By Wen Chihua, Qiu Lin
BEIJING, Feb. 17 (Xinhua) -- Often referred to simply
as "Comrade Xiaoping," Deng Xiaoping is revered in China as a leader who changed
the course of the world by steering the country's class-orientated revolutionary
struggle into tangible economic development.
Although considered as "the general architect of
China's economic reform and socialist modernization," Deng Xiaoping modestly
shied away the cult of personality that was all too often enjoyed by his
predecessor Mao Zedong.
Deng died from a lung infection and Parkinson's
disease on Feb. 19, 1997, at the age of 92. Even ten years after his death, many
of his countrymen still adore him as a saint.
"I miss Grandpa Deng a lot," said Feng Daishu while
fertilizing lettuce in his kaleyard in the outskirts of Chengdu, in Deng's home
province of Sichuan.
Without Deng's "opening-up" policy, the 64-year-old
vegetable farmer said that he could have ended up becoming homeless, begging in
the street.
"When he passed away, I almost cried my heart out,"
Feng said. "I felt I had lost a family member."
Indeed, before economic reforms were carried out in
1978, Feng was as poor as a church mouse. Feng remembered how he barely had some
pennies to rub together. "I had to borrow money in order to buy a new bucket,"
he said. "It cost only two yuan (0.25 U.S. dollars)!"
Deng's reforms replaced Chairman Mao's
"collectivization" with the privatization of farmland, giving the land
confiscated during the "Great Leap Forward" in the 1950s back to the farmers. As
long as they regularly delivered a proportion of staple crops to the government,
the farmers were free to grow whatever crops they wanted.
"Now my family of three can make a comfortable living
on our kaleyard. We earned more than 20,000 yuan (2,500 U.S. dollars) last
year," Feng said, laughing from cheek to cheek.
Feng holds Deng in high esteem, lamenting the 10th anniversary of his death he remarked. "Grandpa Deng made our rice bowl full, and pockets deep as well. He bailed us farmers out from poverty."
