Time's editors selected Deng, who had consolidated power after Mao's death and begun dismantling collectivist economic policy, for reshaping China's trajectory. His late-1978 announcement of "reform and opening up" set in motion changes that would transform China into a global economic power within decades.
Deng Xiaoping had been purged twice during the Cultural Revolution, once labeled the "number two capitalist roader" by Mao's Red Guards. His political rehabilitation after Mao's 1976 death was itself remarkable, but his ambitions went further: at the Third Plenum in December 1978, he steered the Communist Party toward pragmatic economic reform, famously declaring it didn't matter if a cat was black or white so long as it caught mice.
Time's recognition came just weeks after that pivotal plenum and amid Deng's landmark visit to the United States, the first by a Chinese Communist leader, where he toured a Ford assembly plant and a Houston rodeo, projecting an image of pragmatic modernization rather than revolutionary rigidity.
The reforms he initiated — special economic zones, foreign investment, agricultural decollectivization — lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty over the following decades, even as the party retained tight political control, a contradiction Deng navigated by insisting economic liberalization and one-party rule were entirely compatible.