Salisbury, Harrison. The New Emperors: China in the Era of Mao and Deng. Boston: Little, Brown, 1992. Harrison Salisbury is an acclaimed American journalist who has devoted years to the study of China in general, and specifically to the era of Mao and Deng. This study is rooted in his personal experiences in China and in his extensive academic research, which are both fully reflected in this penetrating analysis.
The New Emperors is an attempt to understand the communist era in China under the two most prominent leaders of that era to date---Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. The essence of these leaders, says Salisbury, is that they each, in effect, have one foot in the ideological world of Marxism, and one foot in the traditional and historical world of China. Seeing themselves as down-to-earth leaders intent on practical matters of leadership and advancing the communist cause in China, they were nevertheless seen by the people as "Sons of Heaven, rulers by a kind of divine right" (xiii). Both Mao and Deng, when they thought it necessary, were willing and able to use the perceptions of the people to exercise tyrannical power:
In Chinese custom, dynasties and bloodlines are
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