EZRA Vogel, a Harvard scholar who has written extensively on China and Asia, spent 10 years exhaustively researching the life and times of former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping.

He read and verified material both in Chinese and English, and interviewed over 200 people who knew Deng intimately or indirectly, including his daughter Deng Rong and former Chinese President Jiang Zemin, Deng’s successor.

The end result was the 928-page  “Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China,” published in 2011 by Harvard University Press and now widely considered one of the most authoritative texts about the man credited with re-inventing China.

Unlike his predecessors, Deng, who died in February 1997, didn’t leave much writing behind. His daughter and others remembered him as a man who didn’t like talking, which made it difficult to write about him.

“Any individual is a member of the collective. Nothing can be accomplished by an individual in isolation from others,” Deng said in his famous interview with Mike Wallace in 1986.

He added that he had rejected all offers to write a biography.

“Deng realized that making Mao into a ‘god-like figure,’ with almost absolute power, made it difficult to allow different opinions to develop,” Vogel says in an e-mail interview with Shanghai Daily.

The professor emeritus, who was formerly director of the university’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Research and the Harvard University Asia Center, explains how Deng’s demeanor as just an ordinary man was in stark contrast to his predecessors.

“Deng supported the prevailing view that a leader should allow the expression of more different views,” Vogel says. “His role as reform leader was most important for this process that fundamentally changed China. Other able leaders had many of the same ideas, but Deng was the able leader who managed the process, which now seems natural but which was extraordinarily difficult back then. That role enabled China to make extraordinary changes.”

Former US President Jimmy Carter called Vogel’s book “an impressive and important biography of one of the most important men of the 20th century.”

In 1979, during Deng’s celebrated one-week visit to the US right after the two countries re-established the displomatic relations, he and Carter signed agreements on bilateral collabortations on various aspects.

In 1989, Deng voluntarily retired, breaking the earlier convention of staying in office for life. Three years later, during what has become a famous tour of southern China, he gave new life to flagging reforms in a series of speeches that stressed the importance of economic transformation and undermined the influence of anti-reformers in the Communist Party.

In 2013, Vogel’s book was published in Chinese under the title of “Era of Deng Xiaoping,” a Chinese expression commonly used when referring to Deng. Vogel was invited to China last year to talk about the book.

He says China is still on the road that Deng started.

Guide for foreign policy

“Deng is still relevant today because the basic structure and approach for ruling the country and dealing with foreign countries are still in place,” Vogel says in the e-mail interview.

“His approach to taoguang yanghui and firm decision that China should not aim for hegemony is a good guide for foreign policy that keeps good relations with foreign countries, avoids conflicts and concentrate on improving conditions at home,” he says.

The literal translation for taoguang yanghui, an important part of Deng’s philosophy, is “hide brightness, nourish obscurity,” but there has always been considerable debate about the English interpretation.

General Xiong Guangkai, former People’s Liberation Army general chief of the staff and an expert on China’s diplomatic strategy, wrote an entire article on what he called “misunderstandings” surrounding the English translation. He said one common translation — “hide our capabilities and bide our time” — wrongly suggests the intention to “wait for the time for attack.”

In his book’s preface, Vogel says he was writing the history to help Americans understand more about China. He considers Sino-US relations to be the most important bilateral rapport of the 21st century. Most Americans, however, are still wary about China.

“The biggest issue in Asia was China, and the man who most influenced China’s modern trajectory is Deng Xiaoping, whom I believe to be one of the greatest leaders of all time,” he wrote in the preface.

Vogel tends to dismiss the image of Deng as a “chief architect,” preferring to call him an “astute general manager.” Architects, Vogel contends, know exactly what they are doing. “Deng did not have a precise master plan,” he tells Shanghai Daily.

Turning to current President Xi Jinping and his predecessor Hu Jintao, Vogel adds, “Hu and Xi have continued the main lines of development begun under Deng, and they have continued to adapt to new situations. There are still issues that Xi must continue to adapt to.”

Deng, as general manager of reform, had to make decisions based on a wide variety of opinions and options.

“Deng had responsibility for guiding China from the misguided errors of the Great Leap Forward (1958-60) and cultural revolution (1966-76) to a new approach that brought growth, enriching the people and strengthening the country,” Vogel says.

Deng made enormous changes, and he was always “able to find the best way to get people to listen to him,” he says.

He did that by showing effective results. He encouraged farmers to become more creative and find better ways to farm. Journalists were sent to report what was working and what was not, which made it possible for other parts of the country to quickly adopt better methods.

Deng sent Chinese officials from all fields on overseas trips to witness first hand the gap in development between China and the West and to learn from the experience.

There are still many things Vogel says he would like to know. “If he were alive,” Vogel says, “I would ask various questions, but not the most important ones, for he would not have been so open with me.”