Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall and Rise of Deng Xiaoping

Episode Date: August 14, 2026

For decades, China was transformed by revolution, war, and the radical policies of Mao Zedong.  After Mao’s death, however, power eventually fell to a man who had twice been purged, stripped of his positions, and sent into political exile.  He would never hold China’s highest formal office, yet he became its most powerful leader, set the country on a dramatically different course, and was responsible for the China we know today. Learn more about the remarkable rise of Deng Xiaoping on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. Shop the store at Shop.Everything-Everywhere.com Sponsors Hexclad Get 10% off your order at hexclad.com/DAILY Mint Mobile Save 50% on Unlimited premium wireless plans starting at $15/month at MintMobile.com/EED Quince Go to quince.com/daily for 365-day returns, plus free shipping on your order! DripDrop Go to dripdrop.com and use promo code EVERYTHING for 20% off your first order! Square Get up to $200 off Square hardware when you sign up at square.com/go/daily Horizon3 Go to horizon3.ai/everything and request your free NodeZero demo Babbel Go to babbel.com/daily for up to 60% off Subscribe to the podcast!  https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/ -------------------------------- Executive Producer: Charles Daniel Associate Producers: Austin Oetken & Cameron Kieffer   Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere Discord Server: https://discord.gg/Ds7Rx7jvPJ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/ Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/  Disce aliquid novi cotidie Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For decades, China suffered from revolution, war, and the radical policies of Mao Zedong. After Mao's death, however, power eventually fell to a man who had been perched twice, stripped of his positions, and sent into political exile. He would never hold China's highest formal office, yet he became its most powerful leader, set the country on a dramatically different course, and was responsible for the China that we know today. Learn more about the remarkable rise of Deng Xiaoping on this episode. of Everything Everywhere Daily. Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast with Benjamin Boster.

If you're tired of sleepless nights, you'll love the I Can't Sleep podcast. I help quiet your mind by reading random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. Each episode provides enough interesting content to hold your attention, and then your mind lets you drift off. Find it wherever you get your podcasts. That's I Can't Sleep with Benjamin Boster. Fear is the virus is trending on TikTok. Vaccines are poison. Then your yoga teacher says that sex traffic children are being sacrificed by satanic liberals,

but it's all okay. The Great Awakening is coming. What is happening? Every week on Conspiratuality Podcast, we explore the fever dreams that suck friends, family, and wellness gurus down the right-wing cult spiral in a search for salvation. Born into a middle-class Sichuan family in 1904, Deng Xiaoping spent his formative years in a Chinese world gripped by political turmoil. When he was just seven years old, China's nearly 4,000-year-old dynastic history came to a sudden end with the fall of the

Qing dynasty in 1911. In the turmoil that followed, 16-year-old Deng was one. one of the Chinese progressives who participated in a program called the Diligent Work, frugal study movement. Under the program, Chinese teens were expected to go to France, where they learned science, engineering, and technological skills that they could in turn bring back to China upon completing their time there. Not only would they bring back an understanding of Western industrialization, but the freedom they experienced living in a Western-style democracy would also help foster the growth of these ideas in a new China. The program did prompt new values amongst the Chinese students, just not the ones that the program leaders

expected. Many of the early leaders of the Chinese Communist Party converted to Marxism while in France, including Deng and future premier, Zhao Enlai. After officially joining the Communist Party in 1994, Deng's administrative skills and political drive sparked a rapid rise through the communist ranks. Deng returned to China in 1926. In the early years of China's internal struggle between the communists and Chiang Kai Czech's nationalist government, Deng immersed himself in the communist underground movement. He ascended quickly being pointed chief secretary of the Central Committee in Shanghai. Amidst a struggle with the nationalist,

Deng found himself in the Yianzhi Soviet, a communist stronghold led by Mao Zedong. Deng quickly demonstrated fierce loyalty to Mao and became a vocal supporter of Mao's core principles as the editor of the Yiang Shi newspaper. In 1933, Mao's control over the Yangshi Soviet began to crumble under a coalition of Chinese communist leaders with close ties to Moscow. This group attacked Mao's leadership by cutting the organizational support from out under him as he was too popular to take on directly. And as an acolyte of Mao, Deng was targeted.

The Soviet-backed leader stripped him of all party and administrative positions, publicly denounced him, forced him to undergo re-education sessions, and imprisoned him. On top of that, his wife divorced him and he lost nearly everything. Yet he kept fierce loyalty to Mao. When the communists were forced to abandon the Yangxi Soviet in 1934 to embark on the long march, Mao regained control of the Chinese Communist Party. And Mao did not forget Deng's loyalty during his power struggles and granted him a series of powerful positions within the party, including Chief Secretary of the Central Committee. After the six-sixth century, of the Communist Revolution in 1949, Deng was rewarded with expanded roles, culminating in his selection as the party's general secretary in 1956. However, this promotion came at a very inopportune

time as it was on the cusp of Mao's Great Leap Forward initiative. The Great Leap Forward, which I've covered in a previous episode, ranks among the greatest catastrophes in human history marked by a famine that claimed an estimated 45 million lives. Marked by radical reforms that led to agricultural inefficiencies and industrial collapse, the Great Leap Forward was so devastating to Mao's reputation that he was forced to step back from the initiative's day-to-day management. The party leadership called on Deng Xiaoping and his associate, Liu Xiauchi, to address the economic problems.

Ding realized that the solution lay not in more communal farms and background steel furnaces. He advocated a transition to foundational market principles. Deng initiated a series of reforms that slowed the disaster and restored agricultural production levels. Deng's solution was the privatization of agricultural land for peasants, the reestablishment of local markets where peasants could sell their crops, and the promotion of industry leaders with technical skills rather than party loyalty. Within the party, Deng's effort won him a claim.

His reforms were viewed as necessary and pragmatic. even if they had drifted from the core Maoist ideology. Deng famously observed to party colleagues in 1962, quote, In terms of establishing the best form of production relations, I think we should take this attitude. Adopt whatever form can fairly easily and quickly restore and develop agricultural production in a given place.

As the old Sichuan saying goes, it doesn't matter whether a cat is yellow or black, as long as it catches mice, it is a good cat." End quote. The message was clear. It was unimportant what style the reforms were, as long as the nation recovered from the calamity. However, Deng's reforms put him in a precarious situation. On the one hand, they were successful and wildly popular among Chinese peasants and the

technical class. On the other hand, they were antithetical to the core foundations of the Chinese Communist Party and Maoism. and this contradiction would exact a heavy price. The great leap forward was very damaging to Mao, and looking to restore his position and reestablish his prominence in the party, he launched the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution, which I've also covered in a previous episode,

was a decade-long political campaign launched by Mao to reassert his total control over the Chinese Communist Party by eliminating political rivals and purging Chinese society of non-communist ideas associated with traditional culture and Western and capitalist influences. Among the first targets of the campaign were the two reformers called upon to solve China's economic problems, Deng Xiaoping and Liu Xiaou Kyi. Despite his past loyalty to Mao, Deng's fall from grace was swift. Mao and his minions used Deng's cat phrase against him, using it in public posters as evidence

of his betrayal of communist values. Dang was named the number two person taking the capitalist road behind only President Liu Shao Kyi. As a consequence, he was stripped of all political and party duties, subjected to an intense campaign of humiliation, and exiled to a menial post at a tractor repair factory. Dang's tragedy didn't stop there. Radical members of the Red Guard harassed his family as well, resulting in his son, a college student, being pushed from a third-story window where he was permanently paralyzed from the waist down as a result of his injuries. During his exile, Deng was forced to confront these realities as he walked the same dirt path under heavy military supervision to his post on the factory floor. When asked about these walks by his daughter, Deng remarked, quote, I was waiting, waiting, thinking, and observing. Deng was planning for China's future. He was

confident that he would be rehabilitated as he had been before, and that when given the chance to lead, he would usher in a new age in China, not based on Mao's principles, but his own. Deng's days manning the factory floor were about to come to a swift end, as his old friend and the ailing premier Zhao Wyn Lai, with the blessing and insistence of Mao, brought Deng back to political influence to lead the economic recovery in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. Amid Jiaoan Lai's battle with cancer, Dang assumed leadership over most of the day-to-day functions of the party, the government, and the military. Dang led swift and dramatic reforms across all aspects of Chinese society. His first order of business was to represent China at the United Nations in 1974,

becoming the first leader of China to address the organization, signaling China's re-entry into the global community. He initiated a series of industrial reforms that further eroded Mao's influence over the economy, as he replaced struggle sessions with structured production schedules and goals. Under Deng, China restored research and technical institutes and promoted a system based on expertise rather than party loyalty. Perhaps the biggest change was the reform of the Red Army, in which he streamlined army units and cracked down on regional warlordism amongst Red Guard factions. And the results were significant. Many industries saw production increased by 10%. lurking in the shadows, however, was an aging Mao, seeing his legacy compromised by Deng.

Mao gave Deng one final test to prove his loyalty, asking him to declare that the cultural revolution had been mostly 70% to be exact, good for China. Deng politely refused acknowledging that at the time he was out of government and out of influence and that it would be impossible for him to have an opinion. Yet again, Deng fell out of favor, this time at the hands of Mao's new inner circle, the Gang of Four. Shortly after he refused to endorse the Cultural Revolution, Deng's ally, Zhaoin Lai, died. Deng spoke at his funeral, which followed a public remembrance ceremony which was held in Tiananmen Square. What was to be a presentation of flowers turned into a massive public protest directed at Mao and Mao's inner circle, the Gang of Four.

Without any evidence, the Gang of Four convinced Mao that Deng was behind the massive protests. On his deathbed in 1976, Mao consented to Deng being stripped of his influence for a third time and placed under house arrest. Dang Xiaoping was down but not out, and he proceeded to engineer one of the most remarkable political comebacks in modern history. Capitalizing on the arrest of the gang of four in the wake of Mao's death in the fall of 1976, Deng leveraged his vast support among military leaders and party elders to urge Mao's successor, Hua Gu Feng, to declare his rehabilitation and promote him to his proper governmental roles. Rather than threatening Huagofeng's power by seeking formal titles like party chairman or premier, Deng launched an ideological movement across China around the pragmatic slogan,

Seek truth from facts. Shortly before Mao's death, the party adopted the two whatever's policy, which essentially said that China should do whatever Mao said it should do and whatever he likely intended it to do. But this was not Deng's path for China. He ushered in another set of reforms, including the reinstatement of the university entrance exam and the rehabilitation of hundreds of thousands of persecuted citizens. By reestablishing the exam, he, He removed party influence and returned it to those who had demonstrated merit, a very popular move among the politically disconnected.

By December 1978, Deng had used his ideas, connections, and energy to outmaneuver Huagafang, and his comeback culminated in a new title, China's Paramount Leader. Free from party and ideological restraints, Deng officially pivoted the nation away from communist class struggle and initiated the landmark era of reform and, opening up. Deng's policies transformed China from a plotting centrally planned command economy into a more dynamic market-oriented economy. Deng relied on local leaders to inform many of his policies, such as the popular household responsibility system, which decolectivized all farms

and gave farmers the right to sell any crops beyond state-sponsored production quotas for their own profit. Liberating the farmers proved a stroke of genius, as production and income soared under Deng's reforms. Perhaps the most profound change was the shedding of centuries of isolation and the embrace of foreign investment through the establishment of special economic zones, or SEZs. Established in 1980, China's SEZs offered tax incentives, limited regulations, and duty-free imports of raw materials to attract investment.

The program was incredibly successful as Western companies flock to China to seize these opportunities in the four special economic zones. And the original four grew to 14 in only four years. After 1985, foreign companies were allowed to form joint ventures with Chinese companies. Western companies like Jeep, Kentucky Fried Chicken, and Volkswagen all jumped at the chance. Despite his proclivity for free market reforms and modernization, Deng was not a Western-style political thinker. In particular, he was not an advocate of,

democracy. Amid calls for greater political autonomy and reform during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, the Deng government crushed the uprising. Deng embraced the power of markets, modernization, and efficiency, but he also believed in the power of a one-party state to implement the reforms necessary to achieve those goals. The full catalog of Deng's economic reforms are too great to cover in one podcast, but his fingerprints were visible in urbanization, Chinese manufacturers, currency policies and market reforms. Deng Xiaoping only stood 4 feet 11 inches or 150 centimeters. Yet he was a giant.

He was the chief architect of modern China, perhaps proving even more influential than Mao himself. It was his reforms that took China from an economic basket case to one of the largest economies in the world today. The executive first. producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Otkin and Cameron Kiefer. Research in writing for this episode was provided by Joel Hermanson. My big thanks go to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make

this podcast possible. I also want to remind everyone about the community groups on Facebook and Discord, as this is where everything happens outside of the podcast. As always, if you leave a review on any of the major podcast apps, you too can have it run in the show.