Deng Liqun

Communist Party of China Marxism–Leninism 1915–2015 ○ Natural causes

Propaganda chief who drove the campaign against spiritual pollution; spokesman of the 1980s conservatives

Born to a landowning family in Guidong, Hunan, he studied economics at Peking University, took part in the December Ninth movement, joined the Communist Party in 1936 and went to Yan’an. In the 1950s he worked with Wang Zhen in Xinjiang; he was secretary to Liu Shaoqi and deputy editor of Red Flag until purged as a “capitalist roader” in the Cultural Revolution. He joined Deng Xiaoping’s State Council political research office in 1975, headed the Secretariat’s research office from 1979 and was head of the Propaganda Department from 1982 to 1985. In 1983 he pressed for spiritual pollution to be “eliminated”, and in 1987 he was instrumental in ousting Hu Yaobang. After failing to win election to the Central Committee at the Thirteenth Congress that year he left front-line politics, but kept up a hardline stance against the southern tour and “peaceful evolution”. He died in 2015.

Also known as: Little Deng