CHANCE has always had an incalculable effect on history, and it is no exaggeration to say that if the city of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England had not been twinned with the coal town of Taiyuan in Shanxi, we would know a lot less about the life of Deng Xiaoping.
From his base in the Taihang Mountains north of the Yellow River, Mr Deng organised one of the most successful guerilla and military campaigns in Chinese history. It was the source of his power and gave him the contacts and the credibility that made him ruler of China 40 years later. But until a few years ago next to no one outside China knew anything about it.
The key link in this mystery is Professor David Goodman, now the director of the Institute for International Studies at the University of Technology in Sydney, an adviser to the Australian Government and one of the world's experts on Chinese politics.
But back in 1987 he was lecturing at Newcastle University. How did he stumble across Mr Deng's hidden career? 'It was an accident, a mistake,' he said. 'We had a student exchange programme with a Beijing college but we felt we were being cheated. We realised what worked in China was deeper institutional links so we went to Taiyuan, because Newcastle is twinned with Taiyuan.
'Almost on the last day one of our hosts in Taiyuan asked me what gift I would like and I said my real interest is past party history. He went out and bought the first book he found on the shelf.' The book was An Outline History of the Taihang Revolutionary Base Area, but Professor Goodman at first did not give it a second thought and left it on his bookshelf unopened. 'Later I was compiling a bibliography of all the books I had and I saw it on the shelf. I thought I'd take a look at it, opened it up and inside the cover was Deng Xiaoping's calligraphy.
'There had to be something important about it if he had written it, so I phoned my contacts in China and asked them was it right that Deng had been in Taihang and they said yes.' But from there on, only an academic of Professor Goodman's standing could have opened the door. Fluent in Chinese, he has given lectures in China on party history and his contacts were impeccable.