Throughline - The architect of modern China

Episode Date: July 23, 2026

From impoverishment to global superpower, China’s supremacy happened at a breakneck speed thanks to the visionary strategy of the man who took power in 1978. Over the next decade, under leader Deng Xiaoping’s firm leadership, China flirted with capitalism and transformed its socio-economic and political systems, effectively becoming the world’s factory.Guests:Kerry Brown, professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King's College London and author of several books, including Xi: A Study in PowerDan Wang, a writer specializing in contemporary China and author of Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the FutureSupport shows like Throughline with NPR+. Sign up today at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

There's all sorts of elements of China, which have slightly a blade-ruder aesthetic. And Shenzhen is one of these cities that really embody that. The city of Shenzhen sits right on the southern coast of China. Its subway is one of the most rapidly expanding on the planet. skyscrapers tower high above the city. By night, millions of bright neon lights punctuate an impressive modern skyline, like a futuristic cyberpunk fantasy. It's one of the country's industrial powerhouses.

By day, you'd see the insignia of the world's biggest brands around you, Nike, Adidas, Tesla. It's likely the place where all the parts in your smartphone are made. Almost 90% of the world's electronics are made there. All the farmers in Blade Runner who were mining for recycling for electronics, there was Shenzhen. It's a city defined by its manufacturing, technology, and innovation. If I wanted to propose a grant synthesis for Americans to understand Xinjiang, it would be Detroit in its heyday of about 100 years ago to Silicon Valley today. And that comparison is really important because the architect of this industrial city on China's coast

was taking notes from American capitalism all the way back in the 1970s when China began to open itself up to the world. That man was Deng Xiaoping, China's paramount leader in the 1980s. When you go to Shenzhen today, you can still see his legacy everywhere you look. You've got this big billboard. Deng Xiaoping is on it. In the background, the great skyline of Shenzhen. And he's looking at it as if to say,

I made this. Today, it's easy to take for granted that China is one of the world's big superpowers and an economic rival to the U.S. But this transformation started as an experiment, a gamble by Deng Xiaoping, that he could turn China into an economic powerhouse. Shenzhen embodies that gamble. China's current leader, Xi Jinping,

visited Shenzhen soon after taking office, on a whistle-stop tour designed to mimic one Deng took two decades earlier. And so much of China's assent globally as a superpower began with the vision set in motion by Deng. To make that vision real, he had to change China's relationship to the world and introduced capitalism to a society steeped in tradition and communist ideals.

I'm Randaabed Fet Dhar. On this episode of Thru Line from NPR, we tell the story of Deng Xiaoping's quest to open China, transform its economy, and make it the world's factory. Hi there. This is Francesca Vyulich Kennedy. I'm calling in from Brooklyn, New York, and I love everything you guys put out. This podcast has taught me a ton and maybe look forward to doing the dishes every night. Thanks for everything. You're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Part 1. The Great Manager. I want to take you back to a time before China was the global juggernaud it is today.

It's May 1966, and the Chinese Communist Party. run by Chairman Mao Zedong. Issues a warning. No capitalist infiltrators. Communism must survive. Wealth must be distributed and not held by individuals. Malthedong's approach to economics was non-existent. This is Kerry Brown,

a professor of Chinese studies and director of the Lao China Institute at King's College London. So 99% of economy was in the hands of the state. Mao's plan had been to industrialize, the country through collective farming, which also diverted labor from other agricultural activities, leading to a plunge in grain production. People were starving. An estimated 30 million people died. Mao was a believer in class struggle, a sort of social mobilization, and the culture revolution

was really driven by this idea to remake Chinese culture. The Cultural Revolution was Chairman Mao's attempt to regain control over the party, His strategy was ruthless. There's a deliberate destruction of culture, ideas, customs, habits, historical artifacts were destroyed, and ancient scrolls were torn apart. Intellectuals were persecuted or imprisoned. Families were forced to destroy heirlooms to avoid persecution. The lives of citizens themselves were destroyed. Millions were forcibly relocated to the countryside and forced to perform manual labor.

visiting Western journalists covered the strict working conditions. There are 7,000 workers in the Shanghai shipyard. They're constantly being reminded of their need to work for their fellow workers and for China. The Mao's period seems like another planet. Chairman Mao's thoughts are there on the loudspeakers to egg them on, to remind them of the three main rules of discipline. Life in China was really dire. Society was in chaos.

The country needed someone to help. help stem the bleeding. Deng Xiaoping was not at all charismatic, but incredibly effective as a manager. Deng Xiaoping was a true communist patriot. He served in the military and later wore many hats in the party. In the 1950s, he served as vice premier and vice chair of the defense council. He later served as the Communist Party's general secretary.

In the early 1960s, Deng embarked on a series of reforms to help China's economy recover after the famine and widespread death in the previous decade. Because unlike Mao, who's considered the visionary, cult-like leader and dreamer of the party, Deng is different. He's practical, realistic. He was a ferociously competent and very pragmatic dude. This is Dan Wong. a writer specializing in contemporary China, an author of Breakneck,

China's quest to engineer the future. He was a short little dude, chain smoker of cigarettes. Enormously strong personality. He was a tough, tough character. He had a spittoon by the side of his feet, which he spat into. There are all of these accounts of foreign leaders

meeting him and marveling at how expertly he would spit into a nearby sputoon because he was just able to hawk up so much mucus, just direct spit right in there. Deng's pragmatic approach threatened Mao's project. He was a valuable confidant, yes. But Deng's ideas were pragmatic and growth-oriented. And Deng earns a reputation for being a little too innovative for comfort. Mao's rule and the communist project were paramount.

So like the rest of China, Deng succumbed to Mao's rule. This was a man who was savagely attacked in the culture revolution and had everything taken from him. In the late 1960s, Deng Xiaoping was removed from his political post and his political titles were stripped. He and his family were sent far away. To work an attractive factory, I think, in Jiangxi province. He was disgraced, punished, sent to the countryside.

Deng and his family are banished to work in that factory from 19, They're forced to read Mao Zedong thought. They live in a military compound. But while he's there working at the factory, Deng Xiaoping has plenty of time to think about his country, about what had gone wrong with many of Mao's policies, about what might be possible. He had this spiritual reawakening where he thought,

why is it after 20-plus years of socialism, our country is still so poor and weak? I see all this poverty around me, something's wrong. His thoughts start to cohere into one main idea. Could there be a way to loosen China up to the outside world economically, but also retain the structure of the Communist Party? By 1973, Deng was summoned back to Beijing. Another official with a good relationship to Deng convinces Mao to let him return.

Deng rises in the ranks, becoming Mao's third in command. He's brought back to initiate pragmatically. reform, organization, and essentially do the cleaning up of the destruction caused by the cultural revolution. I think we see that Deng Xiaoping was a really supremely competent administrator, and that China is a country which needs being administered, like a continent rather than a country. World leaders sent their condolences to Peking today, calling Mao the last giant of the century and one of the world's immortals.

But then, September 1976. Mao Zedong dies. At the White House, President Ford called Chairman Mao a great man with vision and imagination. The power structure in China, as it had existed in the Maoist era, totally collapsed. There was a period of chaotic power struggles as members of the party tried to claim control. But when the dust finally settled, Deng remained. They needed the skills of someone like Deng Xiaoping, and so he was allowed to come back to Beijing and to be part of the kind of new system.

We also did have a plan. A radically new economy. One opening itself up to science, technology, business, and new big ideas from all over the world. It didn't matter what its political system was. The trick here for Deng was to develop a political system that could fit the unique needs of China at this moment. In complete disarray, diverse, very poor.

but a nation with a deep cultural history. Deng cannot simply import another system into China. He had to develop something as unique as its needs. By 1977, he's looking over at nations like the UK and the U.S. And thinking, we need to embrace some of what's going on over there, the free market. But he also doesn't want to go full-on capitalism. Well, we don't like capitalists,

but they are able to produce what we can't, which is GDP growth, we have to find a way of doing that without being contaminated by them. He was the key architect of that. That's what he's called in China, the key architect of the reform process. By 1978, newly minted paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping, wants to carry out his plan to bring wealth to the people of China for maybe the first time in the modern era. He didn't know exactly how. Taking a stab at this would be almost like feeling around for the stepping stones as he crue. across the river, a favorite saying of his. He's 74 years old by this point, back in the Communist Party in Beijing.

By now, he's losing his hearing. There's a meeting with high-ranking members of the party overseeing the government and the military. But there was a big meeting in Beijing and a hotel, actually, a military hotel. From that meeting comes the start of a project. Socialism with Chinese characteristics. It's Deng's brainchild, a system. where small private businesses could operate, and employees working in those businesses could receive bonuses.

Deng and his comrades argue that in order to reach the communist ideal, China needs to go through capital development. It allowed sort of entrepreneurialism and foreign capital to come to China. Under Deng's vision, China would finally open itself up to the world, to allow it to rejoin the international system. So these things were complete heresy before, But because of these few words in a high-level speech, they became okay. And from that point on, it was good to get rich.

And in that good-to-get-rich spirit, Dung went on a big trip to America for some inspiration. That's after the break. Hi, my name's Alyssa. I'm in Madison, Wisconsin, and I actually work in public radio. And so it's like this one to keep me really engaged and inspired. It's my favorite one, so you're listening to ThruLine from NPR. Part 2. Dung's new plan. This house belongs to all Americans.

People who are firmly dedicated to a world of friendship and peace. And Vice Premier Deng on behalf of all Americans, I welcome you here to our house. So Deng Xiaoping went to America in 1979. Deng Xiaoping was welcomed to Washington today by President Carter, the two leaders promising to work for peace and stability in the Pacific and the world at large. Your visit here, Mr. Vice Premier, is an important milestone in the development of friend relations between the United States of America and the People's Republic of China. So this trip to America is a huge deal. Deng was the first Chinese communist leader to visit the United States.

shouting protesters marred the South Lawn ceremony a bit, but Carter carried on with his speech. When Jimmy Carter became president, he kind of did very end of 1978 shift diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China. And so Dung very quickly, I think in January or February of, you know, 179 went to America. And, you know, kind of these are more innocent times.

He went to a rodeo in Texas. It was big news. This Chinese communist leader was eating barbecue and going full cowboy. The eyes of Texas were on Dung Xiaoping today. As the Chinese vice premier continued his tour of this country, his two-day schedule in Texas is certainly buried. A visit to the space center, a rodeo, and barbecue tonight, an inspection of oil drilling equipment tomorrow.

And famously wore this 10-gallon hat, which is about the same size as him. He's like one of those cartoon characters. A little sort of cartoon character, when it wears a hat, it's half the size of its body. He famously wore this hat in the stadium and it got huge coverage in America. Indeed, at the rodeo, the Chinese came alive. All wore cowboy hats and drank beer and Li Sun Sung of the Chinese news agency summed it up.

We have good relaxation, good barbecue, good country music and good rodeo show. So the Chinese leave today with their memories and perhaps a new image for communist China's leading man, for Deng Xiaoping not only went west, but went western. Deng went on to other U.S. cities on his trip. He encouraged American business people to invest in China, academics to collaborate on scholarship, and generally advocated for more exchanges between the countries. So he went to the Boeing factory in Seattle, and this has never happened before. Deng Xiaoping, this diehard, 100% committed communist leader, became very popular in a

really until the late 1980s. And he was times, you know, like man of the year twice. A lot of it was about how America had this image of this, what they thought was a relatively benign, capitalist friendly, communist leader who was leading China towards final capitalist sort of revolution. No, he was 100% committed a servant of the party. And that was never going to, you know, be negotiable. No, never.

When Deng looked at the economic model in America, He learned a lot, and he wanted China to learn those lessons too. The lessons were very profound. The need for industrialization and a decent technology infrastructure. The importance of education. There was a very intentional effort by Deng Xiaoping, the then leader, to say, well, you know, who is the most successful country in the world? It's not really the Soviet Union.

It's much more the Americans. And so why don't we adopt practices closer to America? And my view is that China adopted absolutely everything from the United States, aside from the political system. China decided that its only great asset was plentiful, well-educated, cheap labor. Deng wants some of what he sees in America for his own people, the prosperity, the economic freedom. But was there a way to do that within communist China? If he moves too fast, he could upset members of his own party and be ousted. or it could embolden protests and plunge the nation into disarray, as it did under Mao.

How could he let some freedom trickle in without losing the architecture of a communist society? He needed a bubble, a place where he could experiment with capitalism without letting the contagion loose. In concert with other advisors as part of the economic reforms, Dung established something called special economic zones, spots where business and trade laws are a little more relaxed than the rest of the country. In 1980, Deng and the party opened the first three special economic zones, one of which was Shenzhen, a small city on the coast near Hong Kong. Shenzhen was a fishing kind of, well, it wasn't a village, it was a whole kind of county that had about 300,000 people, but it was rural. And if you stood in Hong Kong in 1978,

you would have looked across to mostly fields and rivers, you know, very rural scenery. Chen Zhen did not have a great deal of industry. It was a lot of low-slung buildings that were making things like harvesting oysters. Why did Zhang see Chen Zhen as a good place to experiment with the idea? Well, special economic zones were to engage with capitalism but at arm's length. So to allow a very designated areas where you could control these sort of nasty capitalist behaviors in case they got out of hand. Special economic zones would allow Deng to introduce the foreign market in these little city laboratories where market reforms could be tested. Shunjan was to benefit from Hong Kong. Hong Kong's land prices were very high. It couldn't manufacture. It was doing manufacturing

in other parts of Southeast Asia and Asia. So Shunzunzhen was perfect. It was just across the border. You could get Hong Kong entrepreneurs. The idea was that you could mitigate state regulation and taxes, and the zones would attract foreign businesses. Dung's bet was that this city would help chip away as socialist structures and begin the capitalistic transformation he dreamed of. The city received loans from Chinese banks, new roads were built, housing, water, power. A brand-new Shenzhen was on its way.

But the scale in Shenzhen was what made it unique. Chen Zhen, when it developed, was a crazy, crazy sort of, you know, wild west sort of place. After Dung made Shen Zhen a special economic zone in 1980. Rural citizens flock to it. A job in Shen Zhen was a ticket to a totally different life. Soon, businesses from around the world move their manufacturing to Shenjin. It become, in many ways, the factory for the whole world. Well into the 1980s and 90s, the city grew at an alarmed.

rate, now colloquially referred to as Shen Zhen speed. It had had 40% growth a year. You mean, literally building, you know, like half the city in a year. So it just was growth, growth, growth, even if it wasn't particularly sustainable. So this was one huge experiment. The Shenzhen commercial daily newspaper said that there was so much irresponsible construction in Shenzhen that one in five rural buildings. simply collapsed in the year

1985. There was quite a lot of... That's a lot, though, 20%. That's what progress feels like. Deng's bed on Shenzhen and the special economic zones of the reform process offered powerful lessons.

Let's be open. Welcome foreign investment. Be ready to learn from other countries and move up the technology leader in part through a foreign help. Sounds like a great formula for re-industrialism. Shenjin was just the beginning.

More and more businesses moved in over the coming decades. Titans of industry, advertising their products in America, like Apple, Walmart, and Procter & Gamble, started moving operations to China. It does all the things you'd expect a business computer to do. Tremendous selection, spectacular savings during Walmart's January clearance sale, now through Saturday. The six-roll family pack, the softest family pack you can by. But it created massive distortions so that you got huge inflation in 1989 and massive party corruption.

China was growing at breakneck speed. But the bottom was going to give out at some point. They're butchering people. In China today, they are saying the streets are rivers of blood, the aftermath of a youth-driven movement for change that has ended in the deaths of hundreds, perhaps thousands. That's after the break. Hi, this is Abdullah, calling from the Bay Area in California. I love this show so much, and if everybody dialed into your program, I think we'd have flying cars already.

You're listening to ThruLine on NPR. Part 3, The World's Factory. The only known American television interview Deng Xiaoping gave was in 1986. He sat down with Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes. Everybody asks the question. Deng Xiaoping has done a wonderful job here in the last few years. With modernization, the economy is better. People are not afraid as they were.

But after Deng Xiaoping, we don't know what's going to happen. Perhaps it could go back to the bad old days. There will be no turning back. When one tries to find out whether the existing policy is here to stay, he should first examine whether the policy is correct, whether the policy is right for the country and the people, and whether the life of the people is gradually improving under the policy. If you have to change the policy, if people is,

if people is, the people is, So long as the people think the existing policy is correct, whoever wants to change it will be brought down. Deng Xiaoping's reform process instigated the most profound economic development China had ever seen. But with that amount of change, that quickly, a completely different Communist Party presided over the country. The party became almost like a business rather than

a political movement. And all of this sort of built up to the events over April to June 1989. The Tiananmen Square Massacre. It looked like a battleground. Students protested for a different China. Ambulance drivers were prevented from getting into the square when the troops were trying to take it over. But the government imposed martial law.

Every main intersection, there were burnt out vehicles, there was bread and glass, pools of blood, twisted road signs, smashed barricades and fences. The violence happened all over the city last night. Students protested over a whole series of things, but mostly corruption, the prices of things, kind of just very frustrated, and put up the goddess of democracy in Tiananmen Square.

They were pushed in something of a panic down from the steps of the monument, and people were crushed. The tail end of the Soviet Union, Union's existential threat to capitalism already happened. The protests in Tiananmen Square are no accident. It's an eruption, an extension of Dung's vision, of opening up the country. The protesters argued that for the country to be truly modern, it should embrace democracy.

The party, though, just couldn't compromise. It did not compromise. It was an existential threat. They did turn their military on protesting, mostly protesting, students, but some protesting workers, pretty brutally. Dung ordered the military to crush demonstrators, with estimates between hundreds or possibly thousands of deaths. At the time, I remember, I mean, I remember kind of observing this from Britain.

The idea really was that China was going to close the door, that it was not going to continue developing its economy because it had been too risky. There was international outcry. The massacre threatened China's future. and Deng's progress. The raspy student broadcast system keeps up a constant barrage of announcements about protests in other cities, about new calls for the resignation of China's top leaders.

Would Deng Xiaoping be a part of China's future? Could communism survive in China after such a public catastrophe? The shorter answer? Yes and yes. So what we see after 1989 is the appearance of this very specific form of Chinese capitalism, but with socialist characteristics and with a very strong insistence on it being a Chinese model

with Chinese cultural characteristics. Democracy and the democracy movement was stopped in 89 and never really has never really come back to China. Following the events in 1989, Deng, then nearing his late 80s, retreated from view. his image tainted by the bloody demonstrations. He was old, and perhaps his reign as the key architect of China's economic reform had come to a close. There were rumors almost every month about him being dead.

But Deng Xiaoping was a man who had been twice purged by Chairman Mao himself. In January of 1992, at the age of 87, Deng did something extraordinary. Once again, he goes on a southern tour of China. speeches arguing that reform was necessary, and China would not turn its back on foreign investment. He's saying, if China chooses to give up on socialism, reform, and opening up, economic development, and improving people's livelihoods, then it has chosen certain death. In other words, a brave, market-oriented approach could work with socialism. And Deng brought his message to other cities. After the famous southern tour of Deng Xiaoping in early 1992,

China really basically said there's the part of reform or the part of perdition. We have to reform. On January 19th, he arrived in his sacred Shenzhen. While he was there, he observed what Shenzhen had become since he had designated it a special economic zone just over a decade earlier. The crowds greeted him, Uncle Dang. There was a big crowd around him.

He had a sort of emperor-like figure. He was retired, but of course he was the most consequential leader of his generation. And the fact that he had waded in and gone to Jujai, Shenzhen, and made these comments which were broadcast on Chinese media was really basically the thing that decided China's recommitment to the global system and to socialism with market characteristics. Right? Symbolically, it was a huge moment. And the Southern Tour of 1992 was his last significant political kind of...

Dung Swan Song, his final message, was clear. This was his legacy, the continued opening up of China. There would be no going back. From the Southern Tour, within a few months, not immediately, there was a massive influx of foreign investment, foreign interest, suddenly the doors opened and there were way more kind of foreign businesses going there. And it was a high risk but high return environment. So over the 90s, you also got, you know, kind of significant finance companies like JP Morgan or the Bank of America or you saw more and more McDonald's restaurants. The biggest McDonald's in the world was in Wang Fujin in Beijing, Kentucky Fried Chicken. And I think the

90s were really a kind of period of great experimentation. So, you know, you'd see many speculative business people come. In the 1990s, China's GDP growth was 10% a year, most years, after 1991. And that was just something companies couldn't ignore. One company that didn't ignore it was Walmart. Walmart moved to China like a lot of other major retailers, because it could produce things way cheaper, but very good quality. So, you know, Walmart got a great deal from this.

The American consumers got a good deal from it. Well, what about Chinese workers? So Chinese workers did get something for it. But for many people, it was the first chance to kind of make money. And it was a choice between, do you want to be in your work unit where all you're ever going to do is doing the same thing for the same return for the rest of your life, or the capitalist sort of dream of, well, you've got a chance. Migrant laborers who moved to places like Shenzhen were able to make money. But their lives were really hard. The working conditions were tough.

Unionization efforts were thwarted for all the promise of Deng's unique capitalism. There was considerable human cost. Deng Xiaoping died in February of 1997. Since then, China has undergone. even further economic development and expansion. In December 2001, it officially joined the World Trade Organization. By 2006, I remember going around China and everywhere was growing like crazy. You would go to some places.

They would be building skyscrapers one floor a day. It was unbelievable, the greatest period of on-scale growth any country in history has achieved. Xi Jinping walked out to face the world, now one of its most powerful politicians. The men on this stage rule over 1.3 billion people. By 2013, Xi Jinping had become the paramount leader of China, and the nation he presides over now

is one marked by Deng's strong influence. But there are some key differences. It's different scale. And I think that's where she differentiates himself from previous leaders. He is leading a China which they created, they contributed to the creation of, but which he is so much more powerful and so much more capable and has greater capacity. And he's the politician mandated to do something with that. China has defined itself as a manufacturing superpower,

with Shenzhen serving as a symbol, and America is its favorite customer. Both nations sort of depend on each other in a symbiotic relationship. But China's technological advancements are changing the dynamic for the future. Overnight, the high-stakes handshake between superpowers. Chinese President Xi welcoming President Trump back to China for the first time in nearly a decade. It's kind of China's power underdung with sort of three-dimensional. And now we've got this four-dimensional power because we've got not,

just investment, manufacturing, and, you know, kind of the market of China. We've got technology. And that is something that no other Chinese leadership in modern history has had to kind of really deal with and work out, how do we leverage this? In May of this year, President Trump visited China and addressed President Xi Jinping. Oh, President Xi Jinping. Thank you very much. They talked about global trade, security issues, and the two countries' business relationship.

The U.S. knows this relationship with China is essential to its own economy. It's a massive historic opportunity, and it gives China different kinds of power because as it creates more technology, the West has to basically hit this opportunity cost of, we don't like your values, we don't like what you're doing diplomatically,

but the problem is that if we don't deal with you, we're not going to get this technology that you're doing that might be important to us. But if we do deal with you, we're going to basically be strengthening all these things we don't like. It's the ultimate dilemma. And I don't think anyone solved this. And I don't think it is really soluble. Think of the relationship between the two countries like a snake eating its tail, one feeding the other. As much political rivals as they are capitalist collaborators.

It's an honor to be your friend. and the relationship between China and the USA is going to be better than ever before. And just off-screen from this scene playing out today, is Deng Xiaoping in the distant wings, who first set it all in motion. Now China is a technology superpower that is a totally new ballgame. And that's it for this week's show. I'm Randab del Fattah. Throughline was created by me and Ramtin Ada Blui.

This episode was produced by me and Amy Padula Jasmine Romero Devin Katayama Sarah Wyman Kiona Mojadam Julia Redpath Skyler Swenson

Leanna Semström Irene Noguchi Thank you to Johanna Sturgy and Cheyenne Butler Fact-checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel This episode was mixed by Robert Rodriguez Some archival footage from this episode

comes from independent television news Special thanks to Anthony Cune Vincent Nie, Jane Gilvan, and Barclay Walsh. Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes... Navid Marvi, Cho Fujiwara, Anya Mizani. And finally, if you have an idea or liked something you heard on the show, please write us at ThruLine at NPR.org.

And if you're open to us giving you a call back, leave your number two. We might feature your idea in an upcoming episode. Also, make sure to follow us on Apple, Spotify or the NPR app. That way, you'll never miss an episode. Thanks for listening.