Harvard professor and preeminent East Asia scholar Ezra K. Vogel will deliver a lecture Friday at Portland State’s Lincoln Hall to promote his new book, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, published last month by Harvard University Press.
Attracting an author-scholar of Vogel’s stature to the university was a big accomplishment for PSU’s Institute for Asian Studies and the Confucius Institute, the two organizations sponsoring the event.
Harvard professor and preeminent East Asia scholar Ezra K. Vogel will deliver a lecture Friday at Portland State’s Lincoln Hall to promote his new book, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, published last month by Harvard University Press.
Attracting an author-scholar of Vogel’s stature to the university was a big accomplishment for PSU’s Institute for Asian Studies and the Confucius Institute, the two organizations sponsoring the event.
“This particular event is definitely a high-profile one,” said Sharon Carstens, director of the Institute for Asian Studies. In the past week alone, Vogel’s book has received coverage in The Oregonian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Review of Books and The Economist.
Vogel’s appearance was facilitated, in part, by PSU history professor Ken Ruoff, who studied under Vogel at Harvard in the ’80s.
“Ezra was my undergraduate mentor,” Ruoff said. “He was chair of the department of East Asian Studies, and in that sense he was kind of a mentor to anybody who studied East Asian Studies.”
Although Vogel’s previous work dealt primarily with Japan, he has focused more keenly on China as it has emerged as a modern world power.
“Ezra’s been focusing on China for about 20 years now,” Ruoff said. “He turned his attention to the biography because Ezra recognized it’s Deng who’s responsible more than anyone for the China as we know it today.”
When scholars or politicians speak of the “China as we know it today,” they are generally referring to its monumental economic expansion—an expansion influenced, in large part, by the ideas of Deng Xiaoping.
After Communist leader Mao Zedong died in 1976, “China got a new start,” Vogel said in a recent online video interview with Harvard University Press. “And the person in charge was Deng.”
Although Deng never officially held any of China’s highest political positions, he served as the country’s de facto leader during the pivotal years following Chairman Mao Zedong’s death.
“Deng comes to power after one of the more bizarre experiments anywhere, the Great Proletarian Revolution from 1966 to 1976,” Ruoff said.
“The country had been riven by civil war,” Vogel said. “You had people, some of whom who had criticized and even killed and battered other people in the same unit, and now you had to get those people working together.”
Economically speaking, China was in bad shape: The country had an average income of less than $100 per capita, according to Vogel.
While many within the Communist party squabbled over China’s ideological future, Deng focused on the practical and the useful.
“Deng says, ‘All I care about is what works. What we need to do is modernize China,’” Ruoff said.
This emphasis on viability over dogma is perhaps best illustrated in Deng’s most famous quotation: “I don’t care whether it’s a black cat or a white cat,” he reportedly said. “It’s a good cat as long it catches mice.”
One could misconstrue Deng’s message to be race-related, but he “was talking in ideological terms,” Ruoff said. In effect he was saying, “I don’t care if a cat is a Marxist or a capitalist, all I care about is whether he catches mice.”
Deng’s efficient approach helped rescue China from the economic hardship of the ’70s: “Fast forward 30 years, and the China of today very much has Deng’s imprint,” Ruoff said. “You’re talking about a country where several hundred million people have been catapulted out of poverty into the middle class.”
Dr. Vogel’s lecture and book signing is from 5–7:30 p.m. in room 75 of Lincoln Hall.
“One of our missions is to invite experts on China-related issues,” said Meiru Liu, director of the Confucius Institute, which also provides scholarships, hosts cultural events and teaches students the Chinese language. “We want people to have a better understanding of China.”
A Henry Ford II professor of the Social Sciences Emeritus, Vogel is also the author of Japan as Number One: Lessons for America—the all-time best-selling nonfiction work in Japan by a Western author.
“One of our primary activities is sponsoring extra-curricular events like this,” Carstens said of the Institute for Asian Studies. “They’re always open to the community and they’re always free of charge.”
