Opinion | Forget Texas, China came out when Deng tipped his hat to Japan

For Western historians, the signal moment for China’s coming out in the modern age was Deng Xiaoping’s trip to America in early 1979, a visit memorable for a single image – of the diminutive, Mao-suited vice-premier donning an oversized cowboy hat at a Texas rodeo.

For historians with a wider lens, especially in Asia, Deng’s trip to Japan months earlier was an equally transformative event.

Deng went to Japan in late 1978 when the country was on the crest of an industrial wave that was threatening to upend the US-led global order, a phenomenon that echoes in today’s US-China rivalry.

Japanese cars were popular, and its televisions and electronics were flooding foreign stores. The country’s steel mills were putting overseas rivals out of business, leaving the beginnings of a rust belt across the American Midwest, a process China’s factories would accentuate two decades later.

Deng arrived in Japan a hardened figure, the survivor of multiple wars, revolutionary conflict and Maoist purges. But he seemed to sense – as he trekked through Japan’s state-of-the-art factories, and rode its famous trains – that he was witnessing a new industrial revolution.