Deng Xiaoping (22 August 1904 – 19 February 1997) was the Paramount leader of China from 8 March 1978 to 18 October 1992, succeeding Hua Guofeng and preceding Jiang Zemin. Deng became known as a prominent reformer within the Communist Party of China, creating a socialist market economy.
Biography
Deng Xiaoping was born in Guang'an, Sichuan, China on 22 August 1904, and he studied with Zhou Enlai in France from 1920 to 1925. He joined the Communist Party of China in 1924, and he studied briefly in Moscow before returning to China in 1926. He led several uprisings against the Kuomintang, and he was the political commissar of the Communist 7th and 8th Armies. A devout follower of Mao Zedong, he went to Jianxi in 1931, and he took part in the Long March. In the Second Sino-Japanese War, his rise to prominence continued as a political commissar in the 8th Route Army and the 129th Division, until he joined the CCP Central Committee in 1945. Owing to his experience in battle, he played an important part in the Communist success in the Chinese Civil War, such as through his part in the Huai-Hai campaign. In 1949, he was the first secretary of the party's southwest bureau, and he became secretary-general of the party in 1954, holding a seat in the Politburo. He was a central figure in the growing ideological and then political alienation between China and the Soviet Union. In the Cultural Revolution, he was deprived of all his posts and had to recant his alleged "reactionary-bourgeois" tendencies. Zhou Enlai reinstated his old friend, and Deng became Vice-Premier of the State Council in 1973. His renewed advance peaked when he practically ran the government during Zhou's illness. He was dismissed after Zhou's death in 1976, becoming a victim of the Gang of Four.
After the arrest of the Gang of Four, he was reinstated once again in July 1977. He now became the strongman in Chinese politics, outmaneuvering the more ideological Hua Guofeng by appropriating Mao's slogan of "practice as the sole criterion of truth". With this pragmatist platform, his leadership was confirmed at the Third Plenum of the 11th CCP congress in December 1978. Subsequently, he played down the memory and teachings of Mao Zedong, and he emphasized instead the need for socialist modernization. This led him to pursue a careful balance between continued political "democratic dictatorship" by the Communist Party on the one hand, and greater economic liberalism to encourage individual enterprise and economic growth on the other. It explained his readiness to suppress all opposition, most notably at Tiananmen Square in 1989, while granting his people an unprecedented amount of personal freedom in other spheres. In foreign policy, he combined a high degree of pragmatism with nationalism. He was a pivotal influence in the taking up of dipolmatic relations with the United States in 1979, and he normalized Sino-Soviet relations in 1989. At the same time, he was insistent on the return to China all territories under outside control. He thus negotiated the return of Hong Kong and Macau, while continuing to call for the return of Taiwan to its dominion. An increasingly fragile man towards the mid-1990s, the succession to Deng became a pivotal issue for the future of party and state, and was hotly contested within the party leadership behind the scenes, with Jiang Zemin emerging as the frontrunner and his successor. He died in 1997 at the age of 92.