esteemed guests, we asked him what he thought about the different leaders at the time, what he thought about great
past leaders, and what made great leaders great. We were eager to get his perspective because he had known most
of the greatest leaders for much of the last 50 years and was one of the greatest leaders over those 50 years. He
said that Deng was the greatest leader of the 20th century. Why? Because Deng open-mindedly learned and
changed China to advance his people, he was smart and wise, he was extremely practical, and he delivered great
results to his population of about a billion people.
While Deng formally stepped down from the Politburo’s Standing Committee in 1987, he remained the de facto
leader of China, which continued to open up and become more capitalist at a breakneck pace. I got to be a small
part of China’s evolution toward capitalism in a number of ways over a number of years.
In 1989 my friend Wang Li (who was responsible at CITIC for bond trading and setting up the leading bond
trading platform) introduced me to a group of seven people (of which she was one) who were appointed by seven
companies at the request of the visionary economic reformer and historian Wang Qishan to create an organization
(the Stock Exchange Executive Council, known as SEEC) to set up the first stock markets in this new China.
China was still very poor so SEEC’s office was in a dingy hotel and the group lacked adequate funding. Still, this
small group had what mattered most—a clear mission to create big changes, smart people of good character, open-
mindedness to allow rapid learning, and determination to achieve their goals. To them this was not a job; it was a
noble mission to help their country. Over the decades that followed, I saw how they and many others built the
Chinese financial markets to become among the largest in the world for the same reason. I was thrilled to help
them. Through all this I gained a deeper liking and respect for the Chinese people, the Chinese culture, and the
rapid rates of improvement that these forces brought about.
Then, a shock happened that led everyone to question just about everything. In 1989 a movement to democratize
China developed and grew and led to demonstrations. The question of how far to allow demonstrations to go
that could be either a) healthy expressions of people’s passionate views or b) undesired anarchies or revolutions
is encountered and debated by most leaders when internal fights become heated. It is one of the big issues that
splits leaders (e.g., that debate is now going on in the United States, splitting those who would impose stronger
law-and-order adherence and those who would impose weaker law-and-order adherence). At the time of the
Chinese pro-democracy demonstrations there were eight weeks of debate and a split among the leadership about
how to handle this movement. As Deng himself as a young man was a demonstrator against the Chinese
government and a revolutionary until he won and became part of the establishment, I presume he must have in
some ways related to those young protestors.22 Deng made the defining choice to sideline those who would have
tolerated the demonstrations more and go ahead with the conservatives’ crackdown against this movement. At the
time most Chinese I spoke with were worried that China would slip back into the old Mao/“Gang of Four”-type
ways. A very close Chinese friend of mine from CITIC, Madame Gu, who was traveling to New York and whose
brother was China’s Minister of Defense, happened to be with my family at the time so I saw events unfold
through her eyes as well as through other Chinese friends’ eyes. Madame Gu had been an idealistic follower of
Mao in the early years soon after “liberation.” Then when the Cultural Revolution came along she lost her husband
to persecution (he was forced to commit suicide) and she was shunned by friends under the Red Guard’s pressure.
She got past that terrible experience to work on behalf of the country she loved and rose to a senior job at CITIC,
which is where I met her in 1984. She literally cried at the prospect of slipping back into that time. Like many
others she worried that this crackdown marked the end of reforming and opening up China and a return to those
old terrible days. The Tiananmen Square protests were a shock to the whole world and significantly set back most
countries’ relationships with China. However, they didn’t keep Deng and his government from continuing with
their reforms. With time most of my Chinese friends who were heartbroken about the crackdown thought that the
government had made the right move because the greatest fear of these friends was of revolutionary disorder. So,
the reforms and the opening-up policies continued.
The economy continued its strong growth, and good relations with other countries resumed. In fact, relations and
trade with the West became better than ever as globalization picked up. Globalization, which helped China
immensely, can be said to have begun in 1995 with the formation of the World Trade Organization and extended
until 2016 with election of Donald Trump. China joined in 2001. Since then China’s position in world trade soared.
In 2001 the United States had more trade than China with 80% of countries. Now China is a larger trading partner
than the United States in about 70% of countries.23