Saturday, February 19, marks 25 years since the death of Deng Xiaoping, the leader who succeeded Mao Zedong and oversaw a fundamental transition in China’s place in the world with a policy dubbed ‘reform and opening up’.
For those in the West, Deng’s reign, which began in 1978, heralded a hope that China was going to become more open and more liberal, and that its transition towards market-based economic reforms would spell an end to communism in the country, with his tenure coinciding with the conclusion of the Cold War.
But two-and-a-half decades after his death in 1997, many might find themselves disappointed that this has not proved to be the case. China’s political system neither collapsed nor opened up significantly, and under the rule of Xi Jinping, the country has seemingly moved away from the path which Deng set it on, instead ushering in a fresh era of geopolitical tensions with the West in what has been widely called a new Cold War. What changed? And just how relevant is the legacy of Deng in today’s China?
As much as the West may have romanticised Deng, he was far from the ‘revisionist’ to communism in China he was hoped to be. Deng, after all, had come from the stock of Chinese revolutionaries who had been with the Communist Party from the very beginning, and adopted Marxist ideas after five years of studying in France. He fought in the Sino-Japanese War, as well as the Chinese Civil War. However, alongside his ideological worldview, he was very firmly a pragmatist, believing that things ought to be done by the means, which had been proven to work best, as opposed to theory or principle.
This outlook left Deng on the wrong side of Mao Zedong on many occasions. In seeking to consolidate his personal power, Mao demonstrated the sheer force of his ideology in several disastrous campaigns, including the Great Leap Forwards and the Cultural Revolution. Although Deng would be purged in the turmoil of it all, it was following Mao’s death that he emerged as the most suitable person to reshape China from these disasters and to move the country forwards.
Famously arguing that “practice is the sole criterion of truth” and reinterpreting Mao’s theory, Deng oversaw the reform and opening up of China by establishing a ‘socialist market economy’ and laying the foundations for the country to transform itself into an international economic powerhouse, while moderately liberalising society.
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