It was a crossroads for modern China. As its de facto leader since 1978, Deng Xiaoping had introduced serious reforms. These had begun to sputter toward the later 1980's. Then came Tiananmen Square and a growing crackdown. Authoritarian politics was overtaking economic liberalism, a constant danger for progress everywhere.
Deng had been only “first among equals” out of the revolutionary class left to rule China when Mao Zedong died in 1976. One of those was Chen Yun, a master politician who by all accounts was taken to be a clear reformer in the early days of the Communist reign. Chen would come to represent the Marxist counterbalance to what much later reforms would propose, a sign of how much things were changing. Being called the godfather of Chinese central planning, he was a so-called hardliner.
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