Deng Xiaoping

In October 1919, newly graduated from a Chongqing school, the 15-year-old Deng Xiaoping boarded a French packet ship bound for Marseille as part of the Diligent Work-Frugal Study Movement. He was the youngest of the more than 4,000 Chinese students who would eventually participate in the program. In France, work rather than study defined his life: he briefly attended middle schools in Bayeux and Châtillon, but spent most of his time as a fitter, fireman, and waiter at the Renault factory and the Le Creusot iron and steel plant. In the workers' dormitories of La Garenne-Colombes he fell in with Zhou Enlai, Chen Yi, Li Lisan, and other future CCP leaders, joining their Marxist study circles. He joined the Chinese Communist Youth League in Europe in June 1923 and was admitted to the Chinese Communist Party in the second half of 1924, rising to a leadership post in the European branch. In January 1926 he left France in haste; the next day police raided his dormitory, seizing from his room Bukharin's ABC of Communism and a trove of Chinese and French propaganda pamphlets. Deng's five years in France gave him a revolutionary identity, an international sensibility, and the concrete experience of factory labor that stayed with him for the rest of his life.

When the Cultural Revolution erupted in 1966, Deng Xiaoping was branded the 'number two capitalist roader in the Party' after Liu Shaoqi and removed from all his posts. In the summer of 1967, Red Guards hauled Deng and his wife to a struggle session where they were humiliated and beaten, then placed under house arrest. Red Guards tortured his eldest son Deng Pufang and pushed him from a fourth-floor window, leaving him a paraplegic for life. In October 1969, Deng was sent with his wife and stepmother to a tractor factory in Xinjian County, Jiangxi, to work as an ordinary laborer. In his mid-fifties, he again stood before a lathe, shaping metal eight hours a day. After work he smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, a habit from his Soviet factory days, and read Marxist classics alongside the Twenty-Four Histories.

After Lin Biao's downfall in 1971, Mao reconsidered Deng as a successor to the ailing Zhou Enlai. Returning to Beijing in February 1973, Deng became Vice Premier and began reconstructing the shattered economy; in January 1975 he was elected Vice Chairman of the Party Central Committee. But Mao, unwilling to see the Cultural Revolution's achievements undone, and Jiang Qing's Gang of Four would not tolerate him. From late 1975 Deng was forced into public self-criticism, and after the April 1976 Tiananmen Incident he was branded a 'counter-revolutionary element,' stripped of all posts, and placed under house arrest for a second time. Only after Mao's death and the arrest of the Gang of Four was Deng rehabilitated in July 1977. Four years of factory labor and two political falls seared into Deng an indelible understanding of how Maoist mass campaigns destroy the economy and the Party itself, an experience that became the political foundation for his pragmatic turn toward reform and opening.

The Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, held from December 18 to 22, 1978, was the single most consequential turning point in modern Chinese history. In the two years after Mao Zedong's death, the 'Two Whatevers' line championed by Hua Guofeng ('Whatever Chairman Mao decided we shall firmly uphold; whatever Chairman Mao directed we shall unswervingly follow') held sway in the Party. Deng Xiaoping, rehabilitated in July 1977, openly challenged this, declaring that 'the Two Whatevers do not accord with Marxism' and triggering the nationwide debate over 'practice is the sole criterion for testing truth.'

At the Central Working Conference in November, which served as the runway for the Plenum, Deng's allies overwhelmed the Hua Guofeng faction, and the agenda expanded from agricultural and economic questions into a wholesale realignment of the Party's political line. On December 13, Deng delivered the closing speech 'Emancipate the Mind, Seek Truth from Facts, and Unite as One in Looking to the Future,' declaring that without ideological emancipation the Four Modernizations were impossible. The speech effectively became the keynote of the Third Plenum.

The Plenum formally abandoned Mao's line of 'taking class struggle as the key link' and shifted the entire focus of Party work onto economic construction. Agricultural reform, the principle of opening to the outside world, and the strengthening of inner-Party democracy and the legal system were all approved. With this meeting Deng Xiaoping became China's paramount leader in fact if not in formal title, and the political foundation of reform and opening was laid. Deng's line converged on 'socialism with Chinese characteristics,' gradually introducing private property and market competition, a political decision that set in motion the most sweeping material transformation in late-20th-century global economic history.

In early 1992, with reforms stalled after Tiananmen, the 88-year-old Deng Xiaoping embarked on a southern tour through Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Zhuhai, spending Chinese New Year in Shanghai. Along the way he openly criticized conservatives who were hesitating on reform, declaring that 'planning and markets are both merely economic instruments' and urging the Party not to be 'shackled by abstract arguments about whether something is socialism or capitalism.' Beijing's central press initially ignored the tour entirely, so Deng published pro-reform articles in the Shanghai Liberation Daily under the pseudonym Huang Fuping. As news of the tour spread and public support swelled, Jiang Zemin swung to open endorsement. The Southern Tour decisively relaunched reform and opening after the post-1989 retrenchment and locked in the market-oriented trajectory of 'socialism with Chinese characteristics.'