China Vitae

Biography

Deng Liqun, Han nationality, was born in Guidong county, Hunan province, in 1915. He joined the CPC in 1936, and became known as the "leftist king" for his ideology position.

From 1937 to 1945, Deng worked in the CPC Central Party School in Yan'an, directing its School of Marxist-Leninist Studies. From 1945 to 1949, Deng did propaganda work in the Jibei area of the northeast. He was then transferred to Xinjiang in China's far northwest, where he worked in the local Propaganda Department in the early to mid 1950s. Deng then moved to Beijing, where he became the Party Secretary and Deputy Editor of the CPC's flagship journal, "Red Flag." Deng was purged during the Cultural Revolution, and spent 1966 to 1975 undergoing labor reform in the countryside. He returned to Beijing in the late 1970s, working first at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and later, in the 1980s, directing the Propaganda Department.

Deng Liqun remained an active critic of market capitalism and corruption in the 1990s and into the 2000s. A 2001 letter attacked the CPC's decision to admit private entrepreneurs into the party, arguing that it violated Marxist theory: "Since the start of reform, the gap in incomes has become increasingly wide, with the emergence of a new capitalist class of private business people who exploit others. The party cannot allow such people to join." Deng's memoir "Twelve Springs and Autumns" criticized "bourgeois liberalization" under Hu Yaobang in the 1980s.