Sir, - As one associated with Chinese affairs in the last 82 of my 85 years, I think correspondents who have been offloading wrath against Deng and his followers into your columns would do themselves good if they did some honest thinking. They, should wonder how successful and clean handed they themselves; would be if they had found themselves in charge of the destiny of one billion two hundred million; fellow beings in a country that has only seven per cent of the world's cultivable land, but 22 per cent of its population to feed.
They would have to remember that they would have undertaken this responsibility in a land that for 400 years was at frequent intervals invaded, plundered and humiliated - in spite of having pioneered for mankind innumerable techniques such as printing, construction of navigation by the compass, canal construction, paper money - by peoples with a different coloured skin who boasted of their superior religion and culture.
They would have not to forget that the immediate ancestors of their 1.2 billion subjects had then gone through a century of totally unexampled horror, when no fewer than seven foreign countries seized large areas of theirs, and even in the unseized areas declared their citizens above and not subject to local law. This was a century when in one short period (1851-71) the country's population had fallen by 84 million, and which had culminated in a war in which over 30 million were killed by the invaders. The resistance to these saved the erstwhile tormentors of this country from probable defeat by Nazi Germany, as Japan's armies would have struck at Russia, their chief defence against Hitler, from behind.
Then they would have to reckon that when they at last had an independent country to rule it was before long to be threatened, uniquely, by each superpower with nuclear attack, and that they would have to create some sort of civilised life for a population that was more than 80 per cent illiterate and had been systematically taught by the great Christian powers that violence was the normal way of life. Your correspondents cannot squirm out of either by assuring us that they, in the circumstances which Deng and Co. had to confront, would have to do better, and done better - or else shut up.
Of course, there is a lot wrong in China (there is a lot wrong in Ireland too, and even Ireland never suffered - and certainly not between 1851 and 1951 - what China suffered). Chinese friends I have had for many years openly agree that there are things wrong: but do not see how they can all be put right in a brief period, above all till a universally high standard of education, and a certainty that famine is finally banished, have been achieved.
Meanwhile, there is no doubt whatever that a higher percentage of China's population is today better off than ever before, and there are more Chinese than ever before. - Yours etc
Grosvenor Terrace, Dalkey,
Co Dublin.