Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China: Political Reform in the Deng Xiaoping Era by Merle Goldman Harvard University Press $390 DENG Xiaoping's faltering footsteps in Shanghai at Chinese New Year reminded the world, if any reminder was needed, just how fragile is the government of a country when it relies on one man alone.
Deng's death, looming larger every day, will lead to only the second transfer of leadership in the 45-year history of the People's Republic.
The last, the death of Mao in September 1976, brought a military coup within days and a radical restructuring of the Communist Party's ideology within two years.
The latest offering by Merle Goldman, professor of Chinese History at Boston University, attempts to give some of the background to the future succession crisis by outlining a decade of arguments over political change and liberalisation in China.
Those arguments were not sterile, academic debates. They divided the Communist Party from 1978 onwards, led to the sacking of two General Secretaries, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, and ultimately the bloodbath at Muxidi in Beijing on the night of June 3-4,1989.
Professor Goldman has a mine of information to work from and she traces the chronology of events with skill and delicacy of touch. Her theme is the consistent failure, until it was too late, of the liberal intellectuals to reject traditional methods of political protest, come down out of their ivory tower and talk to the workers and the peasants.