The Factory Worker of Jiangxi

People's Daily last week celebrated the 80th birthday of Deng Xiaoping, China's top leader, not with an official announcement but with one of the paper's most unusual articles in recent memory. The subject: Deng's ordeal as a political outcast during the decade of Mao Tse-tung's Cultural Revolution. The author: "Mao Mao," the childhood nickname of one of Deng's three daughters. According to her account, three years after Deng was ousted from Deng Xiaoping Mao's inner circle in 1966 for being too critical of economic policies, he was exiled to Jiangxi province in the southeast. There he lived under constant guard with his wife and stepmother in a five-room house on the grounds of an abandoned infantry academy. Deng got a job fitting parts together at a nearby tractor factory. In his spare time he tended his vegetable garden, raised chickens and read books on Marx, Lenin and Chinese history. He became popular with his neighbors, who would drop by to grind flour and make rice wine with him. Deng returned to Peking in 1973 after the death of his rival, Lin Biao, and to full power in 1977. Evidently he retains warm feelings for Jiangxi. His days there, says Mao Mao, helped him "comprehend the actual social conditions of the people."