As the train moved closer, and then past, the provincial capital of Guangzhou, signs of the new China became more evident: roads and bridges; low-rise factories and accompanying accommodation blocks; modern houses of the white tile that covers a multitude of construction sins.

Further south, the train slipped through the fence and barbed-wire Second Line that separated the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone from the rest of China.

At 9am on January 19 the train pulled into Shenzhen Station, and Deng descended to the platform to be greeted once more by a phalanx of officials.

“We have really missed you!” one said. Another added, “The people of Shenzhen look forward to seeing you, and have been looking forward to it for eight years!”

The officials were dressed in lightweight suits and grey jumpers; Deng likewise had shed the heavy overcoat and scarf he had needed at Wuhan. The group bustled from the station and into waiting minibuses, driving the five minutes north to the Shenzhen Guesthouse, where Deng and his family would stay.

They had a hotel villa to themselves, newly renovated with cream furnishings and floral fabrics. Deng’s room featured a large pine desk complete with inkstone and brushes; a hopeful suggestion, made in the knowledge of his calligraphic efforts during his last visit to Shenzhen.

In front of the ornate faux-marble fireplace, cream leather sofas had been arranged; there was even a small ornamental bar built into the room’s corner.

Deng was encouraged by the party officials and his family to rest after the long train ride; 2,000km (1,243 miles) in just under two days. After briefly retiring to his room, however, Deng re-emerged. He declared that he didn’t want to just sit still – he wanted to see the city for himself.

Officials scurried to prepare the minibus, and Deng walked in the courtyard of the villa with his daughter, Deng Nan, and recalled that famous inscription he had written during his Southern Tour visit of January 1984: “The development and experience of Shenzhen prove that our policy of establishing the Special Economic Zones is correct.”

He was here, in part, to try to evidence this assessment once more.

He clambered into the white Toyota minibus with his family and local officials, including Xie Fei, the local provincial leader; Li Hao, former mayor and current party secretary; and current mayor Zheng Liangyu.

Also accompanying Deng and the party was local journalist Chen Xitian: the only print reporter permitted to record Deng’s visit, he would spend the next five days following the leader around the city, transcribing his utterances on a small notepad – no audio recording was permitted – and relying on the second-hand accounts of officials when he was unable to squeeze into Deng’s minibus.

Despite the obvious newsworthiness of the visit, however, Chen’s report would not be published until March 26, two months after Deng’s departure, when his 11,000-character article, titled “East Wind Brings Spring All Around”, was printed on the front page of the Shenzhen Special Zone Daily, headlined in decorative red characters and accompanied by a photo of a grey-jacketed, relaxed Deng.

The narrow road away from the hotel was shaded by overhanging trees and hemmed in by buildings, but soon they emerged onto one of the city’s broad perpendicular highways.

Deng recalled how some of this part of the city had, in 1984, been rice fields, fish ponds, narrow paths and low houses; today, the road was flanked by medium-rise buildings of white and pastel render and a few taller structures of mirrored glass.

“Eight years have passed, and Shenzhen is developing so fast. It exceeds my expectations,” Deng said. When Deng had last visited, the total population of the Special Economic Zone was just shy of 350,000 people; now it was well over a million.

In the much larger geographic area of the city of Shenzhen there were now around 2.3 million people.

Deng asked party secretary Li Hao about the recent economic performance of Shenzhen, and expressed specific interest in the rates of foreign investment – one of the issues that had made Shenzhen’s establishment so contentious.

“There were different opinions on the operation of the SEZ from the beginning and worries about whether it was capitalist,” Deng said. But, he argued, the development of Shenzhen had answered those critics: the SEZ was surnamed socialism, not capitalism – evidenced by the fact, he argued, that only a quarter of investment was from abroad.

He advocated for more foreign investment, reaffirming that the political control remained in China’s hands. He declared that those who thought this meant a slow move towards capitalism “lack basic knowledge”.

The minibus buzzed slowly south, and the railway station came back into view: a squat low-rise hunk of concrete and blue glass right on the Hong Kong border.

Deng’s daughter pointed out the station sign hanging in red from a concrete arch, the two characters copied in Deng’s handwriting, and made a joke about the sign being his patented intellectual property – a persistent issue in Shenzhen, which was notorious for its production of counterfeit goods.

They cut west, parallel with the river. After a little over 10 minutes, the minibus arrived at Deng’s first destination: the Huanggang Border Crossing Station, on the southern edge of the city.

Officials sporting smart peaked hats greeted Deng as he clambered with assistance from the minibus, and escorted him to the bridge across the Shenzhen River. This border post with Hong Kong had been completed in 1989, and around 7,000 cars and 2,000 people crossed each day.

Deng walked slowly out onto the bridge, right up to the borderline and stood looking across into Hong Kong’s New Territories: flat, water-filled farmland; the occasional village of white houses; low, rounded hills and curling alluvial valleys off into the distance.

*

Deng, setting out from the hotel on his morning constitutional, followed the path up a hill, flanked by a retinue of attendants. And though he was then 79 years old, he managed the 653 steps to the top without difficulty, so the story goes.

As he began to descend on the far side, however, those accompanying him expressed concern about the steepness and unevenness of the loose gravel path.

The way they had already walked was, perhaps, safer. “Bu zou huitoulu,” he told them: “Do not turn back!”

Deng’s refusal to go back would be transmuted in party histories from banal utterance into resonant metaphor. What it pithily seemed to express was his determination to keep moving forward, no matter the challenges or objections. Political infighting, ideological zealotry and economic stagnation of the Cultural Revolution was what lay close behind them in 1984.

As he had observed the previous summer: “Now that we are on the right track, our people are happy and we are confident. Our policies will not change. Or if they do, it will be only for the better. And our policy of opening to the outside world will only expand.

“The path will not become narrower and narrower but wider and wider. We have suffered too much from taking a narrow path. If we turned back, where would we be headed? We would only be returning to backwardness and poverty.”

His reference to that comment atop Luo Sanmei, here in Shenzhen eight years later, was a reassertion of his renewed faith in forward motion as an escape from the troubled past, and a reminder of the significance of that last Southern Tour in moving China’s economic debates forward.

It had a personal resonance, too; Deng was not one to constantly revisit or discuss past events or traumas: his consistently muted response to the persecution of the Cultural Revolution years seems to testify to that.

But it was the nation’s need for faster action that he was overtly referencing once more in 1992; the journey towards that self-set goal of quadrupling China’s GDP by the year 2000.

He would invoke another similar metaphor during this trip in expressing that need – drawing again on the imagery of travel, and emphasising the risks of not continuing on: “For a big developing nation like China, it is impossible to attain faster economic growth steadily and smoothly at all times […] Like a boat sailing against the current, we must forge ahead or be swept downstream.”

At 10 o’clock the next morning, Deng was 160 metres (525ft) above the crowded streets of Shenzhen, panoptically surveying the city from the revolving restaurant which was perched like a spaceship atop the pinstriped International Trade Centre that he had watched being built eight years earlier.

He sat at a long banquet table, with a map of the city unrolled in front of him and upturned teacups positioned in anticipation; crowded around him were scores of local officials and even restaurant staff, eager to glimpse the leader. Party secretary Li Hao narrated the view, with Deng Rong leaning forward to repeat his words to ensure her father understood.

Accounts of this occasion relate his desire to “stand tall and see far”, in the idiomatic Chinese expression, and looking north he could just make out the low buildings and narrow lanes near his hotel.

This old town owed the limited significance it had in the pre-reform era to the railway. Since 1911, the peninsula of Kowloon in Hong Kong had been connected to the Chinese city of Canton (Guangzhou) by a train line: the Kowloon-Canton Railway, or KCR.

Soon after the CCP secured victory over the Nationalists in 1949, Shenzhen became the administrative centre for the county, and settled into life as a moderately sized, moderately prosperous Guangdong town, with two main thoroughfares: People’s Road and Liberation Road.

The railway station moved closer to the river in 1950, and Shenzhen remained significant as a site of first encounters for those crossing the Bamboo Curtain.

Shenzhen’s urban development in the 1980s would be concentrated around the old border crossing and market town. The cluster of new buildings in this district would define the first centre of the city and be the site of its first skyscrapers.

Gradually, the planned city would spread from this nucleus, developing new urban hubs, and incorporating hundreds of villages into the SEZ.

The city pulled in young workers from all over China; about 70 per cent of all those living in Shenzhen at the time did not hold hukou – the official registration record which confirms a person as a permanent resident of an area and qualifies them for services including health and education.

Annual economic growth rates had run at more than 30 per cent for most of those years, driven by this abundance of cheap and transient labour who, on arriving in the city, would find themselves cheap accommodation in one of the chengzhong cun – urban villages – whose original residents had taken advantage of rural land laws to build dense low-rise housing for rental.

The rest of Deng’s stay would see the patriarch adopt the role of eager tourist. On the sunny, brisk morning of the 21st, Deng arrived at the adjacent Splendid China and China Folk Culture Village theme parks with his family in tow. The China Folk Culture Village offered whistle-stop encounters with China’s ethnic minorities: the 55 non-Han Chinese groups officially recognised by the government.

Deng watched the prepared performance of song and dance before boarding an electric buggy for a tour of Splendid China, which, in this new city of Shenzhen, offered a chance to encounter China’s ancient heritage, presenting scaled-down 1:15 versions of China’s most famous landmarks.

The park was still open to tourists, and a group of Malaysian-Chinese visitors spotted Deng and took his photo. The next day, a small version of the image was reproduced in a Hong Kong newspaper – the first public record of his visit to Shenzhen.

Deng took a tour of the sites, visiting the miniature Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square; the Giant Buddha of Leshan, from his home province of Sichuan; the Three Pagodas of Dali, in Yunnan; and the famous karst peaks of Guilin.

Eventually they arrived at the Potala Palace of Lhasa, perched high on an artificial hill. “I have been to other parts of China, but I have never visited Tibet,” he said, posing for a photograph with the whole family. The image shows 14 family members huddled together, with Deng centre-right – the most soberly dressed of any of them in a buttoned-up black jacket.

It is an utterly ordinary picture of a family holiday. All are caught in mid-pose; Deng Rong has her hand half-raised seemingly to direct the group’s attention to the relevant camera. Behind them rises the white and terracotta palace, with its countless windows and staircases like a sketch by Escher.

Deng would continue in a similar mode the next morning, visiting the Fairy Lake Botanical Garden, where, helped by his children and grandchildren, he planted a Ficus altissima, or lofty fig tree.

Deng was not averse to playing the tourist; during his 1979 visit to America he had gamely eaten barbecue and donned a cowboy hat bought for him at a rodeo in Houston, Texas: “If the idea was to show that the Chinese visitors were just folks,” The New York Times reported, “the rodeo was the place to put it across.”

The photo would be reproduced around the world; it was a moment that marked a new era in US-China relations, with Deng – voted Time magazine’s 1978 man of the year – breaking down prejudices of Chinese leaders as unsmiling, austere and inherently hostile to American values.

*

At 8.30am on January 23, Deng Xiaoping shook hands with officials and hotel staff, before clambering into his minibus and setting off in convoy for the port of Shekou, where he would board a boat across the Pearl River to the city of Zhuhai.

Deng sat, as the convoy drove westward, looking out on busy streets. Quite quickly, however, the city began to peter out into patchy countryside punctuated with building sites. To the north, a low hill rose out of the landscape.

Eight years later, on November 14, 2000, a six-metre-high statue of Deng Xiaoping, cast in bronze and wrapped for its unveiling in swathes of red paper, would be revealed by Jiang Zemin; the statue had languished in a warehouse since 1997, the year of Deng’s death, so uncertain were his successors as to how they should memorialise him.

And even as he prepared to leave, Deng was still refining his final message to officials. “The primary consideration is not to be afraid of making mistakes,” he said. “The first thing we need to consider is to explore boldly, instead of first considering making mistakes. The second is to find the problem and correct it immediately.”

When he got to the pier, he walked towards the waiting boat, before suddenly turning to Li Hao and saying: “You carry on your work faster!” Li responded: “Your remarks are very important. We are determined to speed up our pace.”

As the well-connected China watcher Robert Kuhn has observed, this was an astonishing statement. “Nowhere else in China was reform moving as fast as it was in Shenzhen. Critics in Beijing often pointed to the city as a case study of what happens when reform moves too fast.”

With that final encouragement Deng boarded the boat – a 60-metre customs boat with a black hull and white two-level cabin – and disappeared from view. He would never set foot in Shenzhen again.

Excerpted from The Southern Tour (2024), by Jonathan Chatwin, Bloomsbury UK.