divested of all his posts when the Cultural Revolution began,
reinstated into the position of vice-premier of the State Council in
1973, and again divested of all his positions after the ‘‘Tian-an-men
incident’’ of 1976. In 1977, he was again reinstated in his former
positions in the Communist party, the government, and the military.
He presided over the Third Plenum of the Eleventh CCP Central
Committee in 1978 and established the key policy of focusing on
economic development and opening to the outside world. From
1982, he introduced a series of new thoughts on the reform of the
system of the party and government leadership. In 1981, the Sixth
Plenum of the Eleventh CCP Central Committee passed a ‘‘Resolution
on certain questions in the history of our party since the founding of
the People’s Republic of China,’’ drafted under his direction. This
important document helped to clarify and frame the nation’s under-
standing of the holocaust of the Cultural Revolution. He was elected
chairman of the CCP Central Military Commission in the same year.
In 1984, he introduced the idea of ‘‘one country, two systems’’ as a
method of addressing the issue of the return of Hong Kong. His ideas
and pragmatic reforms enabled him to be included inTimetwice, in
1978 and 1985, as Man of the Year. In 1985, he introduced the idea
that socialism is not in contradiction to a market economy. In 1992,
he toured numerous cities in southern China and offered the famous
‘‘talks from tours of the South.’’ He published three volumes of the
Selected works of Deng Xiaopingin 1983, 1989, and 1993 respect-
ively. Deng Xiaoping was, and is widely considered to be, the architect
of China’s reforms since the late 1970s. (For more detailed biographies
of Deng Xiaoping, see Li, 1994 ; Stewart, 2001 ; and Yang, 2005 .)
Deng’s reformism
Deng Xiaoping is mostly known as the chief architect of China’s
reforms. Conventional reference to these reforms is exclusively
restricted to post-Mao times. However, Deng’s interaction with Mao
was one of half a century. Deng’s collaboration with and differences
from Mao existed long before Mao’s death. And Deng’s reformist
wishes can be traced to the early years of the new PRC.
During Mao’s revolutionary wars, Deng had been a stalwart
supporter of Mao and the Thoughts of Mao Zedong. During the early
1930s, leftist forces within the CCP opposed Mao’s policies for the
Leadership theories and practices of Mao and Deng 221