Deng Liqun, Who Battled China’s Liberals, Dies at 99
By CHRIS BUCKLEY

HONG KONG — He was as obstinate as a Hunan mule, the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping said. China’s reformist officials and liberal intellectuals came to detest him, and he often fought them with equal venom.

Deng Liqun, who died on Tuesday in Beijing at 99, was a senior Communist Party propaganda and ideology official who began the 1980s as a powerful proponent of change, yet became one of the most vehement and divisive foes of China’s liberalization.

His death, after many years spent bedridden, was reported by Xinhua, the state-run news agency.

The Xinhua announcement eulogized Mr. Deng as an “outstanding leader on the party’s front line of thought, theory and propaganda.” But that was a euphemism for a staunch traditionalist whose legacy can be detected in the party’s current revival of Leninist and Maoist rhetoric.

“He was a representative of the left, and I think that reflected his real beliefs; it wasn’t seeking personal material gain,” Yang Jisheng, a historian in Beijing who has written an account of Chinese politics in the 1980s, said in a telephone interview.

“He supported the reforms, like the rural reforms,” Mr. Yang said, “until he felt reform and opening went too far, and then he was a stubborn defender of the planned economy and leftist ideology.”

Mr. Deng shared a surname with Deng Xiaoping, who oversaw China’s post-Mao thaw, but they were not relatives, and Deng Liqun came to believe that the senior Mr. Deng’s liberal protégés had strayed perilously far from Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. Deng Liqun’s career in the 1980s hinged on confrontations with the more moderate leaders, especially Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang.

“China has an old saying: ‘Good deeds are answered with good, and bad are answered with bad,’ ” Deng Liqun wrote in his memoirs. Mr. Zhao, he said, “got his retribution in the political tumult of 1989,” when he was purged and the army crushed pro-democracy demonstrations.

Mr. Deng’s critics believed that he, too, got at least part of what he deserved. His conservative patron, Wang Zhen, nursed hopes that Mr. Deng could climb higher in the leadership, Mr. Yang, the historian, said. Instead, his feuding made him unpopular with many officials. At a party congress in 1987, conservative lobbying to win Mr. Deng a promotion backfired, and, to widespread astonishment, he failed to win enough votes even for a seat on the Central Committee, a relatively junior leadership body.

Mr. Deng was not always cast as a hidebound traditionalist. In the late 1970s, he was one of the early proponents of loosening commune controls over farmers and other concessions to overcome the malaise of Mao’s last years.

Mr. Deng was born in Hunan Province in southern China, the son of a wealthy, educated landowner. He went to high school in Beijing, where he joined the Communist Party in 1936. After a few months studying economics, at Peking University, he journeyed to Yan’an, Mao’s base. He rose to become a deputy editor in chief of Red Flag, the party’s main doctrinal journal. Toward the end of the Cultural Revolution, he was an important aide of Deng Xiaoping when Mao brought back the senior Mr. Deng from banishment to shore up the economy. Both men were again thrown from power in a leftist backlash.

The younger Mr. Deng refused to criticize Deng Xiaoping, and “Old Deng,” grateful for the support, kept “little Deng” by his side when he returned to power in 1977. Deng Liqun helped write speeches and provided the Marxist arguments for measured economic adjustments.

But in the 1980s, as demands for bolder economic and political liberalization grew, Mr. Deng recoiled. He warned against further liberalization and backed a campaign against “spiritual pollution” that alarmed intellectuals and reformist officials.

In 1985, Deng Liqun lost his job as head of the party’s Department of Propaganda to a more liberal successor. But he kept a foothold in policy making and continued to battle liberal officials. He also wrote his memoirs, which settled scores with foes.

Mr. Deng’s wife, Luo Liyun, died four years ago, said Warren Sun, a historian of the Chinese Communist Party at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Mr. Deng is survived by three daughters, two from an earlier marriage, which ended in divorce.

Mr. Sun said Mr. Deng could be viewed “as the last fighter for orthodox Marxism-Leninism.”

“He really conceived of himself as the only one who would defend Communism,” Mr. Sun said.

After the People’s Liberation Army quelled pro-democracy protests in 1989 and Mr. Zhao and other more liberal leaders were purged from power, Mr. Deng claimed vindication.

“For many years the Marxist doctrine of class struggle and the theory of class analysis have been spurned, even distorted, insulted and attacked,” he said in a speech in August that year. “We dismantled our own ideological weapons.”

「左王」鄧力群 百歲辭世

有「左王」之稱的前中共中央書記處書記、原中共宣傳部長鄧力群，因病醫治無效，昨天下午在北京過世，享壽一百歲。

新華社報導以「中國共產黨的優秀黨員，久經考驗的忠誠的共產主義戰士，無產階級革命家」形容鄧力群。

鄧力群在上世紀80年代初出任宣傳部長期間，主張堅守毛澤東路線，與時任總書記胡耀邦、時任總理趙紫陽等改革派對立，更被認為是1987年胡耀邦下台的影響力之一。六四後，大陸自由化思想泛濫，以鄧小平為首的改革派常遭以鄧力群為首的左派圍攻。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/13/world/asia/deng-liqun-divisive-chinese-communist-party-official-dies-at-99.html

紐約時報中文版翻譯：
http://cn.nytimes.com/china/20150213/c13deng/zh-hant/

2015-02-11．聯合報．A12．兩岸．大陸新聞中心