Your review of Ezra Vogel’s Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 2011) shares the author’s enthusiasm for his hero (“The Great Stabilizer,” October 22, 2011). The paramount leader from 1978 to 1992, Deng reversed most of what Mao Zedong had done while calling it “socialism” still. The author thus considers him not just the maker of modern China, but one of the most substantial figures in modern history. As an intelligence officer in East Asia for the Clinton administration, the author surely knows what he is talking about. One of your innocuous comments is that he could have subtitled the book not the “transformation” but the “stabilization” of China. In fact, he could have subtitled it the “counter revolution” in China, for that is precisely what Deng had achieved while carefully eschewing calling his goal “capitalism.” Miraculously, the counter revolution has been so quiet ever since that few people have noticed it at all. For this Deng certainly deserves heaps of praise all around, but especially from America.