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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.
In the meantime, an ailing and indecisive Mao, unable to trust his wife and her cohort, anointed as his heir Hua Guofeng, a man without allies. Yet Mao would not throw Deng out of the party. "Leave him his party card to show his descendants and to see how he will behave in the future," Mao decreed. It was now a matter of waiting for Mao to die--and waiting to see whose power base was most effective. "I am prepared for the worst," said Deng. He got the best of it. Within a month after Mao's death in September 1976, the Gang of Four was under arrest. Deng staged his third and last comeback the next year.
In Paifangcun there is a cactus-like plant whose hundred-year blooms are an omen. When the flowers burst forth in 1979, the village knew whose good fortune they portended. By then the greatest son of the village was firmly in control of Beijing, having outmaneuvered Hua Guofeng and eased the Maoists out of power. Millions of peasants were allowed to cultivate private plots, sell surplus crops and invest in village factories. Soon Chinese peasants were not only adequately fed--no small thing in a country where 80% of the people still lived on the land--but more than a few were able to build houses and fill them with television sets, refrigerators and clothes washers.
For a moment dissent was allowed to flourish in the "Beijing spring" of 1979; hundreds of the walking wounded from the Cultural Revolution plastered public spaces with denunciations of Mao and even of Deng. Before long, that spectacle triggered Deng's deep distrust of spontaneous mass movements. Had not the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution turned into cataclysms? The Beijing spring was cut short, and the champions of political reform were imprisoned.