Tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of the birth of Deng Xiaoping, and China has gone to great lengths to honour the chief architect of its reforms. Hong Kong, Macau and the mainland will jointly issue stamps to commemorate the late Chinese leader, who died seven years ago.
Shenzhen is opening a new park to mark the occasion, and has unveiled a gigantic new portrait of Deng. A bronze statue of him has been unveiled in his hometown of Guangan, in Sichuan province, while an exhibition, including many photographs never before shown in public, is being held in the National Museum of History, in Beijing.
Deng deserves to be honoured. After all, he was the man who almost single-handedly turned China around after the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, and launched it on its current path of economic development and integration with the rest of the world.
I well remember finding myself on the same plane as author Han Suyin not many months after Mao's death, and chatting with her for several hours. At the time, Hua Guofeng was premier - having succeeded Zhou Enlai after his death in January 1976 - and had also assumed the top position of chairman of the Communist Party after Mao's demise the following September.
Han, who had just been to China, told me that everywhere she went, nobody talked about chairman Hua. In fact, some people sat on their hands instead of applauding after he spoke.
Instead, she said, the old cadres she met said that they were all looking to Deng to be the country's new leader, to guide them out of the chaos of the Cultural Revolution.
Not long after, I was asked to open The Wall Street Journal's Beijing bureau, and so had a ringside seat as I watched Deng turn the country around. After decades of Maoist indoctrination, he began by emancipating the people's minds. Instead of dogma, he told people to be pragmatic. Practice, he said, is the sole criterion of truth. He halted Mao's unending class struggles and focused the country's attention on its greatest need: economic development. Where others saw only China's poverty and backwardness, Deng saw potential. Indeed such was his confidence that he boldly set the goal of quadrupling China's gross domestic product in 20 years. (This goal was achieved ahead of schedule).
