May 14, 1996

The Village That Deng Xiaoping Calls Home

Eric Ellis, Paifang, Sichuan 

As part of his occasional series, Eric Ellis visits Deng Xiaoping's home town - Paifang Village, Guang An, in Sichuan Province

AN old dissident joke that circulated through Stalinist Eastern Europe could well apply to Deng Xiaoping's China.

An ancient hard-line communist strongman decreed that two plus two equalled six and that all official records, bank notes and ideology would reflect this absolute truth. The old despot died and his more moderate son took over, declaring that two plus two actually made five. Records were changed accordingly. Sensing a relaxation, a dissident mathematician proclaimed that two plus two actually made four - not five, or even six.

He got the perfunctory dead-of-night visit from the secret police, who, after interrogating him and terrorising his family, asked him: "Do you really want to go back to the bad old days when two and two equalled six?" (The Chinese do have a term for this - zhili weima, literally meaning "to see a deer when it is a horse", a hangover from a cruel Qin Dynasty regime.)

In Deng Xiaoping's China, two and two equals five, and what better place to see it displayed than in his hometown.

Deng may be the most modern of China's communist leaders, but even he is not above a bit of embroidery if it suits him.

It suits China's propagandists to portray Deng's family as modest small-holders, stressing their agrarian credentials, but the family home gives lie to that fable.

The Dengs were relatively rich landlords. His father leased out the surrounding land, and took office as a regional official, the type that probably would've been targeted by Mao's Red Guards (Deng's family was a target, but more for his own political "revisionism").

The Deng family home, now a museum, is a comfortable compound of enviable size, although the "curators" do their best to keep the interior spartan.

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. It's all Carters, Thatchers, Kohls and Mitterands meeting Our Great Designer, with a poem -presumably from Deng himself - extolling the virtues of Western expertise as it might apply to modernising China.

If the photos are any guide to who will inherit the old man's legacy, it should be noted that there's plenty of President Jiang Zemin and little of Premier Li Peng. The disgraced former Premier and Deng acolyte Zhao Zhiyang, who lost his job in 1989 for sympathising with Tiananmen Square protesters, makes a surprise appearance, albeit officiating at the 1984 Sino-British ceremony concerning Hong Kong, which was very much a Deng matter.

Mindful of Mao's megalomania, state and party propagandists downplay any Deng personality cult, and relatively few cities have a statue or even a portrait of him. The array of "Dengobilia" at the crude store outside the family home is pretty lame.

While generally respected, Deng is mostly referred to by the folksy "Comrade Xiaoping". Sichuan officials elevate him to Deng Daren, literally Big Person Deng - ie, VIP.

This is no place of pilgrimage. Guang An has no special access, and 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 Guang An from the massive Yangtse port of Chongqing traverses terrain that is the traveller's romantic China, undulating rice terraces teeming with peasants tending the paddies.

The villages en route are desperately poor, the walls of some of the modest homes still daubed with fading slogans of Maoism - when two and two equalled six and sometimes more - which weather and time have failed to shift.

It's from these towns, and thousands like them across China, that "Deng's Army" arose, as many as 80 million itinerant labourers looking for the opportunities his reform program have created, heading mostly east to the booming coastal regions.

Deng himself took the Chongqing road from Guang An - legend has him walking it in three days - in 1920 and ended up first in Paris, where he discovered communism , and back to Beijing, where, it could be argued, he discovered capitalism.

Sichuan contributes an estimated six million "soldiers" to Deng's worker army, and those returning are reminded that today's China has different priorities to Mao's time.

Slogans on banners draped across Guang An streets remind locals that it's a national duty to pay one's taxes, cash-in-hand being preferred payment in Shenzhen and Shanghai.

Perhaps it's no coincidence that of all the towns around here, Deng's village shows the greatest sign of economic take-off, thanks in part to remittances from migrant workers (10 per cent of provincial GDP), and some canny politicking among friends in Beijing.

Guang An recently had the good fortune to be promoted from county to prefecture, meaning that its 400,000 population gets bigger subsidies from Chengdu, the provincial capital, and Beijing.

More in hope than need, the local government has also set up a Special Development Zone for foreign investors. Aside from a couple of modest silk-processing factories that some Hongkongers are sniffing around, the zone still has no takers.

Deng's influence is getting through to his hometown, but perhaps in ways that even the Great Designer didn't anticipate in his blueprint.