Success is never final. Failure is never fatal. Courage is what counts. –Sir Winston Churchill
CHONGQING CITY, China – Why are we discouraged by the slightest setback? Why don’t all of us boldly pursue our dreams, no matter how difficult the odds?
Throughout my vacation, I have met numerous young entrepreneurs – enterprising street-food vendors (cooking daily from 10 p.m. to 3 a.m. in the harsh winter cold) and even emerging tycoons throughout China who are living actual rags-to-riches sagas.
In America, men from the most humble beginnings, like Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Edison, also proved that nothing is impossible for those who dream and are willing to pay the price to attain their goals.
I am reminded of the world’s numerous self-made people and other success stories because of the incredible life of China’s late reformist leader Deng Xiaoping, who was born 103 years ago in Baifang village, Xiexing township, Guang’an county of Sichuan, 100 kilometers north of this bustling mountain city of Chongqing (pronounced "Chung-ching"). Not many people are aware that the genius behind China’s ongoing economic miracle was a dreamer who himself had to overcome cruel odds to become leader of this vast nation.
Edison was 22 when he went to New York City with only a dollar in his pocket and no job. He looked for jobs during the day and in the evenings slept in the basement of a gold company where he observed everything around him. Some of the firm’s equipment broke down, and Edison promptly fixed it because he had been closely studying how it worked every night before he went to sleep. The gratified bosses offered him a job.
Edison went on to innovate and improve the machine, and the company owners were so happy they paid him $40,000 for his invention. With this money, Edison established the American Telegraph Works in New Jersey, where he built a laboratory in Menlo Park. It was here that Edison became world-famous for his numerous breathtaking inventions, such as the incandescent lamp, a camera for the first movies, the phonograph, a cement mixer, and a better telephone.
Few people realize that Edison tried 1,500 materials to create the light bulb; it was only then that he finally succeeded in lighting up the whole world. He worked so hard day and night that he would sometimes fall asleep at his workbench. It was Edison who revealed the secret of success as "one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration."
Unfortunately, the next decade of his life was a series of heartbreaking business (including bankruptcy), political and personal setbacks that would have destroyed less determined persons. In 1855, he ran for the Senate and lost. In 1856, he ran for vice president and lost. He never gave up. In 1860, he won the election as US President. He went on to lead victory in the civil war, save the US from breaking apart, and he liberated the blacks from slavery.
Lincoln lost in eight elections, suffered business bankruptcies, a nervous breakdown and many personal tragedies, but he never gave up his dreams and persevered.
Deng’s life was scarred by horrific tragedies that would have totally vanquished most people, but he never gave up. His father was a landlord who was beheaded by bandits in 1938. His brother committed suicide in 1967 at the height of the leftist Cultural Revolution, which had a year earlier removed Deng from power. At the time of his brother’s death, radical Red Guards pushed his son Deng Pufang out of a fourth-floor window at Beijing University, which failed to kill him but fractured his spine and made him a paraplegic. Deng Xiaoping suffered political persecutions and in 1933 was purged from power three times from the Communist Party, and then in 1966 and 1976 as a top government official. But he never gave up.
In his personal life, Deng’s first wife Zhang Xiyuan died two years after their marriage in 1928 during a miscarriage. His second wife, Jin Weiying, divorced him during his first political defeat in 1933 and went to live with his political persecutor. Deng later remarried Zhuo Lin, with whom he had three daughters and two sons. Physically as diminutive as President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, Deng was partly educated in France, where he had to work part-time in a Renault factory, steel and rubber factories, as a fireman in a locomotive and a kitchen helper at restaurants.
Deng Xiaoping was a pragmatist who once said: "It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice." He pioneered the stunning idea of so-called "socialism with Chinese characteristics," whereby China established the first ever stock exchange in a Communist country and other startling innovations that, since the early 1980s, have transformed the world’s largest nation into the world’s fastest-growing major economy.
He also negotiated for Britain to return its colony of Hong Kong, which was forcibly taken during the 19th-century Opium Wars in which the weak and corrupt Manchu-led Qing Dynasty couldn’t stop the British narcotics trade. He was criticized for his efforts to maintain political and social stability in this developing nation of 1.3 billion people, but he was steadfast in his belief that the imperatives of economic development should supersede politics.
Unlike other world leaders with giant egos, Deng Xiaoping didn’t want to promote a cult of personality and relinquished official titles. He groomed his successors – such as former President Jiang Zemin and ex-Premier Zhu Rongji – as well as present leaders President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao, to ensure stability. Even when he died, the pragmatic Deng donated his corneas and body to medical research. He refused a grand mausoleum or an open casket, asking that his ashes be cast into the sea and that there be no national holiday on the day of his funeral but business as usual nationwide.
Deng Xiaoping was an ordinary human being with uncommon strength of character, discipline, dreams and indomitable faith.
He also survived many assassination attempts. However, like Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Edison, automobile tycoon Henry Ford, Ming Dynasty peasant founder Zhu Yuanzhang, or the uneducated but great founder of the Han Dynasty Emperor Liu Bang, the late Deng Xiaoping believed that nothing is impossible for those of us who dare to dream and are willing to pay the price to attain our goals.