Deng Xiaoping Dies: China's Economic Architect

Deng Xiaoping was purged from power twice before he finally consolidated control over the Chinese Communist Party in 1978. Mao Zedong first removed him during the Cultural Revolution, sending him to work in a tractor factory in Jiangxi Province. He was rehabilitated, returned to Beijing, and was purged again in 1976 after Mao's allies blamed him for the Tiananmen Square protests that followed Zhou Enlai's death. He came back again. Born in Guang'an, Sichuan Province on August 22, 1904, Deng studied in France as a teenager through a work-study program and joined the Chinese Communist Party in Paris. He participated in the Long March, served as a political commissar during the war against Japan and the civil war, and rose through the party apparatus in the 1950s. After Mao's death in September 1976, Deng outmaneuvered Mao's designated successor, Hua Guofeng, and by December 1978 had become China's paramount leader. He held no title higher than Chairman of the Central Military Commission and Vice Premier. He ran the country anyway, for nearly two decades. His reform program transformed China from an impoverished, ideologically rigid state into the world's fastest-growing major economy. He established Special Economic Zones in Shenzhen and other coastal cities, opening them to foreign investment and market forces. He decollectivized agriculture, allowing farmers to sell surplus produce at market prices. He sent tens of thousands of students to Western universities. His slogan was: "It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice." He did not extend reform to politics. When pro-democracy protests filled Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1989, Deng authorized the military crackdown on June 4 that killed hundreds and possibly thousands of civilians. He viewed political liberalization as a threat to the party's control and to the stability required for economic growth. He died on February 19, 1997, at 92. The economic system he built lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The political system he preserved remains authoritarian.