Deng Xiaoping

Deng Xiaoping was the paramount leader of the People's Republic of China from 1978 until the early 1990s. A veteran of the Communist revolution who was twice purged under Mao Zedong, he dismantled much of the Maoist economy, opened China to foreign trade and investment, and set off the growth that made it a global economic power. He also ordered the army to clear the protests in Beijing in June 1989, when troops killed hundreds and probably thousands of civilians, and insisted to the end on the Communist Party's monopoly of power.

Deng was born on 22 August 1904 in Guang'an, Sichuan province, the son of a landowning family. At sixteen he went to France on a work-study programme, worked in factories, including the Renault plant, and joined the Communist movement there alongside Zhou Enlai. In 1926 he studied in Moscow, and on returning to China he worked as a party organiser, leading a failed uprising in Guangxi in 1929.

He took part in the Long March of 1934–1935 and became a close supporter of Mao. During the war against Japan and the Chinese Civil War he served as political commissar of an army commanded by Liu Bocheng, and he was one of the leaders of the Huaihai campaign of 1948–1949, a decisive Communist victory. After 1949 he ran south-west China before moving to Beijing.

Deng rose quickly, becoming vice-premier and, in 1956, general secretary of the party. He supported Mao in the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957, helping to direct a purge in which hundreds of thousands of intellectuals and critics were labelled enemies and sent to labour camps or the countryside. After the famine caused by the Great Leap Forward, he worked with Liu Shaoqi to restore agriculture with more practical policies, summed up in his remark that it did not matter whether a cat was black or white as long as it caught mice.

Mao saw this pragmatism as a betrayal. In the Cultural Revolution Deng was denounced as the "number two capitalist roader", stripped of his posts in 1966–1967 and in 1969 sent to work in a tractor factory in Jiangxi. Red Guards persecuted his family; his eldest son, Deng Pufang, fell from a building in 1968 while held by them and was left paraplegic. Deng was rehabilitated in 1973 to help the ailing Zhou Enlai run the government, but after mass mourning for Zhou turned into protests in Tiananmen Square in April 1976 he was purged a second time.

Mao died in September 1976 and the radical Gang of Four were arrested weeks later. Deng returned to office in 1977 and outmanoeuvred Mao's chosen successor, Hua Guofeng. At a party meeting in December 1978 he set a new course, putting economic development ahead of class struggle. He never took the top formal titles of party chairman or head of state, ruling instead through his authority and his chairmanship of the military commission.

The reforms came in stages. Collective farms gave way to the household responsibility system, under which families farmed their own plots and sold surplus produce, and harvests rose sharply. Special economic zones, starting with Shenzhen near Hong Kong in 1980, welcomed foreign capital. Private business returned, prices were gradually freed, and millions of rural workers moved into new industries. Deng also normalised relations with the United States, visiting in early 1979, and weeks later launched a short and costly war against Vietnam.

The reforms had harsh sides. The one-child policy, introduced in 1980, was enforced with fines, forced abortions and sterilisations. Political liberalisation was strictly limited: Deng closed the Democracy Wall in Beijing in 1979, and the activist Wei Jingsheng, who had called for democracy as a "fifth modernisation", was jailed for fifteen years. Deng's formula of "one country, two systems" shaped the 1984 agreement with Britain for the return of Hong Kong in 1997.

By the late 1980s inflation and corruption fed discontent, and Deng had already removed the reformist party leader Hu Yaobang in 1987 for being too tolerant of student protests. Hu's death in April 1989 set off demonstrations by students and workers in Beijing and dozens of other cities, calling for an end to corruption, freedom of the press and political reform. Students occupied Tiananmen Square, and the protest drew huge crowds during the visit of the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in mid-May.

Deng and other party elders decided the protests were a threat to the party's rule. Martial law was declared on 20 May, and the party leader Zhao Ziyang, who opposed it, was dismissed and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. On the night of 3–4 June, on orders backed by Deng, troops and tanks forced their way into central Beijing, firing on crowds in the streets leading to the square. The Chinese government gave a death toll of around 200 to 300, including soldiers; other estimates range from several hundred to several thousand, and the true number remains unknown because the government has never allowed an independent inquiry. Thousands were arrested and some were executed. Deng publicly praised the army days later. The event is still censored in China.

Deng gave up his last formal posts in 1989 and 1990 but remained the final authority. When hardliners slowed the reforms after Tiananmen, he made a tour of southern China in early 1992, praising the special economic zones and restarting rapid market reform under Jiang Zemin. He died in Beijing on 19 February 1997, a few months before Hong Kong's handover.

His legacy is the China he left: a fast-growing, increasingly market-based economy under a Communist Party that tolerated no rival. Hundreds of millions of people rose out of poverty in the decades after 1978, while inequality, corruption and environmental damage grew. Unlike the parties of the Soviet bloc, which fell in the Revolutions of 1989, the Chinese party survived, in large part because Deng combined economic opening with the use of force in June 1989. His insistence on collective leadership and term limits was later abandoned under Xi Jinping. Further background is in the History of China.