TO OUR READERS

By BRUCE HALLETT/PRESIDENT

TIME's China watchers had been planning a special report on the legacy of Deng Xiaoping for months, but it wasn't until 10 p.m. Wednesday--early morning in the U.S.--that Beijing bureau chief Jaime FlorCruz got a tip that China's ailing leader might be dead. As FlorCruz raced to the TIME bureau, driving past Tiananmen Square and the residences of the top Communist Party officials, he could tell something was amiss; police at each intersection were waving motorists to the side so that black cars with flashing red lights could enter Zhongnanhai, the party headquarters. Within hours, Deng's death had been confirmed, and deputy managing editor Jim Kelly had given the go-ahead for this week's cover package.

TIME has long had a special relationship with Deng--or, as we used to spell it, Teng. He was twice named Man of the Year--a distinction shared by a select group of world leaders that includes Churchill, Eisenhower and Gorbachev. When Deng decided to visit the U.S. in 1979, he gave TIME his first interview with a Western magazine.

Deng might have seemed an unlikely choice as Man of the Year for 1978. He had only recently been "rehabilitated" in one of the frequent purges of Mao's later years. But we recognized even then that as the chief architect of the so-called Four Modernizations, Deng was destined to play a key role in helping propel China into the modern world. A few weeks later, we were rewarded for our prescience with that first exclusive interview--a 30-minute audience that stretched into 80 minutes and formed the basis of another Deng cover story.

By the time Deng won his second Man of the Year nomination, in 1985, the effect of his "Great Leap Outward" was apparent to everyone. Deng had transformed the world's most populous nation into something like a capitalist country--albeit one still run with a heavy, communist-style hand. That cover story too followed an exclusive interview; this one included not only TIME journalists but also a group of U.S. civic, academic and business leaders who were our guests on a TIME Newstour of Asia.

"In Chinese culture, the Emperor is Emperor until he dies, and the new leaders can't do anything until he's left the scene," says TIME News Service director Richard Hornik, a former Beijing bureau chief, who coordinated our reporting effort. "So China has been stuck in neutral for the past few years." Last week the country shifted back into gear.