Alexander V. Pantsov, with Steven I. Levine, Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. 610 pp. $27.50.
Editor's Note: Deng Xiaoping had a crucial impact on China's role in the world in the latter half of the twentieth century. Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai oversaw Chinese foreign policy during the country's first quarter century of Communist rule—initially establishing a close alliance with the Soviet Union, then turning bitterly against the USSR at the end of the 1950s, and finally pursuing a rapprochement with the United States in the early 1970s—but it was Deng who made the momentous decision in the late 1970s to integrate China into the global economic order that had been largely shaped by the United States from the mid-1940s on. When Mao and Zhou died in 1976, China was still one of the poorest countries in the world. Deng's bid to link...