Chen Yun feared that Deng Xiaoping was taking the nation too far, too fast
There was once a joke among sinologists that the key to China's future was whether gung-ho economic reformist leader Deng Xiaoping would outlive his conservative rival Chen Yun . In April 1995, Chen died at the age of 90, and Deng two years later, at 92, winning the apparent battle.
Today, China is still at the mercy of the economic forces that 30 years of Deng-ist reforms unleashed. But Chen's imprint is as discernable as Deng's, though it receives much less fanfare.
'The country today is the product of a long period of haggling between these two different schools of thought on growth. The contest has been a running theme in the central leadership for the past 30 years,' said Hu Xingdou , an economics professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology.
The story often told is of factional rivalry, with Deng cast in the role of open-market visionary and his revolutionary colleague, Chen, the conservative heavy, favouring a more measured pace of economic liberalisation and growth.
However, the idea of Deng and Chen as fierce opponents is a simplification. They often disagreed about the direction China should go in but those differences sprang from their ideological leanings, not their personal feelings towards each other. It was Chen, after all, who helped bring Deng back to power after Mao Zedong's death in 1976.
