Intro

There’s this moment in the late-seventies, when China as we know it barely existed.

No manufacturing, no economic growth, no rivalry with America: a time when modernization was seen as an evil, not an objective, by China’s ruler—Mao Zedong—who obsessed over the ideological purification of his kingdom instead, even if it meant shutting down the universities and calling on the youth to kill their teachers and denounce their parents.

But all that was about to change, because Mao’s successor didn’t share his vision.

Instead, Deng Xiaoping reopened the universities, studied European industrial practices, and set his sights on modernizing his country, even if it meant putting expertise before ideology. And today, Deng’s China is the one we know: a modern country famous for its lightning economic growth, high degree of education, and knack for industrial imitation.

But this Chinese renaissance didn’t happen overnight, nor was its success guaranteed. There was a time when anything was possible. A time when Deng Xiaoping was exiled by his own party to the countryside, more likely to die in obscurity fixing a tractor than to return to Beijing and reshape the nation. A time when a gang of radicals sought to succeed Mao and carry on his perverse and destructive rule, when it seemed that Maoist ideological purity was destined to be the ruinous principle at the heart of China’s government forever.

That is until this backward vision came crashing down, when in three years, three massive events combined to shake China to its core and set it on the path to modernity.

First, a massive protest at Tiananmen you’ve likely never heard of.

Then, the death of Mao, the father of the revolution.

And finally, the unlikely triumph of the exiled Deng Xiaoping over Mao’s chosen successor.

Yet this story doesn’t only explain how China rose to power; it also explains why the country is changing today, why a man like Xi Jinping was destined to come along, reviving Mao’s leadership style and abandoning the principles of Deng Xiaoping which made China a success.

This is China, 1976.

I. The Protest

“It was in the capital, it was at Tiananmen, there was burning and hitting. The nature of the movement has changed.” — note from Mao Zedong to Central Committee, April 7, 1976 (E, ch. 5)

April 4, 1976. It’s a chilly spring morning in Tiananmen Square, a centuries-old plaza that sits at the core of political power in Beijing, overlooked by the old imperial palace complex and flanked by the headquarters of the communist government (B, 4).

Today is the Qingming Festival, a traditional Chinese celebration of the ancestors. It is, to be blunt, not the kind of thing generally liked by the Communist Party, which has spent the last decade pursuing a so-called Cultural Revolution,

a chaotic nationwide terror campaign meant to root out all vestiges of China's pre-Communist culture and tradition mobilizing radical youths to denounce their elders and the "old ways." In turn, the Party's old guard was ousted, schools and universities shuttered, all to elevate the power and cult of personality of the country’s longtime leader, the now-ailing Chairman Mao Zedong (D).

Yet despite this political atmosphere, on this day as many as 100,000 Chinese citizens occupied the vast square, refusing to leave, ignoring orders booming from nearby loudspeakers.

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As for the 100,000 people gathered at Tiananmen in April 1976, they were interested in one ancestor in particular: a father of the nation, Zhou Enlai. Instead of disbanding, the crowd continued defiantly laying wreaths in honor of him, the country’s former premier who sought to provide the Chinese people with something other than empty bellies and heads full of propaganda (A, 8-12). This made Zhou enemy number one for the Cultural Revolution's most devoted partisans: a group of four high-ranking party members led by

Mao's wife Jiang Qing, known as The Gang of Four (B, 3-4). This is why the massive crowd gathered: because, whatever his limitations, Zhou was the closest thing the Chinese people had to a symbol of resistance to a decade of radical upheaval (A, 12).

They exchanged poems and slogans that grew increasingly militant in tone, dripping with anger at ruling officials. One read:

"I mourn but the ghosts are screaming, I cry but the jackals are laughing. Tears are shed, in memory of the hero, Eyebrows are raised, as I take my sword from my scabbard." (A, 98)

For the Communist Party, this was a problem. By the next day, protestors still refused to budge and seemed to be growing emboldened, even as militiamen armed with clubs surrounded the square. If someone was going to pull the trigger on a crackdown, it had to be Hua Guofeng, the man who had succeeded the revered Zhou Enlai as premier. Mao was too ill to be present, but he had picked Hua for the job because unlike Zhou, Hua had no base of power. He could be trusted to follow Mao's line. And on April 5th, he didn't disappoint, as he ordered the militiamen into the square (B, 6-8).

But today, the crowds were disinclined to be cowed. They fought. A riot broke out; cars were set on fire and overturned. In the end, though, the militia won (B, 8). In the aftermath, it was clear to Party leaders that someone had to take the blame. Acknowledging that the protest had been spontaneous wouldn’t do—it meant that the people were, in fact, deeply dissatisfied. No, someone had to have misled them, lied to them and seeded a false consciousness. To Mao, Hua, and the Gang of Four, the culprit was obvious: Deng Xiaoping.

Deng was the party’s Vice Premier; he’d been Zhou’s second-in-command, and the two were personally and politically close. Deng had already been disgraced and cast out once before, at the beginning of

the Cultural Revolution: exiled to the countryside to repair tractors in obscurity. But after six years, Mao had begun to question the wisdom of this radicalism. As he sought a counterweight to Jiang and her radical gang,

it was Zhou who convinced him to invite Deng back (A, 37). The two of them had always shared a reformist streak. Yet even with Deng's return in 1973, the Cultural Revolution had by no means come to a stop.

As one member of the Gang put it in a 1975 article in China’s leading Communist journal,

"On no account should we relax our vigilance just because we have won a great victory in the…Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution…Today there are still many ‘fortified villages’ held by the bourgeoisie; when one is destroyed, another will spring up, and even if all have been destroyed except one, it will not vanish of itself if the iron broom of the dictatorship of the proletariat does not reach it." (C)

In turn, they took this 1976 Tiananmen protest as proof of their beliefs. Even with Zhou dead, more enemies remained. So they zeroed in on Zhou's living avatar, the inheritor of his politics. But powerful as the gang was, they couldn't do anything to Deng Xiaoping. The order had to come from Mao.

Like the Gang, Zhou’s successor Hua Guofeng saw Deng Xiaoping as simply another rival, yet he too remained powerless as long as Mao lived. Hua had spent

most of his career as a party secretary in a small town notable only for having been Mao’s birthplace (B, 5). As a result, he had no base of power independent of Mao, and that was why Mao had elevated him to second-in-command (B, 5). His loyalty was guaranteed.

Indeed, this was the defining feature of Mao’s China, only heightened over the course or the Cultural Revolution: loyalty to the Communist line, formulated by Mao himself, and nothing else. Which is why Mao too arrived at the same conclusion about Deng Xiaoping. After this display, he could pose a threat. So, despite his competency—not to mention innocence—Deng lost everything once again. He was stripped of all titles and responsibilities, leaving him with nothing but his party membership, and was forced into house arrest (A, 105-106).

II. The Death

“Sex is engaging in the first rounds, but what sustains interest in the long run is power.” — Jiang Qing, wife of Mao Zedong (E, ch. 5)

However, the time of Mao calling the shots was not to last. On September 9, 1976 he was struck by a fourth heart attack in months. Unlike the others, this one he did not survive. Chairman Mao Zedong, father of the Chinese revolution and master of the nation for more than 25 years was dead. (E, ch.5) A mere eight months since the Tiananmen incident, China was in stormy seas and now without a helmsman.

Succession was the immediate concern, and, thanks to the chaos of Mao's final years, that question had many answers. Hua Guofeng’s path was the clearest, his vision the least ambitious. Picked by Mao as his Vice Chairman in the aftermath of the Tiananmen incident, Hua immediately rose to Acting Chairman upon Mao’s death.

However, he was not without challengers. The day after Mao's funeral, members of the Gang of Four demanded that Mao’s papers be placed in the custody of his nephew, the group's ally: an obvious attempt to find or forge proof of Mao’s will that his wife Jiang Qing should inherit his power. But Hua fended off the attempt and remained confident that as long as Jiang sought to carve out power from within the system, he was secure. Not only was he was Acting Chairman, the Gang was hardly popular with the rest of the Communist elite, whom they'd hounded and intimidated during the Cultural Revolution.

Yet Jiang and the Gang had power of their own: radical newspapers and radio stations around the country, ready to mobilize the gang’s fanatical youth militia. So on October 4 when one of the Gang’s hardline papers published an editorial calling for just that, Hua’s sense of security vanished. (E, ch. 5)

Within two days, he concocted a plan and called an impromptu session of the Politburo Standing Committee. Fearing that the Gang might smell a plot, he set an agenda they couldn't resist: publication of the final volume of Mao’s collected works, the final say in the Chairman’s legacy. It was so enticing that three of the four attended: everyone but Jiang Qing.

Around 8:00 pm on October 6, they began to arrive at the government headquarters at Zhongnanhai, near Tiananmen,

and one-by-one, as they entered, they were seized upon by guards and hauled before Hua Guofeng. In the hall of Huairen he rose and pronounced,

“You have committed anti-party and anti-socialist crimes. The party center is placing you in confinement for investigation.” (E, ch. 5)

At the same time, Hua sent a detachment to Jiang Qing’s home. She didn’t put up a fight.

However potent the Gang had proved during the Cultural Revolution, however much support they'd received from their patron Mao, their political instincts were...well, pretty terrible. It was over for them, and in turn, the radical Maoism they represented, which had prized ideological purity alone and left over a million Chinese bodies in its wake, without accounting for the costs of the unimaginable poverty it willfully perpetuated. In the Gang's fall was a glimmer of hope for China, a promise that maybe now the country could move forward, not stuck in perpetual revolution, but toward a better future.

III. The Triumph

"As for my return to work, one can take one of two approaches. One is to be an official, one is to accomplish something.” — Deng Xiaoping (E, ch. 6)

To pull that off, though, Hua needed help from someone with sharp political instincts, deep support in the party, and a vision for the future. He needed Deng Xiaoping. Yet these qualities made Deng a threat to Hua as well as an asset. Before he could recall Deng, Hua needed to solidify his position.

Because his power came from Mao, he undertook a sort of public relations campaign to brand himself the defender of Mao's legacy, culminating in a February 1977 editorial which would soon become known as “The Two Whatevers.” In it Hua declared, “We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave.” That included affirming the counter-revolutionary nature of the Tiananmen incident.

But Communist politics can be funny with how easy it is to do one thing and say another, to wrap a massive policy change in the language of fealty to the party line and the immutable principles of the archaic 19th century Marxist science. And that's exactly what Hua intended, as he immediately sought to undo Mao’s decision to exile Deng. At first, Hua demanded that Deng endorse the "Two Whatevers." But Deng rightly judged that Hua's situation was impossible—he had to defend Mao yet also needed to alter the ruinous path Mao had set China on. He condemned Tiananmen even as he begged its supposed mastermind for help. So, Deng refused to endorse the "Two Whatevers," calling Hua's bluff. And a bluff it proved to be—in June of 1977, not much more than a year after he'd been cast out,

Deng Xiaoping was restored to all his old positions: a long list of titles at the highest levels of the party, state, and military, not bad for a man who days earlier remained an exile. But Deng disdained the glamor and titles. Desiring rather, in his words, to "accomplish something," he requested responsibility for science and education policy. Here Deng had an opportunity to differentiate himself from Mao and, by extension, Hua, by cultivating talent instead of obsessing over ideological purity. In turn, he reopened China’s long-shuttered universities and, shockingly, reintroduced the gaokao, China’s standardized exams. For the first time since the Communists took power, school admissions would be based on merit, without consideration of “class background.” He went further, matter-of-factly debunking a key Mao policy of sending students to work in the countryside, saying,

“Facts have shown that after a couple of years of labor, the students have forgotten half of what they learned at school. This is a waste of time.” (E, ch. 6)

This was Deng's vision for China: it would be results, not intention; practice, not ideology; facts, not imagination that determined policy. When officials returned from studying industrial practices in Europe, Deng summarized his view,

“The basic point is: we must acknowledge that we are backward, that many of our ways of doing things are inappropriate, and that we need to change.” (E, ch. 7)

Yet Deng couldn't simply disown Mao and all he stood for (which was, in practice, mostly the opposite of those things). To survive in the party, he had to reconcile his vision with Mao Zedong Thought, no matter how contorted the reconciliation. But where Mao was a talented theorist who could refashion reality with his revolutionary worldviews, Deng was a practitioner without an ideology that fit Maoist tradition. Luckily, many of China’s intellectuals saw Deng as their hero: the great education crusader. In turn, a group of academics published an article attempting to solve Deng's dilemma, titled, “Practice Is the Sole Criterion for Judging Truth.” It was nothing short of revolutionary. The article argued that Marxism is not a literal scripture but a body of ideas which require interpretation based on the context of their application. This was exactly what Deng needed.

Armed with this new theory, Deng left the Party’s stronghold of Beijing and took to China’s Northeastern provinces, holding meetings with old allies and drumming up support for this new notion of “Practice” over Hua's "Two Whatevers." To Deng’s delight, support was easy to find. Discontent, even rage, over Mao’s abuse of party comrades was widespread among provincial officials, and they resented Hua's unwillingness to own Mao's, or his own, failures, particularly regarding Tiananmen. They were hungry for a break with the past. Deng was ready to make his play.

By the time he returned to Beijing in November of 1978, the 11th Party Work Conference was already underway. It began, as all the worst corporate conferences do, with breakout sessions and small group discussions: these composed of provincial officials divided by region. Bad news for Hua, because with Mao gone and discussions taking place amongst regional comrades, delegates felt freer to speak their mind than they had in decades. In turn, their conversations rapidly diverged from the official agenda and into grievance-airing about the errors of Maoism and need for reform. Hua sought to tame the flames. In speeches to the assembly, he disowned the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and endorsed opening up to foreign investment and modernization—concessions which surely sent the embalmed Mao spinning in his glass display case. Yet it wasn’t enough. Hua continued to hold to “The Two Whatevers” and maintained that Tiananmen had been counter-revolutionary: a deep affront to many who identified with the protestors.

Sensing Hua’s conciliatory tone, members of the Beijing Party Committee spied an opportunity to defy the Chairman directly. On November 13th, they published an announcement unilaterally declaring Tiananmen “entirely a revolutionary action,” and promising rehabilitation for all those persecuted.

Five days later, Hua pivoted, and posed for press photos with a newly published book he’d personally titled: a collection of poems commemorating the Tiananmen demonstration. He was adapting. A week later, back at the conference, Hua gave another speech explaining that he was willing to serve the party and accept the prevailing views, even if they contradicted his own stated positions.

It was too late. Hua had allowed himself to be defied by his subordinates. The speech was effectively a concession. Soon, delegates began issuing statements officially declaring their allegiance to Deng’s philosophy of “Practice” over “The Two Whatevers.” Without any formal change of power or promotion, it was clear to all present that Deng’s coup was complete. No longer fighting an uphill battle, Deng was confident and believed this was the time to take his vision one step further: beyond economic reform and into politics. Thus, in his closing speech of the conference he declared,

“Centralism can be correct only when there is a full measure of democracy. At present, we must lay particular stress on democracy, because for quite some time…there was too little democracy…The masses should be encouraged to offer criticisms…The thing to be feared most is silence.” (E, ch. 7)

For the party elite, this was a scandalous notion. For those on the outside, it couldn't have been more obvious. In fact, over the past couple months, on an avenue not far from Tiananmen Square, some posters had already begun to appear, criticizing Mao's legacy and the state of Chinese politics. By December 5th, after Hua's informal ousting, new posters began specifically calling for democracy as a crucial component of China's modernization. This was a direct invitation to Deng, the self-professed modernizer and democracy advocate, to put his money where his mouth was. Three months later, Deng issued his response.

On March 30th, 1979 he gave a speech outlining his “Four Cardinal Principles:” socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leadership of the Communist Party, and Marxist-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. In Deng's words, these were items beyond criticism. All that talk of democracy? Deng had meant democracy only *intra-*party, or within the party (E, ch. 8).

Whatever Deng’s boldness, it was now clear: his goal was to save totalitarianism, not transform it into something else. "Democracy" to him was just a useful tool to make sure the ruling party was running smoothly, not destroying itself under a misguided dictator like Mao.

IV. Thoughts

And in that respect, Deng succeeded. Within the party he cultivated a less violent, more regularized set of procedures for policymaking and disagreement among leadership, emphasizing democracy within the party which resulted in rewards for competence. Crucially, however, the party’s results-oriented culture which Deng fostered carried into policy, reshaping the nation for the better.

No longer in a Maoist straightjacket, local officials were allowed to experiment, even with markets and private enterprise which quickly showed their utility. Although China’s most explosive period of growth would occur after his time in power, Deng’s vision of experimentation, adaptation, and practice over ideology was the foundation for China’s rapid transformation from one of the absolute poorest on Earth to the world’s second largest economy.

Yet Deng’s reforms had their limits. He adhered fiercely to the Four Cardinal Principles, denying the Chinese people any democratic aspiration, most tragically at gunpoint when they gathered once again at Tiananmen in 1989 to protest the ruling order Deng had preserved, resulting in the deaths of thousands.

This was the central contradiction of Deng’s system. He rescued China’s totalitarian regime from the dogmatism of its architect by making it more responsive to public needs and demands. But without any method by which the public could legally signal preferences or incentivize responsiveness, Deng's system is fragile. It works only as long as those in charge effectively hold themselves accountable and remain committed to public goods.

And today, that fragility is showing. China's economic growth has slowed largely thanks to mismanagement by the party, as power has consolidated and incentives for competence—such as Deng's notion of intra-party democracy—have eroded. Recently, Xi Jinping, China's leader, secured himself a third straight term as party chief, unprecedented since Mao's death, and followed it up with a mandatory public education campaign in "Xi Jinping Thought." Under him, loyalty rules once more, as his supporters have displaced competent but neutral figures across the ranks of top party leadership.

This is not a prediction that Xi’s China will collapse, that a crisis is just around the corner. We’ll leave that to the less responsible commentators out there. Rather, it’s an attempt to look to the past to help explain the present.

The story of China between the years 1976 and 1978 is, on the one hand, the essential prequel to its extraordinary success, and a lesson for liberals and democrats who assume that totalitarianism will inevitably break down, lose its legitimacy, and give way to democracy.

Yet there is another side to this coin, because though Deng proved the resiliency of despotism, he did so by embracing responsiveness, accountability, and experimentation: ideas foreign to his regime but foundational to liberal democracy, to market economics, individual rights, and politics by popular election. In short, Deng saved Mao's party by abandoning Maoism. Though it worked, for a time, this contradictory system could always be dismantled by its own stewards.

If experimentation, accountability, and responsiveness are key to competent government, they ought to be embraced and ensured, not tenuous elements of a system otherwise hostile to their practice, which, in the end, the centralized Communist Party is and under Xi has proven to be. As competence and accountability are replaced by ideology and dictatorship, what happens in China is impossible to know, but its past may offer some hints.

Addendum

One last thing — and this isn’t a sponsor read.

This video went into production weeks ago, before Donald Trump’s inauguration and the myriad chaotic events since. But if we’re going to make a video about the value of competence, and the danger of personalized ideology in governance, well it’d be a little strange not to say something about what’s happening right now in America.

Because just recently a former Fox News host, Pete Hegseth, was appointed to administrate the most powerful military in human history. His qualifications? Dutifully glazing Trump on national television: loyalty, and nothing else.

Meanwhile, the richest man in human history has lately taken it upon himself to illegally interfere with the civil service in pursuit of a personalized rather than professional bureaucracy: a plainly obvious ploy to centralize power in the hands of a man he spent over a quarter-billion dollars to help elect.

What we’re seeing is a wholehearted effort to supplant competence with ideological purity in our government, a campaign that would make Mao Zedong proud. In that sense, it would be easy to point at the insanity unfolding in Washington, D.C. and say, “Look, democracy doesn’t work either,” and dismiss the message of this video. But that would be naive, ignoring centuries of history.

In general, liberal democracy does have a higher immunity to the overzealous ambitions of dangerous egomaniacs. Free and fair elections, separated powers, guaranteed individual rights, and constitutions do help to maintain responsiveness, cultivate experimentation, and prevent personalization.

Of course, degradation can occur. If a foolproof prophylactic against tyranny existed, we’d have figured it out by now. But some men will always chafe at the freedom of others, ever seek to strangle the liberty of those around them. Sometimes, they win. In the vast record of history, they usually have. Yet that is precisely what makes liberal democracy worth treasuring, not dismissing.

That’s why I’m saying this right now, because one difference between the US and China is that, at least for now, I am free to criticize my government. Rather than fueling indifference or validating cynicism, the story of Deng Xiaoping’s China should instead invigorate our love of liberty.

Post-Roll

And if you’d like to study your past to understand your present, remember you can use MyHeritage for 14 days completely free with our link in the description. You never know what you might find.

Sources

A. James Palmer, Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes: The Tangshan Earthquake and the Death of Mao’s China (Basic Books: 2012)

B. Frank Dikotter, China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower (Bloomsbury, 2022).

C. Zhang Chunqiao, “On Exercising All-Round Dictatorship Over the Bourgeoisie,” in Red Flag, 1975.

D. Andrew Walder, China Under Mao: A Revolution Derailed (Harvard University Press, 2015).

E. Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. Harvard University Press, 2013.