Prologue—The Death of Mao Zedong

Abstract This chapter discusses how Deng Xiaoping balanced two (often competing) goals since the beginning of the reforms in the late 1970s: modernizing China’s economy on the one hand and maintaining the unchallenged supremacy of the Communist Party on the other. When torn between the two, Deng always sided with Party supremacy. Yet when Party conservatives pushed too hard against the reforms, Deng would use his considerable authority and prestige to re-right the reform agenda. This story had played out again and again throughout the 1980s. To simplify what was a remarkable complex political time, two groups vied for control of economic policymaking: reformists, led by State Council premier Zhao Ziyang and CCP general secretary Hu Yaobang, and conservatives, a loose coalition of powerful senior-level officials, entrenched bureaucrats, aging revolutionaries, and die-hard Marxists. Pushback from conservatives began almost immediately after China began to move away from the planned economy. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was also unenthusiastic about the side effects of these reforms.