Getting rich first.

• Position: U.S. and China - Editorial

Deng Xiaoping got quite a send-off. The New York Times hailed him as the "architect of modern China." Chose Capitalism: Resilient Leader Kept a Firm Political Grip on His Country, the Times declared on its front page. Warm tributes appeared in Time and Newsweek, including one from Henry Kissinger, who sent a posthumous thank-you note for all the consulting business Deng Xiaoping had brought his way. Oh, there was that little matter of Tiananmen Square, but by and large Deng Xiaoping was, we were told, moving in the right direction: toward capitalism. And capitalism would ultimately solve China's political problems, the tributes assured us.

This is folly. Capitalism has actually added to China's political problems. Now, after almost two decades of Chinese capitalism, the government is still horribly repressive. The brutal occupation of Tibet continues unabated, and almost every single Chinese dissident is either in exile or behind bars with decadelong sentences. Several of the most repressive sentences came down just months before Deng's death. For instance, the authorities slapped Wang Dan, one of the leaders of Tiananmen Square, with an eleven-year prison term. And they punished Ngawang Choephel, a former Fulbright scholar from Tibet, with an eighteen-year sentence when he returned to his homeland to film traditional music and dance.

For the most part, the media missed the peculiar nature of Deng's rule, which Maurice Meisner brilliantly explicates in The Deng Xiaoping Era: An Inquiry Into the Fate of Chinese Socialism, 1978-1994. Deng Xiaoping "fatally linked a capitalist market economy to a Stalinist bureaucratic apparatus," Meisner writes. "In China today, the coercion of the market is enforced by a repressive state apparatus, whose functions include the disciplining of the work force and keeping social conflicts within bounds."

The capitalism that the American media praised Deng for welcoming is hardly benign. "The savage capitalism that operates under the cloak of a socialist market economy is bringing about enormous social transformations and upheavals -- massive proletarianization, more intensive forms of exploitation, greater alienation, enormous gaps between rich and poor, and growing economic and social differences between town and countryside," Meisner writes.

Deng Xiaoping shredded not only the economy of socialism but also its ideology. His slogan, To Get Rich Is Glorious, sounds just like Ronald Reagan. Another one, Some Must...