Deng Xiaoping
Deng Xiaoping joined the Chinese Communist Party as a young man and ascended through the ranks to become Mao's most senior lieutenant in the 1930s. Deng became the de facto leader of the Chinese Communist Party and the architect of China's post-Mao reforms two years after Mao's death in 1976. He put in motion measures that would significantly overhaul China's economy, society, and status in the world, abandoning the Maoist socio-economic policies he had long espoused. We are still living with the consequences three decades later. China has risen to become the world's second biggest economy and the world's workshop. Despite the fact that it is fundamentally a market economy ("socialism with Chinese characteristics"), Deng and his successors guaranteed the CCP's leadership by suppressing democratic movements and keeping an iron grip on power.
Deng, who died in 1997 at the age of 92, had set China on the path it is still on today. Deng Xiaoping's new biography by Alexander Pantsov and Steven Levine offers what no previous biography has done: it covers his whole life, from his youth and school years through the post-Tiananmen era, using newly unearthed materials. The writers give a lot of fresh evidence on Deng dating back to the 1920s, thanks to unparalleled access to Russian archives having enormous files on the Chinese Communist Party. Deng handled one enormous catastrophe after another during his long and exceptional life. Deng, who was born in 1904, spent part of the 1920s in Paris, where he joined the CCP in its early years, as did many other Asian revolutionary leaders. He went on to study in the Soviet Union at a time when Stalin was consolidating his grip on the Soviet communist party. During the turbulent 1930s and 1940s, which were defined by civil war and the Japanese invasion, he played an increasingly crucial role.
