BIOGRAPHY OF DENG XIAOPING

Table of Contents

EARLY LIFE

• Deng Xiaoping was born Deng Xixian on August 22, 1904 in Guang’an, part of the Sichuan province of China. The son of a well-to-do landowner, Deng joined the Chinese Communist Party while in high school.
• Deng’s father, Deng Wenming, was a middle-level landowner and had studied at the University of Law and Political Science in Chengdu. His mother, surnamed Dan, died early in Deng’s life, leaving Deng, his three brothers and three sisters.
• At the age of five Deng was sent to a traditional Chinese style private primary school, followed by a more modern primary school at the age of seven.
• He was a very intelligent and a humble child and his teachers often referred to him as “Xixian“which includes the characters “to aspire to” and “goodness”, with overtones
of wisdom.
• In the summer of 1919, Deng Xiaoping graduated from the Chongqing School. He and 80 schoolmates travelled by ship to France to participate in Diligent Work-Frugal Study Movement, a work-study program.
• He was just 15 then and his father supported his participation. The night before his departure, Deng’s father took his son aside and asked him what he hoped to learn in France. He repeated the words he had learned from his teachers: “To learn knowledge and truth from the West in order to save China.”
• Deng was aware that China was suffering greatly, and that the Chinese people must have a modern education to save their country .
• Deng speaked less and was a man of words.He loved to give one word or
two word answers and always indulged in deep thought.

BOYHOOD

• 1921 he joined the Chinese Communist Youth League in Europe. In the second half of 1924, he joined the Chinese Communist Party and became one of the leading members of the General Branch of the Youth League in Europe.
• In late 1927, Deng left Moscow to return to China, where he joined the army of Feng Yuxiang, a military leader in northwest China, who had requested assistance from the Soviet Union in his struggle with other local leaders in the region.
• In 1929 Deng led the Baise Uprising in Guangxi province against the Kuomintang (KMT) government. The uprising failed and Deng went to the Central Soviet Area in Jiangxi province.

COMMUNIST

• Between 1927 and 1929, Deng lived in Shanghai, where he helped organize protests that would be harshly persecuted by the Kuomintang authorities.
• The death of many Communist militants in those years led to a decrease in the number of members of the Communist Party, which enabled Deng to quickly move up the ranks.
• Beginning in 1929, he participated in the struggle against the Kuomintang in Guangx. Surrounded by the more powerful army of the Republic of China, the Communists fled Jiangxi in October 1934(LONG MARCH). Thus began the epic movement that would mark a turning point in the development of Chinese communism.

THE RISING

• The invasion of Japanese troops in 1937 marked the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Deng remained in the area controlled by the Communists in the north, where he assumed the role of deputy political director of the three divisions of the restructured Communist army.
• From September 1937 until January 1938, he lived in Buddhist monasteries and temples in the Wutai Mountains. In January 1938, he was appointed as Political Commissar of the 129th division of the Eighth Route Army commanded by Liu Bocheng, starting a long-lasting
partnership with Liu. LEADER.
• On 1 October 1949, Deng attended the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing.
• In July 1952, Deng came to Beijing to assume the posts of Vice Premier and Deputy Chair of the Committee on Finance. Soon after, he took the posts of Minister of Finance and Director of the Office of Communications.
• In 1954, he was removed from all these positions, holding only the post of Deputy Premier. In 1956, he became Head of the Communist Party’s Organization Department and member of the Central Military Commission.
• After officially supporting Mao Zedong in his Anti-Rightist Movement of 1957, Deng acted as Secretary General of the Secretariat and ran the country’s daily affairs with President Liu Shaoqi and Premier Zhou Enlai.

POLITICAL RISING

• Mao launched cultural revolution feared that the reformist economic policies of Deng and Liu could lead to restoration of capitalism and end the Chinese Revolution.For this and other reasons, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966, during which Deng fell out of favor and was forced to retire from all his positions.
• During the Cultural Revolution, he and his family were targeted by Red Guards, who imprisoned Deng’s eldest son, Deng Pufang. Deng Pufang was tortured and jumped out, or was thrown out, of the window of a four story building in 1968.
• In October 1969 Deng Xiaoping was sent to the Xinjian County Tractor Factory in rural Jiangxi province to work as a regular worker. In his four years there, Deng spent his spare time writing. He was purged nationally, but to a lesser scale than President Liu Shaoqi.

CULTURAL REVOLUTION

• Following Mao’s death on 9 September 1976 and in October 1976, Deng gradually emerged as the de facto leader of China. On 22 July 1977, Deng was restored to the posts of Vice-Chairman of the Central Committee, Vice Chairman of the Military Commission and Chief of the General Staff of the People’s Liberation Army.
• He was a very broad minded man and later emerged as a creator of modern China.

• As his power solidified, Deng quickly instituted new economic policies opening China to international trade and investment. This led to a peace treaty with Japan, improved relations with the USSR, official recognition by the United States, and return of control over the British Colony of Hong Kong.

ECONOMIC REFORMS OR REBUILDING CHINA

• He was a man of thought and was realistic and practical.He permit everything new in the trial. He seek the truths from the facts and reformed everything calling it second revolution.
• Beginning in 1979, the economic reforms accelerated the market model, while the leaders maintained old Communist-style rhetoric.
• The commune system was gradually dismantled and the peasants began to have more freedom to manage the land they cultivated and sell their products on the market. At the same time, China’s economy opened up to foreign trade.
• On January 1, 1979, the United States recognized the People’s Republic of China, leaving the (Taiwan) Republic of China’s nationalist government to one side, and business contacts between China and the West began to grow.

• By the mid-1980s, Deng had introduced economic reforms in agriculture and industry, providing for more local management, and instituted the radical “one child per couple” policy to control China’s burgeoning population.
• In all these reforms, Deng insisted China remain a socialist nation with central control. Reforms improved the quality of life for all but also created a huge inequality gap between the classes.
• Sino-Japanese relations also improved significantly.Deng used Japan as an example
of a rapidly progressing power that set a good example for China economically.

• He emphasized that socialist must have the market economy. He also launched four
modernizations (economy, agriculture, scientific and technological development
and national defense), and announced an ambitious plan of opening and liberalizing the
economy.
• The last position of power retained by Hua Guofeng, chairman of the Central Military
Commission, was taken by Deng in 1981. His most important focus was on science
and technology and in 1978 many scientist had gathered in Beijing to show their
support.
• Deng launched his first “strike hard” anti-crime campaign in August 1983. It was reported
that the government set quotas for 5,000 executions by mid-November and sources in
Taiwan claimed that as many as 60,000 people were executed in that time.
• In October 1987, at the Plenary Session of the National People’s Congress, Deng was
re-elected as Chairman of Central Military Commission, but he resigned as Chairman of
the Central Advisory Commission and he was succeeded by Chen Yun.

• He continued to chair and developed the reform and opening up as the
main policy, put forward the three steps suitable for China’s economic
development strategy within seventy years
• The first step, to double the 1980 GNP and ensure that the people have
enough food and clothing, was attained by the end of the 1980s; second
step, to quadruple the 1980 GNP by the end of the 20th century, was
achieved in 1995 ahead of schedule.
• The third step, to increase per capita GNP to the level of the mediumdeveloped
countries by 2050, at which point, the Chinese people will be fairly well-off and modernization will be basically realized.
• These reforms were a reversal of the Maoist policy of economic selfreliance.
China decided to accelerate the modernization process by stepping up the volume of foreign trade, especially the purchase of machinery from Japan and the West.

LATER YEARS

• Officially, Deng decided to retire from top positions when he stepped down as Chairman of the Central Military Commission in 1989, and retired from the political scene in 1992.
• Deng was recognized officially as “the chief architect of China’s economic reforms and
China’s socialist modernization.
• He loved children and had a very deep place for them.He often told that his grandchildren
was his life.
• Though Deng Xiaoping faced major worldwide criticism for the Tiananmen Square massacre, he continued to stay in power. With further changes implemented, China’s economy grew and standards of living increased under an authoritarian government committed to
one-party rule.
• Deng died on 19 February 1997, aged 92 from a lung infection and Parkinson’s disease.
• The death of Deng was followed by the greatest publicly sanctioned display of grief for any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. However, in contrast, Deng’s death in the media was announced without any titles attached.