Deng Xiaoping
Deng Xiaoping was the paramount leader of China from 1978 to the late 1980s and the author of the reforms that lifted several hundred million people out of poverty. Born in Sichuan in 1904, he went to France on a work-study programme at sixteen, worked in a Renault factory, and joined the Communist Party there alongside Zhou Enlai, then studied in Moscow. He was a political commissar through the Long March and the civil war, and became general secretary of the party in 1956. He was purged twice during the Cultural Revolution — sent to work in a tractor factory in Jiangxi, and his son Deng Pufang was crippled after being forced from a window by Red Guards. He was rehabilitated, purged again in 1976, and returned after Mao's death. By 1978 he had outmanoeuvred Hua Guofeng. He never held the top party or state office, ruling through the Central Military Commission and personal authority. The reforms dismantled Maoist economics without saying so. The household responsibility system returned farming to families and agricultural output rose sharply; special economic zones at Shenzhen and elsewhere admitted foreign capital; state planning gave way progressively to markets. His formula was to seek truth from facts and to cross the river by feeling the stones, and he was indifferent to the colour of the cat provided it caught mice. He negotiated the return of Hong Kong with Margaret Thatcher on the one country, two systems formula, and normalised relations with the United States in 1979. He ordered the army into Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989, killing hundreds or more. He resumed reform with his southern tour in 1992 and died in 1997.
- Lived: 1904 CE – 1997 CE
- Nationality: Chinese
- Roles: Paramount Leader of China (1978–92), Chairman of the Central Military Commission (1981–89)
