This is the BBC.
Chinese characters.
Historian Rana Mitter tells the story of China in 20 remarkable lives.
Part 20.
Black Cat, Yellow Cat.
This is Morning Star, one of the star ferries that chugs its way regularly across the Hong Kong harbour and has done for decades.
This one was put on the water in 1965, just ahead of the Cultural Revolution which briefly convulsed the tiny British colony.
Of course, things had calmed down by the 1970s, when Deng Xiaoping embracing economic reform at home and looking to warm relations with the outside world also turned to unfinished business.
And the return of this tiny patch of British territory in South China was one piece of very important unfinished business that he was determined to conclude.
Hong Kong is now firmly part of the People's Republic of China.
But 40 years ago, it wasn't entirely clear what was going to happen to it.
Hong Kong Island had been ceded to Britain as part of the Treaty of Nanjing in 1842, after the First Opium War.
In 1898, another war let Britain take a 99-year lease on the Kowloon Peninsula and much of the land beyond it.
By the early 1980s, the British Empire was mostly gone.
But new Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher hoped that perhaps the Chinese might be persuaded to let Britain hang on to the territory.
China's leader at the time made it clear that any continuing British claim was unthinkable.
His name was Deng Xiaoping.
And he could be thought of as the man who made China what it is today that unique combination of economic superpower with an authoritarian government and global influence.
Chairman Mao made communist China.
Deng Xiaoping preserved the communist name of the party and turned the country into one of the most capitalist societies anywhere on earth.
Deng was born in Sichuan province in 1904.
Recollections from those who knew him say he had a fiery temper, supposedly like the hot chillies from his home province.
He was sent to France on a work-study programme at the age of just 15.
While there, he joined the new Chinese Communist Party's small European youth branch and made his way back to his homeland via the Soviet Union.
Deng accompanied Mao Zedong and other party leaders on the legendary Long March of the 1930s.
He rose in power during the years of the Second World War and the Civil War.
During Mao's period of rule, Deng fell from grace not once, but twice, but he rose three times.
How could he manage this balancing act?
He was a loyal and unswerving member of the Communist Party –
When it came to the violent overthrow of landlords in the countryside or the establishment of the chaotic policies of the Cultural Revolution, Deng was fully behind his leader, but he also showed a willingness to compromise.
In 1962, after the end of the Great Leap Forward policies, which had caused a famine that killed millions, Deng supported the limited reintroduction of markets to allow more agricultural goods to reach the people who needed them.
In a line that would later become famous.
He declared We don't care if it's a black cat or a yellow cat.
As long as it catches mice, it's a good cat.
Although it wasn't clear at the time, this was a powerful signal that Deng would be willing to mix a strong belief in ideological control with considerable flexibility in how to bring about the political goals that he wanted –.
During the Cultural Revolution, when Deng was temporarily purged, the People's Daily attacked him, changing the colour of the feline along the way, by opposing the theory of what they called the Black Cat and the White Cat.
In Peking, a million people have attended the final memorial service for Chairman Mao, who died last week.
Similar services were held in every city and commune in China.
The Peking memorial service was televised throughout the country and monitored in Hong Kong.
Deng was out of favour with Mao at the time of the leader's death in 1976.
But within two years he had used his influence and prestige to launch a bloodless coup against Mao's colourless successor, Hua Guofeng.
And Deng then unleashed a revolution that was every bit as major as the Cultural Revolution, but this time a quiet one from below, that rode on the backs of decisions that China's farmers and workers were discreetly beginning to take on for themselves.
He urged them to Xia Hai, jump into the sea, the sea of commerce.
And they did.
And a little town in South China became an important part of that story.
That town, just on the China side of the border with Hong Kong in 1979, was Shenzhen.
The following two decades saw it turn into a mighty metropolis which drew on the significant cross-border trade, manufacturing and finance fuelled by official Chinese government policy.
And the ideas for this market-driven revolution promoted by Deng against huge opposition within his own Politburo drew on a whole variety of sources.
Deng made it clear that China should concentrate on the four modernisations – agriculture industry, national defence and science and technology.
He hadn't invented the term, but it became particularly associated with him as he pushed forward the idea that China could achieve nothing without economic growth and that the inward-looking drive towards self-sufficiency that had marked Mao's China would no longer be sufficient.
So Deng's advisers looked all around the world for inspiration.
In 1980, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Milton Friedman, was brought to China to preach ultra-free market economics.
At a time when there was a move towards reform within the Soviet bloc.
The Chinese were also keen to hear from figures from Eastern Europe, such as Janos Kornai from Hungary, which was undertaking what was nicknamed goulash communism socialism leavened by more emphasis on consumer goods.
Deng's supporters, like Communist Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, even drew on futuristic thinkers who argued that technology and computers would alter both civilian and military life in previously unimaginable ways.
It was all a far cry from Marx and Engels.
But by the late 1980s, the Chinese economy wasn't working for everyone.
People were making money, but inflation rocketed, meaning that civil servants, teachers and students couldn't afford everyday necessities.
And the increasingly open atmosphere allowed figures such as the writers of the Hesheng television series, which we heard about previously, to advocate more freedom and democracy.
Protesters began to fill China's cities in spring 1989, most notably Tiananmen Square in Beijing.
Deng's Politburo discussed how to handle them, but on the 3rd of June, he authorized force.
The killings in central Beijing are still taboo in China.
They're hardly ever mentioned, and when they are, they are termed a counter-revolutionary uprising.
They have to be considered as part of Deng Xiaoping's record, along with the undeniable economic growth that he pioneered.
Deng's China didn't collapse in 1989, even though Eastern Europe's communists fell from power one by one that autumn.
Instead, his government promoted a new nationalism to bind itself together.
And one important part of that nationalism was the upcoming return of Hong Kong.
China's communists were always Marxists, even though Deng's variety seemed to involve the end of capitalism turning up sometime in the next millennium rather than any time sooner.
But they were also nationalists.
They'd grown up in the early 20th century, when other countries – France Japan, America and certainly Britain – had been able to push China around and tell it what to do.
Securing China's borders and getting its territories back had been a priority for Mao.
For his successor, Deng, there was unfinished business in Kowloon.
Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, fresh from victory in the Falklands in 1982, mused whether it might be possible to come up with a deal to continue British rule in the colony.
Deng's government made it clear, politely but firmly, that this would not happen.
The Joint Declaration on the Future of Hong Kong, which we have just signed on behalf of our two governments, is a landmark in the life of the territory.
In 1984, China and Britain had signed a joint declaration pledging that Hong Kong would revert to Chinese rule, although its way of life would remain unchanged, for 50 years after the handover, that is, until 2047.
But as Hong Kong moved into its last few years of British rule, profound economic changes were happening in China, and Deng was at the centre of them once again.
In the aftermath of Tiananmen, several of Deng's more conservative colleagues argued that the country must control economic growth and stop the sort of wild swings that had led to the 1989 protests.
Deng feared that his reforms might be snuffed out.
In winter 1992 he made a series of calculated appearances in cities in southern China and in Shanghai, with speeches advocating a firm return to high growth policies and stressing the need to become an exporting powerhouse.
By the mid-1990s, China was beginning to produce the astonishing figures that would make it the fastest growing large economy on the globe, regularly posting double-digit growth, as it became the workshop of the world, supplying everything from clothes to clocks to furniture stamped with the increasingly ubiquitous Made in China.
Deng himself only saw the first few years of those profound changes.
The 1992 Southern Tour would be his last major public appearance.
He died in February 1997 and so never got to see Hong Kong handed back.
But the transition will always be associated with his period in power.
A popular song by the folk rock singer Ai Jing summed up what she was hoping for a chance to visit the fabled Hong Kong nightlife with her boyfriend after 1997 and to use the return of the former colony to banish the legacy of that time when China's culture had looked inward rather than embracing the world.
MUSIC PLAYS
Riding this cable car making its way across the green hills of Lantau Island on Hong Kong is a reminder of this landscape, which has contained so many hundreds and thousands of years of Chinese history.
The past is never really absent, even in today's very modern China.
That legacy of Confucius, Li Qingzhao, Chairman Mao, all the characters we've met continues to shape this country as it develops a space program, a more outward-looking foreign policy and a more nationalist and authoritarian political system at home.
The past is like a mirror, the Chinese like to say, and our cast of Chinese characters has reflected back those complexities, plurality and dynamism that have shaped China's history over three millennia and more.
MUSIC PLAYS
Thank you.
