Chapter 2 Chapter 1 The Farmer's Son

1904-1920 Deng Xiaoping's real name was Deng Xixian, but he was named Deng Xiaoping after he participated in the revolution.He was born on August 22, 1904 in the countryside of Sichuan Province, the largest province in Southwest China, on the twelfth day of the seventh lunar month.Deng Xiaoping himself used this date of birth throughout his youth.According to records in the 1920s, the date of birth he registered during his work-study program in France was also July 12. Deng Xiaoping's father was Deng Wenming, a small landlord.His mother, Dan Shi, is Deng Wenming's second wife.They live in Paifang Village a few miles away from Guang'an County.Guang'an County, located in the eastern part of Sichuan Province, is dotted with hills and streams.Deng Wenming owns about 10 hectares of land, enough to harvest 10 tons of grain in a good year. Guang'an is a fairly large place with several thousand households, but it is not the most prosperous area in Sichuan.The Yangtze River, the artery of Sichuan, flows across the province from southwest to northeast, converging many tributaries along the way.Guang'an is located along the Jialing River, a tributary of the Yangtze River, but it is still a long way from the river valley.Guang'an is more than 200 miles away from the provincial capital Chengdu, and it has to bypass several rolling mountains. It is also 100 miles away from the nearest city, Chongqing.

Two hundred years before Deng Xiaoping was born, Deng Wenming's ancestors immigrated from South China to Sichuan.They were originally Hakka people.Hakka people are part of the Han nationality, originally living in the Central Plains, and later migrated to the south. Before that, their situation was still mysterious for several centuries.The Hakka dialects and customs are different from those of other local Han and non-Han people in southern China. However, the Deng family may have given up the Hakka way of life before moving to Sichuan. By 18 The beginning of the century was more certain.Because at this time, a celebrity came out of the Deng family, and he became a high-ranking official in the court.This man is Deng Shimin, and he was the minister of Hanlin and Dali Temple in Qianlong. In 1774, Deng Shimin retired from his old age and returned to his hometown.Soon after his death, people built a memorial archway at the entrance of the village in memory of him, on which the emperor's imperial pen was engraved, and the village has since been called the Archway Village. During the "Cultural Revolution", this was Deng Xiaoping's crime, the village was renamed the anti-revisionist production team, and the archway was also destroyed.Although the village later returned to its original name, the archway was not rebuilt.

Deng Wenming is an energetic, optimistic and social person.In Deng Xiaoping's life after he left home, Deng Wenming once became an influential figure in Guang'an County and its surrounding areas, commanding a civilian army of several hundred people.Old people in Paifang Village who still remember him told foreign tourists that Deng Wenming liked to socialize with others and was fair in mediating local disputes.At home, he is strict and modest.His discipline to the children is strict, but when the children make mistakes, he is still willing to listen to their statements.There are no photos of him during his lifetime. People remember that he was bald and had a big beard in middle age.Deng Xiaoping never faded, but he seems to have inherited his father's character - self-confidence, ambition, and decisiveness.

Deng Xiaoping's mother was unremarkable.Deng Wenming married Dan when he determined that his first wife, Zhang, was infertile.Dan's natal family may be very good.When she married into Deng's family, her dowry was a large mahogany bed with exquisite carvings and red lacquer.Poor parents cannot afford such a dowry (Deng Xiaoping was born on this bed. You can still see it in Deng Wenming's old residence in the 1980s).Dan gave birth to four children for Deng Wenming. Deng Xiaoping was the second and the eldest of the three sons.Later, around 1920, before Deng Xiaoping left home, Dan became frail and sickly, and she died in the late 1920s, allegedly of tuberculosis.The author has written about her relationship with her children, so it is difficult to deduce what kind of influence she has on the children, or how attached the children are to her.

Deng Wenming married twice later.His third wife, Xiao Shi, bore her a fourth son.The fourth wife, Xia Bogen, was the daughter of the boatman, only one year older than Deng Xiaoping*, and gave birth to two daughters for Deng Wenming.Xia was two years older than Deng Xiaoping. ----Annotation) was married, and she brought a daughter to marry Deng Wenming's family.Therefore, Deng Xiaoping had one older sister, two younger brothers, one half-brother, two half-sisters, and one half-sister①.Because he left home at the age of sixteen and never returned, he did not meet these half-siblings until he was in his forties.But he will never see his half-sister again. She died in 1949, just before Deng Xiaoping conquered Sichuan as commissar of the Communist forces.

In China, there is no agreed standard for naming.Parents choose one or two words from all the language vocabulary to express their wishes or expectations for their children (at the time of Deng Xiaoping's birth, it was often just the father's wishes or expectations) or to pray for auspiciousness for the birth of the child.Deng Wenming named his eldest son Xixian, which means "longing" and "kindness", implying intelligence.Deng Wenming also gave him a name to indicate his seniority in the family, that is, Xiansheng.His older sister had already been named Xianlie, and Deng Wenming went on to give all his children born later names beginning with the character "Xian".The children born to Deng Wenming's third and fourth wives used the name assigned by Xiang throughout their lives.Not Deng Xiaoping and his two half-brothers, who later changed their names.

The house where Deng Xiaoping was born and raised still existed in the 1980s, though it was considerably restored by local cadres who wanted to turn it into a museum.The house, then and now, was very ordinary, though spacious.There are twenty-two rooms in this mansion, separated from each other by tall wooden beams.Later, the right wing room was demolished, and there were not so many rooms.The courtyard is paved, but the roof was thatched in Deng's childhood.The windows are long lattice windows of paper paste.Some rooms are hard clay.No running water.To be sure, Deng eats well and has warm blankets to sleep in during the winter.But there are no calligraphy and paintings hanging in his room, nor expensive furniture.

Deng Wenming belongs to the traditional Chinese ruling class - the lowest class among scholars.His position is not inherited, nor acquired by wealth, but by his education.Like his ancestor Deng Shimin, he studied in a private school for several years and studied classical Chinese and ancient Chinese literature, history and philosophy.But unlike his predecessors, he did not take the imperial examinations.Deng Wenming may have studied in a modern legal and political school in Chongqing for a year or two.The people Deng Wenming associates with are all local officials and prominent local figures.Therefore, he enjoys some privileges, such as being exempted from some obligations and labor services, and does not have to suffer physical punishment if he breaks the law.

Therefore, Deng Wenming is quite famous in the local area.He is also a very traditional character.The Gelaohui is one of the oldest secret societies in China, and it is strongest in Sichuan.Deng Wenming joined the Xiexing Township branch of the Gelaohui, and later became its leader.He believed in Buddhism and often went to the temple to worship. One day in 1938, *he was assassinated by bandits or enemies on his way home after praying to Buddha* should be 1936. ---- Annotated.When he married Deng Xiaoping's mother, his first wife was still alive, **but **Here is a mistake, when Deng Wenming married Deng Xiaoping's mother, his first wife had died. --Annotation and still living in Chi's home, this is a very traditional practice.

In terms of education, Deng Wenming has kept up with the times.Deng Xiaoping began his education in an old-fashioned private school②.Two years later, when Chi was seven years old, he was transferred to a new primary school.Four or five years later, he entered Guang'an Middle School and became a boarding student, going home once a week.So he studied modern sciences from an early age—mathematics, natural science, and geography—and learned vernacular Chinese instead of the classical Chinese that he had been using in the past. There are no written records about Deng Xiaoping's school life. Unlike Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, he never talked about it to foreigners.But there are also some interesting anecdotes. In the 1980s, the old people in Paifang Village, including his uncle Dan Yixing, told foreign visitors that Deng was a lively and intelligent child when he was a child. He liked to play games with his classmates and learned things very quickly.Some of them said that he could memorize and recite the book after reading it aloud three times (Seventy years later, Deng Xiaoping's bridge partner and close political partner Wan Li revealed to a foreigner that Deng Xiaoping's memory for cards was very good, which is why Make him slightly better than players of the same skill level)③.These old people also said that when Deng was a child, he was also a child with his own opinions. Even if some things violated traditional morals and would be punished, he still did it without fear.

According to the new education system, Deng was supposed to stay in middle school until he was eighteen or nineteen, and then, if he studied well, and he and his father both wanted to do so, he could go to a school in Chengdu or Colleges and universities in Chongqing continue to study.Yet sometime in 1918 or early 1919, when he was only fourteen years old, Deng Wenming wrote to his son from Chongqing that he had seen an advertisement in a local newspaper that a school was about to open in Chongqing. Work-study preparatory school for studying in France, training young men (and maybe young women) to prepare for "work-study" in France.He asked Deng Xiaoping if he wanted to enter this school.Deng Wenming also sent a similar letter to his younger brother, Deng Shaosheng, who was only three years older than Deng Xiaoping.Neither of them replied right away, but neither did they delay for too long. In late summer or early autumn of 1919, they left Paifang Village and entered this school in Chongqing. On the surface, Deng Wenming's actions are hard to explain.Deng Xiaoping was still a child and had no experience of life outside the small world of Guang'an, and his uncle had no more experience.None of them had the training or education to deal with the precarious life of a faraway foreign country.In addition, Deng Wenming must have realized that sending his eldest son to study in France would mean that their family would lose this son.If Deng Xiaoping had returned to China with an engineering diploma in his pocket, he would never have wanted to be a farmer, and he couldn't possibly have wanted to work in Sichuan, which has very little industry. It can be speculated that Deng Wenming was influenced by a person who was keen to promote the study abroad movement, and he might even be a foreigner, or he had found his son to be very headstrong, so he wanted to send him away.However, there is no basis for these possibilities.Moreover, the actual situation at that time was also inconsistent with these speculations.Wu Yuzhang, the founder of the school in Chongqing, is a teacher in Chengdu.Deng Wenming probably never met him. Yang Sen, who became famous in the 1920s for his enthusiastic support of Sichuan students studying abroad, was also from Guang'an. He and Deng Wenming were contemporaries, but he was not in Guang'an when Deng Xiaoping was growing up.At that time, there was a French missionary in Guang'an, but Deng Wenming was a devout Buddhist, and it was impossible for him to have contact with the French missionary.As for the relationship between Deng Xiaoping and his son, according to the old people in Paifang Village, the two are as close as friends of the same generation.Therefore, Deng Wenming's move to send his son to France seems to be simply explained as a father's great ambition, patriotism and his understanding of the whole world situation. There is no doubt that Deng Wenming was very concerned about national politics, and the Gelaohui he joined was participating in the road protection movement in Sichuan.His concern for politics is evident in his sending his son and brother to France.It was not difficult for him to understand what was happening in Sichuan and the whole country.By the early 20th century, most towns had telegraph offices, and the circulation of numerous local newspapers and magazines was a feature of the time.According to the legend of the elders in the village, he spent a lot of time drinking tea in the teahouse, which was the center for exchanging local and national news. Even though Deng Wenming didn't talk much about politics at home, when Deng Xiaoping entered Guang'an Middle School in 1915 or 1916, he must have learned that Deng Xiaoping entered Guang'an Middle School in 1918. --Annotation some.At that time, middle schools generally subscribed to newspapers, and it was fashionable for some students to lead and organize radical patriotic demonstrations.In 1919, Deng Xiaoping participated in a student boycott of Japanese goods, according to Deng's official biography.Because at the Versailles Conference at that time, the Western powers transferred the preferential rights enjoyed by Germany in Shandong to Japan, even though China was also a member of the Allied Powers at that time.This aroused strong protests from the Chinese people. During Deng Xiaoping's childhood, the main political event was the 1911 Revolution of 1911-12.The revolution overthrew the ancient Chinese absolute monarchy and the Qing Dynasty, which had occupied the throne since 1644.The Qing Dynasty initially strictly prohibited foreign military, trade and cultural intrusion into China, which was the most fundamental reason for the failure of this traditional empire.Under the rule of several generations of emperors, three policies have been tried successively: closed doors and self-defense; "self-improvement": absorbing foreign technology, military and industry, but not accepting foreign ideas; improving the declining monarchy.But all these policies have failed.This eventually led to the advent of a revolutionary movement. The leader of this movement was Sun Yat-sen, who was born in 1865 in a poor peasant family in Guangdong.He was educated in Hawaii and went to Hong Kong to study medicine. In the mid-1880s, he became a revolutionary, working for a radical overhaul of China's political and social order.Beginning in 1905, he became the recognized leader of all constitutional republicans, anarchists and Marxists (only a small number).These people have the same purpose as Sun Yat-sen, and are ready to achieve it by force.They work together, but the relationship isn't always that rosy.The secret organization of the Tongmenghui has its main base in Japan and has more foreign members than domestic members. From 1905 to 1911, the Tongmenghui tried unsuccessfully to establish bases in interior China, sometimes in port cities and sometimes in the open countryside.The organization's sources of manpower, material resources and weapons are scarce.Its plans are also generally crude, and it always counts on the cooperation of allies, such as secret societies, which are more concerned with self-preservation than bold action.However, the League never gave up its ideals. In the autumn of 1911, the Tongmenghui formulated a plan to mobilize the garrison in Wuchang in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River to riot. Had these plans been more carefully formulated, perhaps there would have been no subsequent revolution.While the plan was being carried out, it was disturbed by sudden accidents.A group of revolutionaries quite unexpectedly detonated a huge homemade bomb in the Russian Concession of Hankou (another part of Wuhan) on the north bank of the Yangtze River.The explosion caused the Chinese city police to quickly enter the blast zone.Normally they are not allowed to enter the concession.There, the police arrested and executed three revolutionaries and also found a list of Confederate members mixed in with the local army.At this critical juncture, a group of revolutionary party officers intensified their efforts to incite the riots of the Wuchang garrison and let them fight the royalist army.As a result, the royalist army failed and was forced to withdraw.While the government was still considering the next step, riots broke out suddenly in several other regions of China. When the first riot broke out, Sun Yat-sen, who was in the United States, returned to his motherland. On January 1, 1912, he was elected as the interim president of the Republic by representatives of parliaments from sixteen provinces in Nanjing.When the six-year-old emperor's mother announced his son's abdication in five weeks' time, Sun Yat-sen was supposed to be president, but he lacked military support.The empress invited Yuan Shikai, a professional soldier who had trained modern armies for the dynasty and thus united commanders in most of the provinces, to form a republican government in her final edict, and a deadlock ensued.Sun has a weak personality, so he compromises easily.Perhaps he was really full of hope for Yuan, thinking that Yuan would accept the way of a democratic republic, so he decided to support Yuan and urged the State Council to elect Yuan as president.Sun did not serve in Yuan's subsequent government, but was retained as party leader. In August 1912, the Tongmenghui joined forces with four smaller organizations to form the KMT, with Sun elected as its main leader. For the next eight years, the country's politics and management were chaotic.It soon became clear that Yuan Shikai was not a democrat.When the Kuomintang won elections for both houses of the new National Assembly, Yuan refused to reshuffle the government and then murdered Song Jiaoren, the most prominent young leader in the Kuomintang.He continued to destroy the republic, instigated the restoration of the monarchy, and asked people to support him as emperor.But in the end they were all ignominious failures.The reason for the failure was not mainly because most of the remaining monarchists regarded him as a non-emperor's direct descendant, but because the act of restoration caused wars in many provinces, which led to the emergence of the most harmful pattern in China in the 20th century: the local Powers or warlords split apart, and the central government collapsed. The official name of the activity that Deng Xiaoping participated in when he entered Chongqing Preparatory School was "Work-study Program", whose forerunner was Li Shizeng.Lee was a patriot, believed in anarchism, and admired French civilization.He has worked hard for many years to establish closer ties between China and France, and tried to make Chinese workers and students enjoy the benefits of work and education in France at the same time.He himself was wealthy and had studied in French secondary schools and the Pasteur Institute in Paris. Lee's earliest plans began in 1908.He opened a tofu factory outside Paris and began teaching his workers, all from his hometown in China, Chinese, French, basic science and good social behavior.Following the practice of most anarchists, he advocated strict management of students, prohibiting drinking, smoking and gambling, and only encouraging them to study hard.The attempt didn't last long.The tofu processing factory went bankrupt because it did not make money, and Li had to send the students who participated in this experimental project back to their motherland. Undeterred, Lee went on to hatch a new, more ambitious plan.In the years leading up to World War I, he arranged for about 130 Chinese boys and girls to study in secondary schools in Paris, Montargis and Fontainebleau.During the war he founded a society.This society is to give basic education to Chinese workers in French factories and make them understand the importance of anarchism.The association opened a school in Paris, and some Chinese workers took time to study while working hard. In 1916, Li Shizeng, who was still in France, launched another plan: to recruit a large number of educated young Chinese to France to study while working.He earnestly hoped that well-educated Chinese intellectuals would overcome the bad idea of ​​underestimating manual labor, and at the same time let them teach the 30,000 Chinese workers in France at that time and enable them to learn useful skills for China's modernization.He founded the "Chinese-French Education Association", hoping to "develop the relationship between China and France, especially with the help of French scientific and spiritual education, and improve China's moral, academic and economic life". ④ He persuaded Chinese friends and people with good intentions to set up branches of the Chinese French Education Association in China, set up schools, recruited students, and prepared experience for living and working in France. Because of the dire political situation in China at the time, and because the first generation of modern high school graduates had difficulty finding jobs, a large number of Chinese youth were attracted by Li's plan. Between March 1919 and December 1920, nearly 1,600 students, about 30 of whom were girls, sailed to France by sea.There are not many students like Deng Xiaoping who are less than 20 years old, and even fewer are in their thirties or even forties. Most of them are young students in their early twenties.Most of them came from Sichuan Province and Hunan Province, where Mao Zedong was located.Some are university graduates, but the vast majority have no more than secondary education.They come from the middle class of society, mostly the children of poorer landowners, businessmen or intellectuals.Even if the steamship company offered a discounted ticket of one hundred silver dollars, most families could not afford it (sometimes, the Chamber of Commerce would lend them money to buy a boat ticket, and if they were not handy, the Chamber of Commerce would extend the loan period). Judging from some memoirs and related records, most work-study students were optimistic when they set off for France, convinced that although they had to work hard, they would eventually acquire advanced professional knowledge and industrial skills.One also wishes to understand the secret of how France became and remained a democratic republic.Zhou Enlai (who and Deng Xiaoping would later become the most famous work-study students) wrote a poem in June 1920, five months before leaving for France, in which he called France "the homeland of freedom" and looked forward to one day being able to live in China "tears open the flag of freedom". ⑤ On the French side, there are also high expectations for these Chinese students.For a while, French politicians and educators were worried about the spread of Anglo-American culture, especially the influence of Protestant missionaries on China through the establishment of middle schools and universities.So they welcome this work-study movement in China, and think it is the best way for Chinese people to understand and admire French culture.Some of them are as romantic as the young Chinese, asserting that the sport will bring the two cultures together.One enthusiast wrote that the Chinese were "the French of the Far East".Because they are philosophers, poets and artists⑥. In Chongqing schools, compulsory basic courses are French, Chinese and basic industrial skills.How Deng Xiaoping fared in class is unknown, but one of his classmates wrote more than sixty years later that he studied "very diligently". ⑦ From the archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, we can learn more.Documents state that when he arrived in France he wished to work in a metallurgical plant.The document also states that he was successfully admitted to the school and passed a French test administered by the French consulate in Chengdu.After graduating from the Chongqing school, Deng May returned to Guang'an for a short stay to prepare his luggage for the trip to France and bid farewell to his family.Parting is painful.Had he and his parents known in advance that they were destined never to see each other again, this parting would have hurt them all the more. In September 1920, Deng, his uncle and nearly 100 other classmates set off from Chongqing by ship and embarked on the first stage of their journey in France, and at the same time began his revolutionary career. Notes: ① "Biography of Deng Xiaoping", page 2, Central Literature Publishing House, 1988 edition. ②The author himself. ③ "Biography of Deng Xiaoping", page 3. ④ Bailey, "China's Work-Study Movement in France", p. 449. ⑤ Tongqishu, page 452. ⑥ Ibid., p. 453. ⑦ Franz: "Deng Xiaoping", p. 28.