146 China in World History
for wrongfully persecuting millions during the Cultural Revolution.^5
Hua Guofeng had few strong supporters in the Party, and Deng Xiao-
ping soon returned from political exile to replace him as Party leader.
After all the purges, policy reversals, and persecutions of the Maoist
era, Deng moved quickly to try to restore some level of popular faith in
the Chinese Communist Party.
Nearly all the victims of the Cultural Revolution, including some
who had been killed or committed suicide, were now pronounced inno-
cent and restored as Communist Party members in good standing. Deng
ended the Maoist-style political campaigns, opened China to foreign
investment, and allowed people for the fi rst time in more than a decade
to enjoy their private lives without being swept up into political cam-
paigns. He never explicitly repudiated Maoism, but in effect he reversed
almost every Maoist policy. He quickly reprivatized agriculture through
a “responsibility system” by which peasants were given lifetime tilling
rights to land that they could pass on to their descendants. Peasants
were responsible for their own production, and after meeting a minimal
state quota, a tax in effect, they could sell any surplus in private markets
based on supply and demand.
Deng Xiaoping called his reforms the Four Modernizations (in agri-
culture, industry, science and technology, and the military) and argued
that the main goal of the Communist Party was to make China prosper-
ous. The government implemented business and contract laws to attract
foreign investors and assure them that their investments would be safe.
Deng created special economic zones with low tax rates along the coast
to attract foreign investment and speed economic development. For
the fi rst time since 1949, individual Chinese were again free to invest
in business enterprises. Foreign investment poured into China in the
1980s, and the country began a remarkable thirty-year economic boom
of unprecedented proportions. Chinese universities quickly expanded to
resume training the best students in China, now recruited by entrance
examinations on academic subjects rather by class background or polit-
ical ideology. Tens of thousands of Chinese students began studying
abroad in the United States and Europe.
In some ways, Deng Xiaoping brought more radical changes to Chi-
nese society than Mao had. For example, one aspect of Maoist rule
in China had been to promote a very puritanical (one might almost
say Confucian) attitude toward sexuality and sexual freedom. From
1949 until after the death of Mao, women wore long, baggy pants
and baggy shirts, as all China adopted a kind of peasant unisex look.
Makeup and jewelry were condemned as wasteful bourgeois products,