On the Colours of the Cat: Deng Xiaoping’s Thought

Abstract

For countless centuries, China was in the vanguard of civilisation and the richest country in the world. Its GDP has been bigger than that of any other country for 18 of the last 20 centuries. In the thirteenth century, Marco Polo described the splendour of the Cambaluc (present-day Beijing) of Kublai Kan, whom he considered “the most powerful man in land, armies and treasures ever to have existed, from Adam to the present”. At the end of the eighteenth century, Lord McCartney, ambassador of the British King George III, visited Beijing and estimated that the income of the Emperor of China was equivalent to two-thirds of the income of Great Britain, and that China’s was four times greater. In 1820, with the Industrial Revolution in full swing and the decadence of Qing China already well advanced, China accounted for around 30% of global GDP.