no shrine, no place of pilgrimage. Guangan has no special transport access, it's very much off the tourist path (not even the Lonely Planet guide lists it), unlike Mao's hometown, Shaoshan in Hunan province, where a virtual cottage industry has grown up around his birthplace.

The six-hour drive to Guangan from Chongqing traverses the traveller's romantic China, undulating rice terraces teeming with peasants tending paddies.

Romantic? Perhaps, but it's likely not too many of their number will be mourning the man whose reforms passed them by, confining them to permanent hand-to-mouth penury.