In 2000, the China scholar Ezra Vogel was thinking about writing a book to help Americans understand key developments in Asia when he was about to retire from teaching at Harvard University. When a friend suggested he should write about the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, Vogel thought about it for many weeks, and concluded that the idea was exactly right.

For the past 10 years, Vogel has researched Deng extensively. He has read books about him, traveled to China numerous times and interviewed hundreds of influential Chinese and foreigners.

The result is Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, published by Harvard University Press last month. It chronicles Deng's rich and intricate life and career from his birth on Aug 22, 1904 in a weakened Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) to his death on Feb 19, 1997, a few months before the return of Hong Kong to the motherland. That time span also takes in the country's turmoil and an economic boom in the last three decades.

"Deng made more contribution to China than any other leader in the 20th century because he put the country on a path to the future," Vogel says at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "China was so lucky to have such a leader to bring such progress.

"Nobody in the West in 1978 imagined that the Chinese Communist Party could lead a country to grow faster than capitalist countries. Even scholars had no idea."

He concludes in his book that all the favorable conditions that China enjoyed in 1978 would have been insufficient to transform the huge, chaotic civilization into a modern nation without a strong and able leader who could hold the country together while providing strategic direction.

It was Deng who finally realized the mission that Chinese leaders had tried for almost two centuries to achieve: finding a path that would make China rich and powerful.

While admiring Deng personally, Vogel says that as a Western scholar he has tried to present an objective picture and point out the different views. But he has also felt China is so big, with so many different views, that he could not possibly explain everything.

Writing about Deng was particularly tough, Vogel says, because Deng wrote almost nothing himself. "It took a long time trying to put the pieces together."

The 81-year-old China scholar believes it was no accident that Deng was a capable and pragmatic leader, given his many ups and downs.

He had "seen so much and thought so much and had always been around".

Deng had enormous range of governing experience at the local, regional and national levels that he could draw on, and Vogel believes Deng's experience in war had shaped his style.

Deng was an extremely confident person from when he was young, Vogel says. He was not one who thought only about the Party or himself. "I think he always thought about the overall situation ... And the important thing for Deng since 1978 was always to improve the livelihood of the Chinese people and the economy," Vogel says.

While Vogel heaps much praise on Deng, he believes Hua Guofeng, who succeeded Mao after his death, was the one who initiated the reform and opening-up.

Deng's personal charisma aside, Vogel found that qifen, or the atmosphere in the high levels of the Party, has been vital for top leaders to make big changes since 1978 and that will remain true in the years to come.

Vogel believes that while China's success has offered much for others, especially developing countries, to learn from, there is no set model. "He wanted to learn the best thing from everywhere and adapt to the needs of his own country."

Vogel is known to many Chinese by the name Fu Gaoyi, and few probably know he is also foremost among scholars of Japan. The Japanese edition of his book Japan as Number One: Lessons for America (1979) is the all-time bestseller in Japan of non-fiction by a Western author.

After receiving his PhD in sociology from Harvard and spending two years in Japan in the late 1950s, his main interest was Japan. But when people like John Fairbank, the then top China scholar at Harvard, called him in 1961 about studying Chinese history and language with a three-year fellowship, he immediately accepted.

Vogel now not only speaks fluent Chinese, but reads and writes the language.

"In the future it's very necessary for China and Japan to get along, and I know that World War II was one of the biggest problems interfering with their ability to get along. I think I have a special responsibility and opportunity because I know both China and Japan."

Deng learned a lot from Japan on how to modernize industry, improve quality control and be efficient, Vogel says. "In the 1980s Deng did very good things. He tried to introduce Japanese movies, television and novels, literature of all kinds."

Making his first visit to China in 1973 with a delegation from the National Academy of Sciences, Vogel met then-premier Zhou Enlai and other high officials, and regretted he never had a chance to meet and talk with Deng in person. The closest contact he had was at the National Gallery in Washington in 1979, when Deng was making a speech during an official visit to the US.

You can contact the writer at chenweihua@chinadaily.com.cn.

China Daily