As China celebrates Deng Xiaoping's legacy, the country finds itself at a crossroads again

In Chinese culture, 60 years old is known as jiazirepresenting the complete alignment cycle between heaven and earth.

The commemoration of the 120th anniversary of Deng's birth on August 22 comes at a particularly intriguing time. After four decades of spectacular growth thanks to Deng's reforms, the world is once again at a historical crossroads, as his current successor, Xi Jinping, has declared.

Comparisons between the two men are almost inevitable. Xi, considered the most powerful Chinese leader since Deng, is often portrayed in Western accounts as the one dismantling Deng’s reforms, a claim Beijing would angrily reject as slander.

According to various official reports and his own speeches, Xi Jinping considers himself the true heir of Deng and the one who must carry out the great mission that Deng undertook to make China a great civilization.

Although the two leaders differ in their strategies and approaches, a closer look reveals many fundamental similarities.

Each of them faced critical moments that would decide the very survival of the Communist Party and responded by breaking with the conventions and paths traced by their predecessors.

Both Deng and Xi embarked on a zealous mission to restore China to its position as a great world power, and they shared the belief that the Communist Party was indispensable to achieving this goal.

Deng was the first to warn China that it must chart its own path of reform and not blindly copy the Western model. He derided Mikhail Gorbachev's perestroika reforms in the Soviet Union, even though they were widely praised in the West.

“My father thinks Gorbachev is an idiot,” Deng Zhifang, Deng's younger son, once told a friend.

By dismantling the power structure of the Communist Party, he [Gorbachev] Young Deng recalls his father predicting that he would lose the power to solve problems before people drove him out, before the final collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Deng Yuwen, former deputy editor of the Central Party Schools Study Times, also called Deng a die-hard communist.

He did not want his reform initiative to undermine the party's power. He established the four cardinal principles to ensure this.

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Why Deng Xiaoping is one of China's most influential leaders

Why Deng Xiaoping is one of China's most influential leaders

The cardinal principles require that Chinese leaders adhere to the socialist path, people's democratic dictatorship, party leadership, Mao Zedong Thought and the principles of Marxism-Leninism, the same message that Xi likes to emphasize.

The most distinctive feature of Comrade Deng's thoughts and practices is [they start] “It depends on reality, the general trend of the world and China's situation and conditions,” Xi Jinping said in a 2014 speech marking the 110th anniversary of his predecessor's birth.

A developing country like China could not rise if its people lacked national dignity or the country lost its independence, Xi said. We must not demean ourselves, forget our heritage or betray the motherland.

Xi Jinping upheld Deng's Four Principles and responded with his own Four Beliefs, officially translated as the Four Confidences.

These statements require the Party's 99 million members to have complete faith in China's path, its unique political theories and system, and its rich history and culture. The language and terminology used may differ, but the two men spoke with one voice.

Consensus, centralization

However, each of them inherited a China facing radically different challenges and conditions, and each responded with a unique approach.

Deng understood that his first task was to pull the party out of a quagmire of ideological struggles and refocus its attention on economic growth. He opted for collective leadership, a consensus-building mechanism that gives different factions a seat at the negotiating table.

Many unwritten rules of Chinese politics were established in the years that followed, including a standard retirement age of 68 for top officials and immunity from prosecution for former top officials.

These rules provided for basic power sharing and a framework of mutual protection that allowed factions to work together.

This project was born out of pragmatism. Deng and his colleagues understood that ideological and factional differences would not lead to any concrete results and had to be put aside.

If they fail to reunite their divided party and refocus their minds on economic development, the very survival of the party and the People's Republic of China will be in doubt.

Although Deng was the undisputed leader, he had the support of other party elders, such as Chen Yun, one of the founding fathers of the People's Republic, and other peers. In his book, Vogel called Deng China's chief executive.

Deng's emphasis on pragmatism is perfectly reflected in his closing speech at the Fifth Plenum of the 11th Party Congress.

Meetings should be short and small. They should not take place if the participants are not prepared. If you have nothing to say, save your breath. The only reason to have meetings is to solve problems, he said.

There must be collective leadership to solve major problems. But when it comes to specific tasks or assignments, individual responsibility must be clearly defined and everyone must be held accountable.

The principle of collective leadership was designed to revitalize the party, as well as to prevent any faction from completely dominating it.

Although this method proved useful, its shortcomings gradually became apparent. The search for superficial unity eventually led to extreme caution, inertia and the breakdown of party discipline.

Subsequently, party leaders will find it increasingly difficult to assemble a supportive team of their choosing or to implement reform programs that would upset entrenched interest groups.

This became particularly evident under former President Hu Jintao, who expanded the membership of the powerful Politburo Standing Committee to nine to accommodate conflicting factional demands.

The ruling body was nicknamed, half-jokingly, the Nine Dragons Who Rule the Rain, a reference to an idiom that when power is shared, no one is powerful enough to cause a downpour.

In the absence of strong leadership at the top and with responsibilities spread across the team, party discipline broke down, leading to rampant corruption as well as abuse of power and even insubordination.

Xi Jinping responded to the crisis by launching the biggest anti-corruption campaign in the party's history and recentralizing power. In the process, unwritten rules, such as exemption from prosecution for former top leaders, were shattered.

While the two leaders opted for opposing strategies, Deng and Xi both aimed for the same goal: to refocus the party's spirit on the common goal of national rejuvenation.

And Xi, like Deng, is also known for his aversion to empty words, often urging party cadres to roll up their sleeves and work harder.

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How forty years of reform and opening-up transformed China

How forty years of reform and opening-up transformed China

Xi Jinping's decision to recentralize power was based on his view that the party was in danger of losing its cohesion and being hijacked by powerful interest groups, in a repeat of Gorbachev's Soviet Union.

These concerns have deep roots in China's philosophy of governance. Han Fei, whose teachings 2,200 years ago formed the basis of the Qin empire, said that the key to governing [a vast empire] With pressing issues on all fronts, we have a strong core.

Xi Jinping cited this quote in a keynote speech to the Politburo Standing Committee on January 15, 2018, two months before the National People's Congress approved the constitutional amendment removing presidential term limits.

Legacy and challenges

Deng's reforms transformed China in just 30 and a half years Jiazi, before heaven and earth can complete a full cycle of alignment from one of the poorest countries to the world's second largest economy.