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In February of the preceding year Deng had been in the audience when Khrushchev delivered his celebrated "secret speech" denouncing Stalin's excesses. The parallels between Stalin's personality cult and Mao's increasing use of self-glorification seem to have made an impression on Deng. At the Chinese Communist Party's National Congress seven months later, Deng openly warned, in Mao's presence, that "serious consequences can follow from the deification of the individual." It was an extraordinary act of temerity, even for a rising star.
Mao may have tolerated the criticism because Deng remained a loyal supporter in other matters. When Mao launched his Hundred Flowers campaign, encouraging intellectuals and professionals to offer constructive criticism of the party, he created a political crisis by unleashing much deeper resentment than he had counted on. Deng fully backed Mao in a retaliatory purge that sent thousands of educators and artists to jail and banished hundreds of thousands more to the countryside. Indeed, for all his departures from standard Communist doctrine in the economic realm, Deng has never veered from orthodoxy when it came to maintaining the party's political primacy. China must always remain a "socialist democracy, people's democracy," he said in 1979, not a "bourgeois democracy, individualist democracy."
Deng also supported Mao's Great Leap Forward in 1958, which called for enforced nationwide collectivism on the farms and a buildup of steel production in backyard furnaces. The campaign proved disastrous, producing a series of prolonged famines that starved some 27 million people during the years 1958 to 1962. By 1961 Deng and President Liu Shaoqi had realized the enormity of the miscalculation and set about correcting it. At a tense party plenum that Mao did not attend (so that Liu, Deng and others could gainleader ship experience prior to the Chairman's death), they announced measures reinstating private farming plots, peripheral industries like hog raising and more extensive free markets. In industry, managers and technicians were to take over from party bureaucrats. On a limited scale these programs foreshadowed Deng's second revolution. Mao was furious when he learned of the change in direction, demanding coldly, "Which emperor decided this?"
Defending the need for such liberalization, Deng coined the line that has become his thumbnail credo: "It doesn't matter if a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice." He also began suggesting that an individual's value in modernizing China lay less in his "redness," or Communist ardor, than in his "expertness," or technical skills. Though his own formal schooling ended early, Deng has repeatedly stressed that his vision for building a new China was bound inextricably to education and research.