Portrait of Deng as Reformer in 1978 Plenum Ignores History

China’s Communist Party leader, Xi Jinping, wants the late Deng Xiaoping’s magic. Mr. Xi will lay out proposals for economic rejuvenation at a leadership conference that started Saturday, and state-run media have likened the event to a historic meeting in 1978 when, they say, Mr. Deng began an era of market “reform and opening up.”

But anyone looking for inspiration and instruction from Mr. Deng should beware: the conventional account of the 1978 meeting is a compound of selective memories, and a deceptive guide to how China’s steps to economic transformation really happened.

“To put a halo on this meeting as a conference of reform and opening up is to concoct a myth,” Bao Tong, a former aide to ousted party secretary Zhao Ziyang, a central figure in the tumult of the 1980s, said in an interview with a Chinese researcher published in 2008....