# Deng Xiaoping **Deng Xiaoping** (August 22, 1904, Guang'an, Sichuan – February 19, 1997, Beijing) was the paramount leader of China from 1978 to 1989 and its dominant figure until his death — the man who, after [[Mao Zedong]] died, launched [[Reform and Opening Up]] and remade a command economy into a market-driven export machine without surrendering the [[Chinese Communist Party]]'s monopoly on power. *Time*'s Person of the Year in 1978 and 1985, he is also the leader who ordered the [[Tiananmen Square Massacre]]. Both facts are the point: Deng's bargain — economic liberalization without political liberalization — is the arrangement the American engagement consensus assumed would erode, and the arrangement the China hawks now cite as proof it never would. ## Career A teenage worker-student in France (1920–26), where he joined the communist movement, and then a Moscow student, Deng returned to China in 1927, served as a political commissar through the [[Chinese Civil War]] and the [[Long March (China)]], and helped direct the 1949 campaigns that took Nanjing. Vice premier from 1954 and party general secretary in the 1950s, he ran the Anti-Rightist Campaign for Mao before falling out with him over the [[Great Leap Forward]]'s aftermath. During the [[Cultural Revolution]] he was denounced as the "number two capitalist roader," purged twice (1966 and 1976) and spent years in a tractor factory. Rehabilitated after Mao's death, he outmaneuvered Hua Guofeng and was paramount leader by December 1978 without ever holding the top party or state office. ## The reform era - **1978–79.** The Third Plenum's turn to modernization; the de-collectivization of agriculture under the household responsibility system; the first Special Economic Zones (Shenzhen among them, 1980); the January 1979 visit to the United States, where he toured a Texas rodeo in a ten-gallon hat and sealed normalization with [[Jimmy Carter]]. - **The system.** Term limits in the 1982 constitution, the one-child policy, nine years of compulsory schooling, the 863 technology program, "one country, two systems" for Hong Kong and Macau. His foreign-policy maxim — *taoguang yanghui*, "hide your strength, bide your time" — is the phrase hawks quote as evidence of long-game intent, though in context it was counsel of restraint after 1989. - **June 1989.** After the reformist general secretaries Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang had each been forced out, Deng backed the military crackdown of June 3–4. The party then halted the reforms: a November 1989 resolution declared their pace too fast, and after the Soviet collapse the conservatives around Chen Yun argued that markets had destroyed one communist state and would destroy another. - **The Southern Tour (January 18–February 21, 1992).** At 87 and holding no office, Deng traveled to Wuhan, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Guangzhou and Shanghai, told the generals that "those who do not promote reform should be brought down," and forced Jiang Zemin's leadership to re-adopt his program; the 14th Party Congress that October wrote the "socialist market economy" into doctrine. Beijing's media ignored the trip until Hong Kong papers reported it. The slogan "to get rich is glorious" is attributed to him everywhere and documented nowhere in his speeches. ## Why he matters here Deng is the origin of the question the vault's China pages keep asking: did the West's bet — trade will liberalize — fail because it was naïve, or because Deng's successors chose otherwise? [[Xi Jinping]] has reversed the term limits, the collective leadership and the low profile Deng built; the American right reads that reversal backward into Deng and concludes engagement was always a con. See [[Reform and Opening Up]] for the policy, [[Tiananmen Square Massacre]] for the price, and the [[Chinese History Hub]] for the line from the "loss of China" to the trade war. ## See Also - [[Mao Zedong]] · [[Xi Jinping]] · [[Chinese Communist Party]] · [[Chinese History Hub]] - [[Reform and Opening Up]] · [[Tiananmen Square Massacre]] · [[Cultural Revolution]] · [[Great Leap Forward]] - [[Chinese Civil War]] · [[Long March (China)]] · [[Jimmy Carter]] · [[China]]