Deng Xiaoping (22 August 1904 - 19 February 1997) was a Chinese revolutionary leader, military commander and statesman who served as the paramount leader of the PRC from December 1978 to November 1989. After CCP chairman Mao Zedong's death in 1976, Deng gradually rose to supreme power and led China through a series of far-reaching market-economy reforms earning him the reputation as the "Architect of Modern China".

Deng Xiaoping had been born into a family in the Sichuan province. Unlike Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoqi, Deng's family were landlords, and so, his education was significantly different. When he was sixteen, he was sent to France to study as a part of a student-exchange program. Later he studied at the Sun Yat-sen University in the Soviet Union.

On his return to China in 1926 he served as political commissar of a military school and then led a series of uprisings in Guangxi province in 1929. He joined the Jiangxi soviet, went on the Long March and then held a series of posts as political commissar in the Red Army. After 1949, he took charge of the south-west of China. In 1952 he moved to Beijing and rose through the ministerial ranks to become, in 1956, General Secretary of the CCP. As General Secretary he carried out the Anti-Rightist movement. During the Great Leap Forward famine, however, he advocated relatively free market policies that ran counter to Mao's views and he therefore became a target when the Cultural Revolution began. He was reinstated as Vice Premier in 1973 after years of exile in the Jiangxi countryside, but then dismissed again. After the death of Mao and the arrest of the Gang of Four he was once more reinstated, and became the controlling force in China.

In 1979, he ushered in the economic reform programme, termed the Four Modernizations, and instituted the open-door policy by which special economic zones, notably Shenzhen, were established. Deng generally sided with hardliners on political reform and was responsible for the dismissal of both Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang and for the 1989 military crackdown after Tiananmen. At the end of 1991, he made another comeback and during his southern tour in 1992 he pushed through a new round of economic reforms. He fell into a terminal coma in 1995.