Little Man in a Big Hurry

Henry Kissinger has no recollection of ever calling Teng Hsiao-p'ing "a nasty little man," the celebrated epithet with which the former Secretary of State is often credited. As Kissinger told TIME last week, "He struck me as extremely able and tough. He had great skill in handling the bureaucratic mechanisms. When I met him [in 1975], Teng had not concentrated very much on foreign policy, but he learned fast. He's a man of no mean consequence."

Some other world leaders held different views. Nikita Khrushchev ignored him when they met, despite Mao Tse-tung's accurate advice that the "little man" had "a great future ahead of him." Mao's wife, Chiang Ch'ing, despised him, and twice her radical supporters vilified him as China's most evil "capitalist reader." At one Politburo meeting in 1975, Mao asked all those in opposition to one of his proposals to stand up. When Teng did so, the Great Helmsman looked at him coldly and reportedly said, "Since I see nobody standing up, my proposal is unanimously adopted."

Even by Chinese standards, Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-p'ing is small in stature (4 ft. 11 in.). Psychologists might argue that his size explains in part Teng's life-long reputation for feistiness, irascibility and driving ambition. He is a highly emotional man, with a reputation for vengefulness. Teng is respected rather than loved by the Chinese, and appears to have cronies and allies rather than friends. For all that, he is China's great survivor; at 74 he has embarked with unflagging energy on the most intrepid political adventure of his life.

Teng still speaks, in a shrill tenor, with the thick accent of Szechwan, a province of central China known for its spicy cuisine, gentle climate and soaring, mountainous scenery. Little is known of Teng's early life or, for that matter, of his private life today. He is believed to be the son of a landlord. He was born in 1904 in Hsieh-hsing, a village near China's wartime capital of Chungking. His given name was Kan Tse-kao, which he changed to Teng Hsiao-p'ing (an underground alias that means Little Peace) when he joined the Communist Party in 1925.

After completing high school, Teng was one of 92 boys from China awarded scholarships to study in France. Instead of studying, the 16-year-old Teng got a job in a Paris galosh factory. At the same time, he helped out in the offices of a Chinese Communist periodical called Red Light. Its editor was Chou Enlai, who later became Teng's patron and protector. Teng's zeal in carrying out the menial chores of binding and mimeographing the magazine soon earned him the nickname of "Doctor of Mimeography."

After joining the party, Teng studied briefly at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow and then returned to China in 1926. He rose rapidly in party ranks, becoming political commissar of the Communist Seventh Army at the age of 25. By that time he was a convert to the guerrilla strategies of Mao Tse-tung, the new chairman of the party's military committee. When these theories were attacked by other Communist leaders, Teng was ousted from office--the first of three times he was to suffer this ignominious fate.

Eventually Teng was restored to good standing and became editor of the army newspaper Red Star. In 1934, he joined Mao's legendary Long March--the heroic, 6,000-mile trek by the party's forces, under constant harassment by Chiang Kai-shek's armies--to remote Yenan, in Shensi province. Food was scarce in the mountainous caves, but Teng rose ingeniously to the occasion. According to Chou's secretary, Yang Yi-chih, Teng earned the gratitude of Mao and other party leaders because of his skills, not in the military arts, but in cooking. He was justly famous for devising a tasty concoction known as Teng's "Hung shao Ko-juo" (Dog meat with brown sauce).

During World War II, Teng helped set up a highly effective guerrilla force against the Japanese in North China. After Japan's surrender, the group continued its operations against Chiang's Nationalist armies. When the Communists took power in 1949, Teng served as the party boss of South China and the mayor of Chungking. Called to Peking in 1952, he held a variety of major posts, some of them simultaneously: Finance Minister, Secretary of the Central Committee, Vice Chairman of National Defense, Secretary-General of the Communist Party. In 1956 he was appointed to the Politburo's seven-man standing committee.

As Teng's power grew, his relationship with Mao degenerated. The Chairman complained that Teng rarely consulted him and treated him as a "dead ancestor." In the aftermath of Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward, Teng tried to reintroduce a measure of private farming to give peasants the initiative to produce more food. In a statement that would later be cited as proof that he was an "unrepentant capitalist reader," Teng declared: "Private farming is all right as long as it raises production, just as it doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice." Mao was not informed of the farming plan, and testily inquired, "Which emperor decided this?"

Still, Teng managed to survive until a power struggle broke out in 1966 between Mao and Chief of State Liu Shao-ch'i. Mao felt that Liu and his pragmatic allies, of whom Teng was foremost, had created highly bureaucratic "independent kingdoms" based on a system that was unresponsive to the needs of the party and the people. In 1965 Liu was denounced as a "renegade, scab and traitor," expelled from the Communist Party "forever" and sent to prison, where he reportedly died in 1973. (There are rumors in Peking that his reputation may be cleared posthumously.)

Teng attended the first Red Guard rallies, but he was soon singled out as a key target of the radical youths who spearheaded Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Teng was excoriated in the press as "Liu's henchman" and "even more sinister and dangerous than Liu." Pamphlets and wall posters claimed that Teng's consuming bourgeois passions were mah-jongg and bridge. While supposedly on inspection tours, it was charged, Teng was traveling around the country on specially chartered trains and planes with his card-playing cronies.

Eventually, Teng was driven through the streets of Peking in a truck, with a dunce cap pulled over his ears, while the Red Guards jeered. One of his two brothers, Teng Ken, was purged from his post as deputy mayor of Chungking. The other, Teng Shu-p'ing, is believed to have committed suicide in 1966 following attacks against him by the Red Guards. Teng's only daughter, Pu Fang, was assaulted and crippled in a similar attack.

Though Teng escaped arrest and was not formally expelled from the Communist Party, he was given a degrading job serving meals in the mess hall of a party school in Hopeh, close to where he had once led triumphant Red forces against the Nationalists in 1947. In a humiliating self-criticism that now reads rather like a manifesto for the future, Teng confessed that his "way of thinking and style of work" were incompatible with Mao's.

Chou En-lai could not or would not help Teng during the worst of his ordeal, but the Premier did reach out a hand to his old comrade once the Cultural Revolution had subsided. It was Chou who evidently engineered Teng's dramatic reappearance at a 1973 Peking banquet for Cambodia's Prince Norodim Sihanouk. As diners stared in disbelief, the erstwhile "unrepentant capitalist roader" was led to a seat by a niece of Mao's. It was thereupon announced that Teng still held the post of Vice Premier. As Chou's health gradually deteriorated, Teng emerged more and more as his heir apparent. He toured the provinces, spoke for China at the United Nations and received President Gerald Ford in Peking. Meanwhile, Teng carried out a running verbal battle with Chiang Ch'ing, whom he blamed for the ferocity of the Cultural Revolution. Mao's wife hoped that her radical faction would seize full power in China, after the deaths of Chou and Mao, against the will of her bitterest enemy, Teng.

By the spring of 1976, Chiang Ch'ing and her radical faction had prevailed--temporarily. Chou was dead. Mao was dying. And Teng was once more in disgrace. The ostensible cause of Teng's second downfall was unprecedented rioting that occurred in Peking's T'ien An Men Square when a commemoration ceremony for Chou was canceled without explanation. The violent demonstrations by would-be mourners were quickly condemned as counterrevolutionary acts, allegedly incited by Teng and his followers. Two days after the riots, Teng was stripped of all his posts. Among his accusers was Hua Kuo-feng, who took over as Chairman following Mao's death five months later.

During his 20 years of service in the Communist military apparatus, Teng had established deep personal and political ties with high-ranking officers. When threatened with assassination by the radicals, the Vice Premier relied on these contacts to escape the capital. One old comrade-in-arms, General Hsu Shih-yu, offered him sanctuary in a Kwangtung province resort that was reserved for the military elite. Teng waited there in limbo for a year.

When Hua had Chiang Ch'ing and her Gang of Four arrested in October 1976, Teng wrote a letter to the Central Committee expressing his joy over the event. A rash of wall posters in Peking and other cities called upon the Chinese people to "warmly welcome and firmly support" Teng's return--the signal, in July 1977, for his reappointment to all his posts.

Since then, Teng has progressed toward his ambitions for China with the speed of a septuagenarian who has scarcely a second to waste. Typically, vengeance remains one of those goals. In the past 16 months, more than 100,000 victims of the Cultural Revolution and of Chiang Ch'ing's ire have been released from prison or have returned from forced labor. But at the same time, thousands of radical officials, former Red Guards and Teng's personal enemies have been purged. Teng will not tolerate anyone or anything that stands in his way, nor does he need to in a state that remains as authoritarian as China is today. "I am an old revolutionary," he said last year. "What storms haven't I braved and what worlds haven't I faced up to?"

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