Chapter 3 continues to describes the power relations and the hierarchy of Deng’s regime, focusing on his relationship with two potential heirs. It also discusses the precarious position of General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, the possible successor, on the eve of the student protest.

After Mao’s passing in September 1976, the coalition that Mao had put in place at the end of his life, which was composed Cultural Revolution radicals with little revolutionary experience, even more junior officials like Wu De and mass representatives, the tainted Fourth Front Army (FFA) group, and a handful of trusted First Front Army veterans like Ye Jianying and Wang Dongxing, took over the People’s Republic of China. An uneasy truce persisted for a very short time before the Gang of Four had alarmed Hua Guofeng by challenging his role as the anointed successor, which compelled him to seek more drastic solutions (Zhang 2008b: 263). In this decisive moment, the FFA swung behind Hua, thus sealing the Gang of Four’s fate, but Hua also became very dependent on FFA veterans. His dependence on military veterans with vastly more experience and greater networks ultimately also brought about his downfall. Within two years of Mao’s death, none of the potential successors Mao had put into place just prior to his death survived as powerful figures in the party. The Gang of Four had ended in jail, while Hua was sidelined at the third plenum in 1978. Even FFA veteran Li Desheng, who had served as vice chairman of the party for a short while, ended his career in the 1980s as the head of the National Defense University (Zhu 2007: 425). Except for key members of the FFA group, the vast majority of Mao’s coalition of the weak had ended in jail or in retirement by the early 1980s. His legacy of continuous revolution also was completely expunged from the party ideology in favor of a single-minded focus on economic development.

This chapter examines Deng Xiaoping’s rise to power and his efforts to build a structure that would prevent the return of Maoism. That structure included rejuvenation, the building of leadership groups at different levels, and the introduction of balances. This chapter also discusses the forces that undermined party unity, leading first to the purge of Hu Yaobang and then the Tiananmen events, followed by the ouster of Zhao Ziyang. The military proved to be an important part of Deng Xiaoping’s structure of power. In many ways, Deng tried to introduce institutionalization to correct the concentration of power under Mao Zedong, but Deng’s own dominance of political power contradicted and undermined these efforts to introduce institutionalization.

Chapter 7 focuses on the economic and political reforms of General Secretary Zhao Ziyang (1919–2005) and his predecessor Hu Yaobang (1915–1989). The reforms are placed within the context of both the controversial “reform and opening” policies of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping (1904–1997), and also the larger context of intra-Party ideological debates dating back to founding of the nation. Zhao’s early career as Party secretary in his native county before 1949 is contrasted with his later posting to Guangdong as part of an initiative to break local resistance to land reform in the 1950s. The disastrous Great Leap Forward is presented as a formative experience for Zhao, leading him to side with Mao’s critics, a decision which would in turn lead to his fall from power in 1967. His eventual rehabilitation by Zhou Enlai in 1971 is described as having led Zhao to support political and economic reform beginning with the Li Yizhe controversary of 1974 and culminating in his work in the late 1970s as Party secretary in Sichuan, where he was responsible for implementing Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in the agricultural sector. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Zhao’s rapid promotion to premier by 1980, and his pragmatic approach to political reform and liberalization, which would lead to his eventual downfall for a second time on the eve of the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, and contested legacy in the PRC today.

Hu Yaobang's death sparked student protests in Beijing, which escalated when protesters felt ignored by officials after Hu's memorial service on April 22, 1989. General Secretary Zhao Ziyang and Premier Li Peng disagreed about how to handle the protests before Zhao left for North Korea on April 23. In Zhao's absence, Li and other officials presented their views to Deng Xiaoping, who labeled the protests "turmoil," sparking a march of approximately 100,000 people disputing this characterization.

Political opening, romantic freedoms, economic reforms, and such moderate political leaders as Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang sparked happiness for many people in China during the 1980s, but their high hopes created heightened expectations that would be dashed by the end of the decade.