Deng Xiaoping

Source date: 18 August 1980. “On the Reform of the System of Party and State Leadership”. Editorial overview.

Deng examines the concentration of authority, the accumulation of offices and the failure to distinguish party responsibilities from government work. His concern is that institutional arrangements can generate arbitrary decisions and obstruct effective administration.

He connects reform to leadership renewal. Younger, professionally competent officials need opportunities to assume responsibility, while older leaders should help prepare successors. Professional experience matters, but rigid promotion ladders can prevent capable people from advancing.

The speech is significant because it treats governing capacity as a problem of structures and incentives, not simply the virtues of individual leaders. Its proposals remain within a socialist, party-led system. They should be read as an institutional programme expressed in 1980, not as evidence that all its ambitions were implemented or as an endorsement of a Western constitutional model.

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