While Japan and China had in fact opened diplomatic relations in 1972, the peace treaty took nearly six years to negotiate, one major sticking point being Chinese insistence on Tokyo including a clause that denounced Soviet "hegemony" in Asia.

The PLA lost over 20,000 men due to weapons and equipment that were outdated, poorly made, and in short supply (a side effect of the disruption caused by the Cultural Revolution), maps that were decades old, the continued use of human-wave tactics from the Korean War, and the fact that the army had no system of ranks.

[21] North Korea also congratulated "our brotherly neighbor for ending long-hostile relations and establishing diplomatic ties with the US" while Cuba and Albania openly denounced Beijing as traitors to the cause of world socialism.

[22] The article stressed the importance of uniting theory and practice, denounced the dogmatic euphoria of the Mao era, and was, in fact, an outright criticism on Hua's Two Whatevers policy.

Prominent politically disgraced people including Peng Dehuai, Zhang Wentian, He Long and Tao Zhu were given belated rank-appropriate funerals at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery.

Deng Xiaoping proposed mandatory retirement ages despite some protests from party elders and also guidelines were put in place that CCP members who lost their posts or were removed from office could not be jailed or subjected to physical harm.

In this regard, Deng borrowed much from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev when the latter had ended Stalin's terror state and established the practice of using more peaceful methods to dispose of his political rivals.

The power transition from Hua to Deng was confirmed in December 1978, at the Third Plenum of the Central Committee of the Eleventh National Party Congress, a turning point in China's history.

Until the mid-1990s, Deng Xiaoping was China's de facto Paramount leader, retaining only the official title of Chairman of the Central Military Commission, but not the chief offices of the State, government, or the Party.

A major document presented at the September 1979 Fourth Plenum of the Eleventh National Party Congress Central Committee, gave a "preliminary assessment" of the entire 30-year period of Communist rule.

With the 99-year lease on the New Territories coming to an end, Deng agreed that the PRC would not interfere with Hong Kong's capitalist system and would allow the locals a high degree of autonomy for at least 50 years.

[41] Starting around 1972–1973, following Richard Nixon's visit to China and the beginning of rapprochement and mounting likelihood of diplomatic normalization, the term began to drop in usage significantly.

According to the Hanoi press, teams of Chinese agents systematically sabotaged mountain agricultural production centers as well as lowland port, transportation, and communication facilities.

As a result, the Sino-Vietnamese conflict is generally not on the list of topics that may be openly mentioned in print or the media in present-day China, although veterans of the war are allowed to discuss their experiences on the Internet and correspond with their Vietnamese counterparts.

In December 1981, Premier Zhao Ziyang visited North Korea where he attacked the US troop presence on the Korean peninsula and stated that it was responsible for the continued division of the country.

The US invasion of Grenada and stationing of missiles in Western Europe met with Chinese disapproval, and the two countries took opposing sides on the Falkland Islands conflict, the Palestinian question, and the presence of American troops in South Korea.

He also expressed his hope for normalized Sino-Soviet relations, but in doing so apparently moved too quickly for the Beijing government, as he was removed from office almost as soon as he returned home (he had a history of making public statements that were at odds with official policy).

These tenets aimed at expanding rural income and incentives, encouraging experiments in enterprise autonomy, reducing central planning, and establishing direct foreign investment in Mainland China.

Several weapons projects that had been in the works during the '70s were dropped due to being too expensive and unnecessary and generals also objected at being asked to produce consumer goods (a common practice in the Soviet Union) instead of receiving badly needed defense modernization.

This interpretation of Chinese Marxism reduced the role of ideology in economic decision-making and emphasized policies that had been proven to be empirically effective, stressing the need to "seek truth from facts".

Contrary to popular misconceptions, Deng's reforms included 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 on the free market.

This stands in contrast to the Mao era, where executions were relatively rare after the CCP's consolidation of power during 1950-52 and criminals were generally punished with labor reform and political reeducation.

Nonetheless, the authorities tolerated Zhao Cuan's play Marx In London which was compatible with official viewpoints in that it presented the communist founding father as a mortal man who lived in a different age and whose theories could not provide the answers for all of China's present-day problems.

With demands for political reforms growing, Deng Xiaoping merely reiterated that the Communist Party was necessary to provide stable leadership and economic development and that "China is not ready for democracy.

The death of Hu Yaobang on April 15, 1989, coupled with growing economic hardship caused by high inflation and other social factors, provided the backdrop for a large-scale protest movement by students, intellectuals, and other parts of a disaffected urban population.

Their protests, which grew despite government efforts to contain them, although not strictly anti-Government in nature, called for an end to official corruption and for the defense of freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution of the People's Republic of China.

On April 26, the central leadership, under Deng Xiaoping, issued the 4-26 Editorial on People's Daily, which was subsequently broadcast on national media, denouncing all recent actions of protest as a form of "turmoil" (动乱).

Various leaders sympathetic to the students, most notably Wan Li, then the NPC Chairman with a degree of constitutional powers to prevent full military action, were placed under house arrest after landing in Beijing.