MUCH TOO TOUGH TO BE CUTE

By RICHARD HOLBROOKE

Deng Xiaoping did not have much time for small talk, at least not with outsiders. He was an old man in a hurry; he saw visitors, but only if they could advance the central goal of his life--to make China great again. In the many hours of talks I attended with him, he expressed little personal interest in his foreign visitors except for their technology, which he wanted immediately. Once I brought some books for his beloved grandchildren. Without looking at them, he handed them to an aide and started lecturing me about the need for Washington to lift all export restrictions on modern technologies--not "those of the '70s, but the '80s and '90s," he said fiercely.

His small eyes focused on you with intensity. Then he would look away, far away, perhaps at some distant vision of the China he wanted to build, or possibly at the memory of some past indignity he had survived on his roller-coaster ride between history and oblivion. His hands gestured constantly, and until his family stopped him, he chain-smoked. To those in thrall to the urbane charm of his old ally Zhou Enlai, Deng seemed crude, speaking with a guttural Sichuanese accent and always keeping a spittoon next to his chair. His size--he was truly tiny--did not seem to diminish him, partly because he exuded enormous energy and sharp focus.

His obsession, presumably born in his childhood memories of a prostrate China and his adult humiliation during the Cultural Revolution, was to undo the crimes and stupidities of the Cultural Revolution, break the communist ideological straitjacket and unleash, as he put it, the creative energy of China. His opposition to superstition and ideology, plus his hostility to the Soviet Union, made him seem more liberal than he was. Deng did not believe his nation could be governed democratically--at least not in this century. Sadly, Tiananmen is part of his legacy.

He once offered Shirley MacLaine a glimpse of his wry wit and burning anger. When he sat next to the famously pro-China actress at a White House state dinner in January 1979, she thanked him for the gracious reception she enjoyed in China in the early '70s. Deng, who had been in exile at that time, replied without a moment's pause, "The people who were your hosts then are in jail now."

His grandfatherly appearance made him seem cute. But Deng Xiaoping was not cute; he was far tougher than Americans could possibly imagine. He surely viewed life as a constant struggle, because that's what his own life had been. When visitors talked of injustice in China, he dismissed them with a wave of his hand. What the West would regard as injustice did not concern him much. These were niceties that neither he nor his country could afford. I saw Deng shake with real anger only when he talked about the Vietnamese, whom he saw as impudent. When Deng complained bitterly to Vice President Walter Mondale about the "ungrateful" Vietnamese, Mondale wryly noted, "We have had some experience of our own with the Vietnamese." Deng did not even smile.

Diplomat Holbrooke dealt personally with Deng for more than a decade.