Astral Codex Ten

Deng Xiaoping

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Deng Xiaoping

Article

Deng Xiaoping is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 6 times across 6 issues between April 21, 2021 and September 19, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “China gets a lot of credit for its free-market reforms under Deng Xiaoping”; “Deng Wenming, father of future Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping”; “Deng Xiaoping thought engineers were cool”. It most often appears alongside China, Japan, US.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 6
  • Issue count: 6
  • First seen: April 21, 2021
  • Last seen: September 19, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Book Review: Global Economic History
April 21, 2021 · Original source
GEH:VSI is also nervous talking too much about institutions, especially along the lines of strong property rights or other libertarian-adjacent ideas. While it admits that they matter to some degree, it also points out that some of the most successfully-developing economies, including Britain in the 1700s and Japan in the Meiji period, had unusually strong governments, high taxes, and poor property rights. The strong governments pursued strong industrial policies, the high taxes paid for infrastructure, and the poor property rights let governments use eminent domain to build canals, railroads, et cetera. In other cases, the book just isn't sure these helped that much. For example, China gets a lot of credit for its free-market reforms under Deng Xiaoping, but these reforms just took China from "literally Mao" to "kind of an average level of market freedom for developing countries". Given that the average developing country has an average-for-developing-countries level of market freedom, but does not experience a China-level economic miracle, these can gain only partial credit for China's success.
Book Review: How Asia Works
June 28, 2021 · Original source
A rather typical landlord of the era was Deng Wenming, father of future Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who owned ten hectares in Paifang village in the hinterland of Chongqing in Sichuan province. Deng Wenming lived in a 22-room house on the edge of his village and leased out two-thirds of his fields. He, like so many other landlords, was not a man of limitless wealth. But he controlled the land of more than half a dozen average families.
Dictator Book Club: Xi Jinping
April 06, 2022 · Original source
For one thing, Deng Xiaoping thought engineers were cool, and he was powerful enough to do whatever he wanted. A government made up entirely of engineers? Sure, whatever you say. And since the top echelons of Chinese government appoint their own successors, these engineers could appoint other engineers and so on.
Mao Zedong was definitely an autocrat. After his death, everyone backstabbed each other furiously for several years and Deng Xiaoping ended up on top. Deng had absolute power but thought that was bad, so he created lots of institutions that were supposed to prevent future leaders from exercising the control he had, then sort of backed down. He appointed former Shanghai mayor Jiang Zemin as his successor. Jiang followed Deng’s anti-absolute-power rules, but he was able to get most of what he wanted anyway. Partly this was because he was a really skilled politician, partly it was because he had a really good secret police force with personal loyalty to him and lots of blackmail on everyone else.
When Jiang Zemin suddenly took the position of CCP general secretary following the suppression of the Tiananmen movement in 1989, his power was constrained by the revolutionary generation led by Deng Xiaoping. Similarly, when Hu began to govern in 2002, five of the-then nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the most influential positions in the CCP, belonged to Jiang’s faction. 28 In contrast, when Xi took power in 2012, only one of the seven members of the Standing Committee was from Hu’s faction. As we would expect, Xi’s faction was generally weaker than Hu’s faction when Xi became CCP leader in 2012. However, because Jiang’s faction supported Xi and still had a powerful presence in the Standing Committee, Xi actually enjoyed more influence in the Standing Committee on his first day in office than Hu ever did. Moreover, Xi took the position of chairman of the Central Military Commission at the same time as he became general secretary in 2012. In contrast, Hu only assumed this position two years after becoming the general Party secretary. These conditions may have provided Xi with an opening to build up his faction quickly.
Highlights From The Comments On Xi Jinping
April 28, 2022 · Original source
Hmm Scott’s theory about China’s turn to autocracy and Xi’s rise to power reminds me of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, specifically that Sulla is a comparable figure to Deng Xiaoping
Communist leaderships choose their leaders for ideological reasons. You're reducing it to cynical power politics. But this isn't how the the Soviet premier got or the Chinese paramount leader gets selected. They're selected for being good Communists, effectively for outstanding achievements in Communism, combined with pragmatic political considerations. Xi didn't subvert the system. Like Deng Xiaopeng before him he rode a wave, of which he was an intellectual proponent, that it was time for a strong leader to fundamentally reform the government. The fact Xi centralized power was not a surprise. It was what his mandate was. He wrote theoretical papers that basically boil down to, "We need to end term limits and have a strong, central leader for Marxist-Leninist reasons." And then he did that. The key moment was not his removal of term limits but the adoption of his Marxist theories into the formal ideology of the CCP.
The Party determines what happens in China. Not some individual. This has been the case since Mao died. Not even Deng had his level of personal unilateral power.
Assistant Dictator Book Club: America Against America
June 07, 2023 · Original source
The year was 1988. A decade earlier, Deng Xiaoping had announced plans for China to liberalize. The first sparks of capitalism had been kindled. The CCP wanted to fan those sparks into economic superpowerdom. But the only country with experience being an economic superpower, the United States, was as inscrutable to China as China is to us.
Your Review: Project Xanadu - The Internet That Might Have Been
September 19, 2025 · Original source
Well, the team did manage one accomplishment during these years: in 1990, Robin Hanson showed up and ran the first ever corporate prediction market at Xanadu. Its employees assigned a 7% probability to verification of the cold fusion experiment in the next year, and a 70% probability to releasing Xanadu before Deng Xiaoping died. Cold fusion was debunked, and Deng died long before any version of Xanadu would be released. Bonus trivia: this story from Robin Hanson is how I first learned of Xanadu’s existence!
Inline links: ran the first ever corporate prediction market, cold fusion experiment