people|Reform and remorse

Deng Xiaoping

Deng Xiaoping was China's paramount leader until 1989 and the architect of the country's modern economic transformation. He launched the policy of "reform and opening up" in 1978.

Rare earths

In 1987 Deng declared "the Middle East has oil, China has rare earths", framing metal dominance as a strategic asset—a vision that would guide four decades of Chinese investment in critical minerals.

Political philosophy

Deng was a political conservative but an economic liberal—though his flirtation with markets was purely instrumental, a vehicle rather than a destination. His objective was not to give birth to a capitalist economy but to harness the power of trade and investment to strengthen China. Even as China's wealth multiplied, Deng's economic reforms remained incomplete. He ensured that the party would hold on to what Lenin called the "commanding heights", maintaining state control over finance, energy, telecommunications and transport. The successful growth of China's private sector created a paradox: the better it did, the less incentive Deng or his successors had to alter the statist heart of the economy.

Consolidation of party power

Deng purged Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, liberal leaders, because of their perceived ideological laxity. Most notoriously, he ordered the armed forces' bloody crackdown on the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.

In the 1980s Deng specifically ruled out making age and term limits either clear or enforceable at the apex of the party, as doing so would have undercut his own power. This decision paved the way for Xi Jinping's abolition of presidential term limits in 2018. According to Minxin Pei, a leading sinologist and author of "The Broken China Dream", that someone would eventually overturn the weak norms around succession was "an accident waiting to happen".

Deng was constrained in ways Xi is not: other leaders with revolutionary pedigree dating back to the founding of the People's Republic were still on the scene and able to counter him. In Mr Pei's view, Deng would look at China's current situation with some envy: "He would have loved to act like Xi Jinping."