Deng's Succession Planning
How Deng Xiaoping selected, discarded, and ultimately installed Jiang Zemin as his successor, and why orderly succession mattered so much to a man who had survived Mao's chaos.
Two Failed Successors
Deng Xiaoping's first two chosen successors both fell from power. Hu Yaobang, the reformist CCP General Secretary, was forced to resign in January 1987 after being blamed for student protests. Conservative elders accused Hu of being too soft on 'bourgeois liberalization' and too tolerant of demands for political reform. Deng, who had promoted Hu, allowed the purge to proceed.
Zhao Ziyang succeeded Hu as General Secretary and continued pushing economic reform. But during the Tiananmen crisis in May 1989, Zhao visited the student protesters in the Square and, with tears in his eyes, told them: 'We came too late.' He opposed the declaration of martial law and the use of military force. Deng removed him from all positions. Zhao spent the remaining fifteen years of his life under house arrest, dying in 2005 without ever being rehabilitated.
The fall of both Hu and Zhao revealed a fundamental tension in Deng's project: he wanted economic reform without political liberalization, but the reformers he promoted tended to see the two as connected. Deng needed a successor who would continue economic modernization while maintaining absolute Party control.