The death of Deng Xiaoping--ultimate leader, for nearly 20 years, of the most populous nation on earth--has been anticipated for a decade. The obituaries and histories in the world press have probably been written and rewritten for years, waiting for the appropriate day to run. With so much forethought, the coverage of his death here said far more about the U.S. than it did about Deng.

Illustrative--simply because of the extraordinary level of butt-kissing--was Thursday's series of stories in the P-I. It led with a 50-paragraph page one New York Times obit, plus four side stories inside: "Washington state has benefited from Deng's reforms," local reactions, Deng quotes and an content-free AP story on succession.

According to the narrative, Deng was a fearless and courageous reformer who founded modern China, bringing enlightenment to the masses, but was too humble to seek much central power himself. It's total horseshit.

For 60 years--during and after Mao--Deng was, with the exception of two brief periods of internal exile, a central figure in one of the most brutal and repressive regimes in modern human history. His role in transforming a state every bit as justifiably despised as that of Stalin or Hitler into one acceptable and lucrative to Western capital--while remaining just as authoritarian and murderous--is an achievement so sweeping it wasn't even mentioned in any of the media reviews of his career.

In the New York Times adulation, Deng was a "wily reformer" and "an unyielding authoritarian." You'd think he was a tough-love high school teacher, not a mass murderer. There is a brief mention, about 30 paragraphs in, of the Tienanmen square "crackdown." As for Deng's legacy today, there is no hint of many thousands of political prisoners in the second largest prison system in the world (after the U.S.); no mention of prison or private slave labor; no mentions of the numerous activist boycotts of various Chinese-made goods; no mention of the corruption and quick fortunes made in Deng's new capitalism via organized crime (in the U.S. it's known as a "public-private partnership"); no mention of the increasing poverty and famine in China's interior while a few export-focused seaports prosper; no mention of ongoing genocide in Tibet, the native peoples of Xinjiang, Yunnan, and other outer provinces, or the near-war with Taiwan last year; no mention of China's key role in nuclear proliferation, the world's largest standing army, or its insistence on one of the most environmentally destructive and flat-out dangerous projects in world history (the Three Gorges Dam).

Most pointedly, in two full pages of P-I coverage the issue of Most Favored Nation trading status for China is never mentioned once. This despite an article outlining what wonderful things China does for Washington state's economy, a really upbeat quote from Boeing, and a strong push by corporate America in coming months to give China permanent MFN status so as to avoid those irritating annual hearings that point up China's countless human rights blemishes.

Oh, yeah, Boeing. Boeing has invested the most time and money of any U.S. corporation in lobbying for that MFN status. Boeing sells lots of jets to Beijing and has given China generous amounts of both technology and U.S. jobs. It projects $140 billion in new civilian sales to China over the next 20 years (military sales projections aren't being divulged), and has bought off the entire Washington congressional delegation (including prime Boeing-booster Jim McDermott) to help in the MFN struggle.

While all those front-page stories on Boeing product releases in the local papers are irritating, self-censorship in our local media is more frequently--as here--a case of what is not discussed.

Beyond the regional corporate self-interest and the capitalist attraction to an "untapped market" of 1.2 billion people, Deng's adoring obits also point up a far larger and more chilling truth. There is very little ideological difference between the leaders of a repressive Communist government and a self-proclaimed capitalist democracy. In the same situation, a Bill Clinton or George Bush would probably make most of the same decisions Deng did. Business as usual in Beijing isn't all that different from bu siness as usual in D.C.

The Soviet Union having become entangled in the Western economy long before its dissolution, Mao's China was the last attempt by a major nation-state to forge an economy independent of the West. That, and raising the standard of living for China's impoverished countryside, were the positive parts of Mao's legacy. Deng managed to dismantle those accomplishments while keeping Mao's repressive state apparatus. No wonder the West loved him.