Ezra F. Vogel · 2011 · overland

Vogel's eight-hundred-page life of the man he argues did more to change the daily lives of more people than anyone in the twentieth century. From a Sichuan village to a Renault factory in France, to Moscow, the Long March, three purges, a tractor factory in Jiangxi - and then, at seventy-four, the reopening of China.

1. 1
   Guang'an

   A Sichuan village and a landlord's son born in 1904 into the last years of the Qing - and a boy of fifteen put on a boat for France on a work-study scheme, which is how the story starts.

2. 2
   Shanghai

   Downriver from Chongqing to the coast, and a ship west with ninety other Chinese students on a work-study scheme - a boy of fifteen leaving a country that has just been carved up at Versailles.

3. 3
   Marseille

   1920, and a Chinese teenager lands in the south of France to study and finds himself working in a Renault plant instead - five years of factory work and radical politics, and a lifelong taste for croissants and coffee.

4. 4
   Paris

   Where he joins the Communist Party under Zhou Enlai, who becomes the patron of his whole career - and where the man Vogel argues transformed China first learned what an industrial country looks like.

5. 5
   Moscow

   Sun Yat-sen University in 1926, and a year of Soviet training - which he would spend the last decade of his life quietly deciding had been the wrong model for everything.

6. 6
   Ruijin

   The Jiangxi soviet, where he is purged for the first time - the first of three falls, each one further than the last, and each one survived by a man whose gift was for outliving other people's certainties.

7. 7
   Yan'an

   The end of the Long March, and the years that made the leadership - Deng as a political commissar, and then twenty years of war in which he commands armies rather than debates about them.

8. 8
   Beijing

   Vice-premier by 1952, general secretary by 1956, and purged again in the Cultural Revolution - his son thrown from a window and crippled, and the family sent to the countryside.

9. 9
   Nanchang

   Three years in Jiangxi working in a tractor factory, walking a circular path in the yard that the locals still call Deng Xiaoping's Path - which is where Vogel says he worked out what he would do if he ever got back.

10. 10
    Beijing

    Rehabilitated, purged a third time, and back again in 1978 at seventy-four - and then the decade in which he opens the economy, and the decade's end at Tiananmen, which Vogel does not excuse and does not simplify.

11. 11
    Washington

    January 1979, and the state visit: normalisation with the United States, a Texas rodeo, a ten-gallon hat, and a photograph that told a billion people the direction of travel had changed.

12. 12
    Shenzhen

    The southern tour of 1992, at eighty-seven and formally retired, going to the special economic zones to restart the reforms his own party had stalled - the last political act of a career that had begun in a Renault factory.