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With big-character placards crying BOMBARD THE HEADQUARTERS! revolutionaries attuned to Mao took over the party and ousted Liu and Deng. Mao's wife, the ferociously radical Jiang Qing, had been biding her time to get at Deng. He had scorned some of her extreme efforts to "reform" Chinese culture, such as turning traditional opera into perfervid propaganda spectacles. "I support wholeheartedly that Beijing opera should be reformed," he said. "But I just do not feel like watching these plays." The croissant lover who had once commented that no one could be truly civilized without having dined out was despised by radicals. His feline remark became evidence against him. Along with fascism, treason and a raft of other crimes, Deng was accused by some Red Guards of promoting cat-ism.
By August 1967, with China in tumult, he and Liu were put on public trial. Liu's leg was broken in the spectacle, and he later died of pneumonia in a makeshift prison in the city of Kaifeng. At the trial Red Guards decried Deng as a "capitalist roader," a "fascist" and a "traitor" and shouted, "Cook the dog's head in boiling oil!" Confronted by such rantings for hours on end, Deng simply removed his hearing aid. What saved him from Liu's fate, evidently, was a simple thing as well. While Mao had always despised the patrician Liu, he remembered with some affection his wartime adventures with Deng. Thus Mao declared Liu "an enemy of the people" but defined the opposition of his old comrade as an antagonism that emerged "from among the ranks of the people." Deng and his wife were allowed to live under house arrest in Beijing for two years before being sent south, back to the old revolutionary base of Jiangxi. They were assigned quarters in the commandant's house at a deserted infantry school and required to work mornings at the tractor factory. Their greatest sorrows at this time were the death of Deng's younger brother, driven to suicide by Red Guards, and the crippling of their son Deng Pufang. A promising student of physics at Peking University, Pufang was hounded by radicals until he fell--or was pushed--from a fourth-story window. His spine was fractured, leaving him a paraplegic.
Deng spent his spare time in exile reading, pacing the grounds of his house and calculating what China needed to recover its sanity. His moment came in 1973. By then, the Red Guards were nearly a spent force, and the army had to intervene to save the nation by manning civilian posts. Mao, wary of the increasing importance of the People's Liberation Army, thought Deng, whom the military respected, would serve to check its influence. Beyond that, Premier Zhou, Deng's onetime mentor in Paris, respected his knack for down-to-earth statecraft.
Summoned back to Beijing, Deng walked unheralded into a banquet for Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia. The Great Hall of the People resounded with applause as he entered on the arm of Mao's favorite niece. Though he remained outside the party's inner circles, Deng resumed his post of Deputy Premier and within two years had helped author Zhou's Four Modernizations, the manifesto of practical reforms that launch China's rapid growth. After Zhou's death in early 1976, Jiang Qing and her radical Gang of Four accused Deng of orchestrating massive demonstrations of sorrow for Zhou that loudly criticized the Gang. The clique suppressed the marches in Tiananmen Square--precursors of the 1989 demonstrations--and purged Deng, who took refuge in Guangzhou.