Due to the institutional disorder and political turmoil from the Mao era, he and his allies launched the Boluan Fanzheng program which sought to restore order by rehabilitating those who were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution.

Deng's ancestors can be traced back to Jiaying County (now renamed as Meixian), Guangdong,[13] a prominent ancestral area for the Hakka people, and had settled in Sichuan for several generations.

The sixteen-year-old Deng briefly attended middle schools in Bayeux and Châtillon, but he spent most of his time in France working, including at a Renault factory and as a fitter at the Le Creusot Iron and Steel Plant in La Garenne-Colombes, a north-western suburb of Paris where he moved in April 1921.

In practice, this meant that the rural soviet in Guangxi was abandoned and that the Seventh Red Army under Deng's political leadership fought and lost several bloody battles.

Advancing through remote and mountainous terrain, some 100,000 men managed to escape Jiangxi, starting a long strategic retreat through the interior of China, which ended one year later when between 8,000 and 9,000 survivors reached the northern province of Shaanxi.

During the Zunyi Conference at the beginning of the Long March, the so-called 28 Bolsheviks, led by Bo Gu and Wang Ming, were ousted from power and Mao Zedong, to the dismay of the Soviet Union, became the new leader of the Chinese Communist Party.

Deng stayed for most of the conflict with the Japanese in the war front in the area bordering the provinces of Shanxi, Henan and Hebei, then traveled several times to the city of Yan'an, where Mao had established the basis for Communist Party leadership.

[44] After Japan's defeat in World War II, Deng traveled to Chongqing, the city in which Chiang Kai-shek established his government during the Japanese invasion, to participate in peace talks between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party.

After officially supporting Mao Zedong in his Anti-Rightist Movement of 1957, Deng acted as Secretary-General of the Secretariat and ran the country's daily affairs with President Liu Shaoqi and Premier Zhou Enlai.

[50]: 7  When Mao argued for a massive campaign to develop basic and national security industry in China's interior as a Third Front in case of invasion by the United States or Soviet Union, Deng was among the key leadership that did not support the idea.

[50]: 7  Following increased concerns of attack from the United States after the Gulf of Tonkin incident, Deng and other key leadership ultimately supported the Third Front construction, and the focus of the Third Year Plan changed to industrialization of the interior.

Deng's reputation as a reformer suffered a severe blow when the Qingming Festival, after the mass public mourning of Zhou on a traditional Chinese holiday, culminated in the Tiananmen Incident on 5 April 1976, an event the Gang of Four deemed counter-revolutionary and threatening to their power.

Following Mao's death on 9 September 1976 and the purge of the Gang of Four in October 1976, Premier Hua Guofeng succeeded as Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and gradually emerged as the de facto leader of China.

Prior to Mao's death, the only governmental position Deng held was that of First Vice Premier of the State Council,[61] but Hua Guofeng wanted to rid the Party of extremists and successfully marginalised the Gang of Four.

Even after retiring from the Politburo Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in 1987 and the Central Military Commission in 1989, Deng continued to exert influence over China's policies until his death in 1997.

However, he remained as the chairman of the State and Party's Central Military Commission and was still seen as the paramount leader of China rather than General Secretary Zhao Ziyang and Presidents Li Xiannian and Yang Shangkun.

[73] According to United States National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter reserved judgment, an action which Chinese diplomats interpreted as tacit approval, and China launched the invasion shortly after Deng's return.

[76] Deng initially continued to adhere to the Maoist line of the Sino–Soviet split era that the Soviet Union was a superpower as "hegemonic" as the United States, but even more threatening to China because of its close proximity.

[82] At the outset of China's reform and opening up, Deng set out the Four Cardinal Principles that had to be maintained in the process: (1) the leadership of the Communist Party, (2) the socialist road, (3) Marxism, and (4) the dictatorship of the proletariat.

[83] Overall, reform proceeded gradually, with Deng delegating specific issues to proteges such as Hu Yaobang or Zhao Ziyang, who in turn addressed them under the guiding principle of "seeking truth from facts" - meaning that the correctness of an approach had to be gauged by its economic results.

The war puzzled outside observers, but Xiaoming Zhang argues that Deng had multiple goals: stopping Soviet expansion in the region, obtain American support for his four modernizations, and mobilizing China for reform and integration into the world economy.

(This somewhat resembles the Leninist theoretical justification of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in the 1920s, which argued that the Soviet Union had not gone deeply enough into the capitalist phase and therefore needed limited capitalism in order to fully evolve its means of production.)

[101][page needed] Deng's reforms actually included the introduction of planned, centralized management of the macro-economy by technically proficient bureaucrats, abandoning Mao's mass campaign style of economic construction.

Deng sustained Mao's legacy to the extent that he stressed the primacy of agricultural output and encouraged a significant decentralization of decision making in the rural economy teams and individual peasant households.

At the local level, material incentives, rather than political appeals, were to be used to motivate the labor force, including allowing peasants to earn extra income by selling the produce of their private plots at free market value.

From 1980 onwards, Deng led the expansion of the economy, and in political terms took over negotiations with the United Kingdom to return Hong Kong, meeting personally with then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

[119][121] A number of people arrested (some even received death penalty) were children or relatives of government officials at various levels, including the grandson of Zhu De, demonstrating the principle of "all are equal before the law".

[130][page needed] Deng privately told former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau that factions of the Communist Party could have grabbed army units and the country had risked a civil war.

He continued to be widely regarded as the de facto leader of the country, believed to have backroom control despite no official position apart from being chairman of the Chinese Contract Bridge Association,[133] and appointed Hu Jintao as Jiang's successor at the 14th Party Congress in 1992.

[167][168][169] Furthermore, he is associated with some of the worst purges during Mao Zedong's rule; for instance, he ordered an army crackdown on a Muslim village in Yunnan which resulted in the deaths of 1,600 people, including 300 children.