Deng Xiaoping was the paramount leader who transformed China after the death of Mao Zedong, launching the sweeping economic reforms that turned the country toward the market and set it on the path to becoming a global power. Born in Sichuan province, he became a Communist as a young man while studying and working in France, and went on to take part in the Long March and the revolutionary struggle that brought the party to power in 1949.
A capable administrator and veteran of the inner party, Deng rose to high office but was twice purged during the upheavals of the Mao era, denounced as a "capitalist roader" and forced into disgrace, only to return each time. After Mao's death in 1976, he outmaneuvered his rivals to emerge as China's effective leader by the end of the decade.
Deng then set China on a dramatically new course. Pragmatic rather than ideological — he famously remarked that it did not matter whether a cat was black or white so long as it caught mice — he opened the country to foreign trade and investment, dismantled the rigid collective economy, and unleashed market forces under continued Communist political control. The result was decades of explosive economic growth.
He kept tight political control even as he liberalized the economy, and in 1989 he backed the violent suppression of the pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square. Deng gradually retired from his formal posts but remained influential until his death in 1997, his reforms having reshaped China and the world.