The Southern Tour: Deng Xiaoping and the Fight for China’s Future

Jonathan Chatwin’s book, The Southern Tour: Deng Xiaoping and the Fight for China’s Future, explores Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 Southern Tour and the mythology around it. Drawing on archival sources, contemporary reportage, and Dr Chatwin’s own retracing of the journey in 2019, it offers a narrative history of this pivotal political moment ‒ and reflects more broadly on the tension between ideological control and market liberalisation in the post-Mao era.