The reluctant convert

Zhao had no formal training as an economist but exhibited a pragmatic style and had a record of success that eventually attracted Deng’s attention. Dispatched to southern China after the Communist victory in 1949, Zhao focused on land reform issues as he steadily rose through the political ranks in Guangdong Province. The collectivization schemes of the Great Leap Forward of 1958-60 led to the death of estimated 30 million people died during three horrific years of famine. In 1962, Zhao, then the top provincial official in Guangdong, introduced a plan to disband the communes and return private land plots to farmers while assigning production contracts to individual households. The system worked and would become a model that helped the rest of China rebuild agricultural output.

Politically, Zhao would not be rewarded. In 1967, he was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution for ‘‘revisionist’’ thinking and spent four years at a factory. He re-emerged in 1971 as an official in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, seemingly as a born-again Maoist. He gave a speech renouncing private enterprise and material incentives.

But his conversion was apparently not very genuine. He returned to Guangdong in 1972 and then moved to Sichuan in 1975. There, he introduced land reforms similar to those used earlier in Guangdong and loosened controls on industry.

His performance also gained the attention of Deng. A Sichuan native, Deng wanted to solve China’s economic problems with pragmatic solutions and in 1980 he brought Zhao to Beijing as deputy prime minister.

Later that year, Zhao was elevated to prime minister, a job that made him the titular head of the government and placed him in charge of the Chinese economy. At Deng’s behest, he acted boldly, embracing economic reform by expanding self-management for peasant farmers and some industries. In 1987, after the ouster of Hu Yaobang, who was deemed too lenient toward student protests, Zhao became general secretary of the Communist Party, a job that made him Deng’s presumptive heir.

He apparently had his doubts. ‘‘I’m not that fit to be the general secretary,’’ Zhao said in an American television interview about a month before being appointed to the job. ‘‘I’m more fit to look after economic affairs.’’ Nonetheless, Zhao was not meek. He made a famous speech at the opening of a party congress in 1987 in which he declared that China was in ‘‘a primary stage of socialism’’ that could last 100 years. As a result, he argued, China needed to experiment with a variety of economic approaches — market economics within an evolutionary framework for socialism.

But Zhao’s policies earned him many enemies among ideologues and hard-liners in Beijing who blamed him when the economy overheated in 1988. Inflation soared, as did reports of corruption. His influence in the government began to wane. His enemies also pounced on his embrace of political liberalization. Zhao was increasingly desperate by 1989 as his power was quickly eroding. Zhao sealed his demise by telling Mikhail Gorbachev that all major decisions by China’s Central Committee had to be approved by Deng, who was technically in retirement. Deng quickly stripped Zhao of his powers, and later, of his job. —NYT