However, he is best known for his sympathetic stance towards the 1989 Tiananmen Square protesters. During this decade, Zhao served in many key roles. Zhao Ziyang was one of the key figures of this reform period, and he is the focus of the 1980s chapter. ‘It is glorious to get rich’, Deng, now the undisputed leader of China, would declare in 1992. The great collective farms were broken up, private enterprise was slowly allowed to emerge, and foreign investment cautiously welcomed. Of course, while the likes of Guzman were trying to turn the world upside down in Peru during the 1970s and 1980s, Chinese citizens were facing momentous changes of their own. As Julia Lovell writes in her chapter on the Peruvian philosophy professor turned Maoist insurgent, Abimael Guzman, the CCP’s global history ‘takes place in the tea plantations of north India, the villages of Zimbabwe, the rice paddies of Cambodia, and the guerrilla refuges amid the high-rises of suburban West Germany, as well as the sierras of the Andes’.
This meant that the Mao-era CCP had a global as well as domestic history. This was because, during his years in power, Mao had tried to position the CCP at the vanguard of a global revolution, with Beijing the centre of ‘anti-imperialism’. Outside of China, it was a different story, with millions still happily taking up arms in Mao’s name. Soon, China started to go through a process of ‘de-Maoification’. However, by 1977 it was clear that Deng Xiaoping, a veteran of the party who had twice been purged by Mao, would emerge as the principal leader. Within weeks of his death, a power struggle had broken out. After almost three decades of brutal and often chaotic rule, he died in 1976. Mao, of course, went on to lead the party to victory, founding the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
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