Deng Xiaoping

Chinese political leader. A member of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from the 1920s, he took part in the Long March (1934–36). He was in the Politburo from 1955 until ousted in the Cultural Revolution (1966–69). Reinstated in the 1970s, he gradually took power and introduced a radical economic modernization programme. He retired from the Politburo in 1987 and from his last official position (as chair of the State Military Commission) in March 1990. He was last seen in public in February 1994. He appointed President Jiang Zemin to succeed him on his death in 1997.

Deng, born in Sichuan province into a middle-class landlord family, joined the CCP as a student in Paris, where he adopted the name Xiaoping (‘Little Peace’) in 1925, and studied in Moscow in 1926. After the Long March, he served as a political commissar to the People's Liberation Army during the civil war of 1937–49. He entered the CCP Politburo in 1955 and headed the secretariat during the early 1960s, working closely with President Liu Shaoqi. During the Cultural Revolution Deng was dismissed as a ‘capitalist roader’ and sent to work in a tractor factory in Nanchang for ‘re-education’.

Deng was rehabilitated by his patron Zhou Enlai in 1973 and served as acting prime minister after Zhou's heart attack in 1974. On Zhou's death in January 1976 he was forced into hiding but returned to office as vice premier in July 1977. By December 1978, although nominally a CCP vice chair, state vice premier, and Chief of Staff to the PLA, Deng was the controlling force in China. His policy of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, misinterpreted in the West as a drift to capitalism, had success in rural areas. He helped to oust Hua Guofeng in favour of his protégés Hu Yaobang (later in turn ousted) and Zhao Ziyang.

His reputation, both at home and in the West, was tarnished by his sanctioning of the army's massacre of more than 2,000 pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, Beijing, in June 1989. When Deng officially retired from his party and army posts, he claimed to have renounced political involvement, but in 1992 publicly announced his support for market-oriented economic reforms. A subsequent purge of military leaders was later claimed to have been carried out at Deng's instigation.