BEIJING (AP) _ Deng Xiaoping, the last of China’s great Communist revolutionaries, who abandoned Mao’s radical policies and pushed the world’s most populous nation into the global community with capitalist-style reforms, died Wednesday.
Xinhua, China’s official news agency, said he was 93, although the birth date in most records would have made him 92 when he died.
Though Deng retired from his last official post in 1990 and had not been seen in public for three years, he spent much of the past decade orchestrating Chinese politics from behind the scenes with a loosely defined title: ``paramount leader.″
While he put an end to the iron rice bowl _ lifetime jobs for all _ he ruled with an iron fist. The military suppression of the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests _ believed to have taken place on his final orders _ killed hundreds, perhaps thousands, and put a blot on the economic progress Deng had achieved.
He died at 9:08 p.m. (8:08 a.m. EST) of respiratory and circulatory failure brought on by lung infections and the Parkinson’s disease that had stricken him long ago, the state-run Xinhua News Agency announced early Thursday.
The first test of Deng’s legacy will be whether his handpicked successor, Communist Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin, and the other younger technocrats he installed in the 1990s will weather political maneuvering that is expected to intensify in the coming months.
A meeting of China’s national legislature next month, the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule on July 1 and a party congress to reshuffle top posts due in the fall will provide chances for the politically ambitious.
No one is expected to supplant Jiang, who received a boost in claiming Deng’s mantle by being named chairman of Deng’s 459-member funeral committee.
Yet the younger aspirants lack Deng’s clout, especially with the all-important military and the few remaining powerful party elders. Successors will have to continue to manage by building consensus among influential constituencies.
The announcement of Deng’s death came about 3 a.m., when most of Beijing was sleeping. It took about six hours before it was broadcast on state-run television or radio, relatively quickly for China: When Mao died in 1976, the announcement took two days.
Taiwan, the seat of the Nationalist government that lost the mainland to the Communists in 1949, immediately put its military on heightened alert Wednesday, state radio reported.
Many Chinese only became convinced of the news of Deng’s death when China’s five-star red flag was raised and then lowered to half-staff at dawn on Tiananmen Square.
``That today we are living well is entirely thanks to Deng Xiaoping. None of my family could believe it when the news said he was dead,″ said a 64-year-old retired factory worker, Mrs. Cui. She cried and anxiously clutched her hands. ``We were all very sad.″
China’s Central Committee proclaimed ``with profound grief to the whole party, the whole army and the people of all ethnic groups throughout the country that our beloved Comrade Deng ... passed away,″ Xinhua said.
There were no signs that leaders had dispatched large numbers of troops or police around the city. About 10 uniformed guards in green padded coats, carrying AK-47s, stood watch outside the alley to Deng’s home near the palace where China’s emperors ruled for 500 years.
The extra security likely was aimed at protecting the top leaders and aging revolutionaries who are expected to visit Deng’s family in coming days.
The funeral committee announced a mourning period, to begin immediately and end after a memorial meeting, Xinhua said. It gave no date for the ceremony, but the committee said no foreign dignitaries will be invited.
Plaudits from abroad, however, poured in immediately.
President Clinton called Deng ``an extraordinary figure on the world stage″ for the past two decades and credited him with being ``the driving force″ behind China’s decision to normalize relations with the United States.
Confirmation of Deng’s death came after days of rumors that his health had worsened _ not an unusual occurrence in recent years.
Deng succeeded Mao Tse-tung in the nearly two-year power struggle that followed the revolutionary leader’s death in 1976.
China was riven by fear and poverty after the decade-long Cultural Revolution, an experiment in radical policies during which millions were persecuted or killed for political reasons.
Deng immediately put China on the road to a market economy, seeking foreign investment and encouraging the world’s most populated country to set about making money.
``It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice,″ was his most famous saying.
He abolished farming communes, allowed some private enterprises and established special economic zones to produce goods for export.
Under his reforms in the 1980s, peasants and workers could afford such luxuries as televisions, refrigerators and washing machines for the first time. Many city residents now own private cars and mobile phones.
Deng, who married three times and had five children, was born to a landowner in the southwest province of Sichuan on Aug. 22, 1904. At 16, he went to France on a work-study program and joined the Communist Party.
Back in China, he became a guerrilla leader and party officer. Purged briefly in the 1930s for backing Mao’s unorthodox guerrilla tactics, he joined the 1934-35 ``Long March″ flight from Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists.
Noted for his sharp intellect and superior organizational skills, Deng became a political commissar in the Communist army, fighting the Japanese from 1937-45 and the Nationalists in the 1945-49 civil war.
Three years after the 1949 founding of the People’s Republic of China, Deng became vice premier. By 1956, he was on the Politburo Standing Committee _ the most powerful ruling body.
But Deng’s economic pragmatism and his ties to Mao’s rivals within the Communist leadership twice put him in political disfavor during the Cultural Revolution. Sent to work at a tractor factory, he returned to the leadership in 1973, only to be purged once again in 1976.
In 1977, he was rehabilitated and once again named vice premier, which gave him the power he needed to get his reform plans moving.
Former U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz, who worked with Deng and China during much of the 1980s, said Deng was tempered by his days as a Communist guerrilla and never lost sight of them.
``He could be tough. He could also be brutal,″ Shultz said. ``And you could see the spark of creativity that allowed him to put China on a new and productive path. He has transformed China and thereby has had an immense impact on the shape of the future.″
Xinhua ended its lengthy obituary urging future generations of Chinese to remember that: ``Eternal glory to Comrade Deng Xiaoping.″