Justifying Capitalist Road, China Says Leader Was Once Shopkeeper : Economy: Deng Xiaoping ran a successful restaurant in Paris as a young man, an official newspaper reports.

Deng Xiaoping, hailed at China’s Communist Party Congress last week as the grand architect of economic reform, learned his petit bourgeois ethics as the operator of a small restaurant in Paris, an official newspaper reported Friday.

Shanghai’s Xinmin Evening News said Deng opened the China Beancurd Shop in June, 1922, to finance his studies in France. Zhou Enlai, who eventually became Communist China’s prime minister, gave him the idea, it said.

Deng’s supposed adventure in shopkeeping was presented as a model of the small-scale capitalism his reforms have unleashed across China.

Deng worked hard, expanded both his seating space and his menu, and became a successful businessman, the newspaper said.

“The shop grew bigger, there was more demand than they could supply, and eventually they were forced to open just long enough to sell out all their products,” it said.

Deng and his partners sold the shop to an overseas Chinese when they left France for home, where they helped lead the Communist revolution of 1949, it said.

China’s leaders have pulled out the stops at last week’s party Congress to throw their support behind Deng, who is now 88.

His theory of combining capitalist-style economic reforms with Communist political control has been hailed as a new “magic weapon” for China’s development.

As a shopkeeper, Deng joins another unlikely proponent of market forces that China’s press introduced last month.

Karl Marx, father of international communism, was also a speculator on the London stock market, the Beijing Youth News said in September.