Deng Xiaoping

Deng Xiaoping listen was a Chinese politician, statesman, theorist, and diplomat. As leader of the Communist Party of China, Deng became a reformer who led China towards a market economy. While Deng never held office as the head of state or the head of government, he nonetheless served as the Paramount leader of the People's Republic of China from 1978 to the early 1990s. Born into a farming background in Guang'an, Sichuan, Deng studied and worked abroad in France in the 1920s, where he would come under the influence of Marxism. He joined the Communist Party of China in 1923. Upon his return to China he worked as a political commissar in rural regions and was considered a "revolutionary veteran" of the Long March. Following the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Deng worked in Tibet and other southwestern regions to consolidate Communist control. He was also instrumental in China's economic reconstruction following the Great Leap Forward in the early 1960s. His economic policies came to odds with the political ideologies of Chairman Mao Zedong. As a result, he would be purged twice during the Cultural Revolution but regained prominence in 1978 by outmaneuvering Mao's chosen successor, Hua Guofeng. Inheriting a country wrought with social and institutional woes left over from the Cultural Revolution and other mass political movements of the Mao era, Deng became the core of the "second generation" of Chinese leadership. He is called "the architect" of a new brand of socialist thinking, having developed Socialism with Chinese characteristics and led Chinese economic reform through a synthesis of theories that became known as the "socialist market economy". Deng opened China to foreign investment, the global market, and limited private competition. He is generally credited with advancing China into becoming one of the fastest growing economies in the world and vastly raising the standard of living.