Opinion | If Deng Xiaoping were alive, he would worry about China’s shifting priorities
Deng’s guiding philosophy of the centrality of economic development is rarely mentioned now, and has become secondary to national security
What would Deng Xiaoping think of China if he were alive today? That question has lingered in my mind ever since I joined tens of millions of Chinese on August 22 in marking his 120th birth anniversary.
The question is as relevant and important as it is sentimental and rhetorical.
Today’s Chinese owe so much to the diminutive reformist leader who ended China’s self-imposed isolation and unleashed reforms in the late 1970s to allow private entrepreneurship to flourish and open up the country to foreign investment, paving the way for China’s economic lift-off.
Deng, who died in 1997 at the age of 92, would have been heartened but unsurprised to see that China’s economy has become the world’s second largest, as the country’s successive leaders vowed to carry the torch and honour his legacy.
