title: Buenos Aires

text: Commuter rail in the city is mostly operated by the state-owned Trenes Argentinos, though the Urquiza Line and Belgrano Norte Line are operated by private companies Metrovías and Ferrovías respectively. All services had been operated by Ferrocarriles Argentinos until the company's privatization in 1993, and were then operated by a series of private companies until the lines were put back under state control following a series of high-profile accidents.


title: Buenos Aires

text: Since 2013, there has been a series of large investments on the network, with all lines (with the exception of the Urquiza Line) receiving new rolling stock, along with widespread infrastructure improvements, track replacement, electrification work, refurbishments of stations and building entirely new stations. Similarly, almost all level crossings have been replaced by underpasses and overpasses in the city, with plans to replace all of them in the near future. One of the most major projects under way is the electrification of the remaining segments of the Roca Line – the most widely used in the network – and also moving the entire section of the Sarmiento Line which runs through the heart of the city's underground to allow for better frequencies on the line and reduce congestion above ground.


title: Buenos Aires

text: There are also three other major projects on the table. The first would elevate a large segment of the San Martín Line which runs through the city center and electrify the line, while the second would see the electrification and extension of the Belgrano Sur Line to Constitucion station in the city center. If these two projects are completed, then the Belgrano Norte Line would be the only diesel line to run through the city. The third and most ambitious is to build a series of tunnels between three of the city's railway terminals with a large underground central station underneath the Obelisk, connecting all the commuter railway lines in a network dubbed the Red de Expresos Regionales.


title: Buenos Aires

text: Buenos Aires had an extensive street railway (tram) system with over of track, which was dismantled during the 1960s after the advent of bus transportation, but surface rail transport has made a small comeback in some parts of the city. The PreMetro or Line E2 is a light rail line that connects with Underground Line E at Plaza de los Virreyes station and runs to General Savio and Centro Cívico. It is operated by Metrovías. The official inauguration took place on 27 August 1987. A -long modern tramway, the Tranvía del Este, opened in 2007 in the Puerto Madero district, using two tramcars on temporary loan. However, plans to extend the line and acquire a fleet of trams did not come to fruition, and declining patronage led to the line's closure in October 2012. A heritage streetcar maintained by tram fans operates on weekends, near the Primera Junta line A Underground station in the neighborhood of Caballito.


title: Buenos Aires

text: In December 2010, the city government launched a bicycle sharing program with bicycles free for hire by users upon registration. Located in mostly central areas, there are 31 rental stations throughout the city providing over 850 bicycles to be picked up and dropped off at any station within an hour. , the city has constructed of protected bicycle lanes and has plans to construct another . In 2015, the stations were automated and the service became 24 hours through use of a smart card or mobile phone application.


title: Buenos Aires

text: There are over 150 city bus lines called "Colectivos", each one managed by an individual company. These compete with each other and attract exceptionally high use with virtually no public financial support. Their frequency makes them equal to the underground systems of other cities, but buses cover a far wider area than the underground system. Colectivos in Buenos Aires do not have a fixed timetable, but run from four to several per hour, depending on the bus line and time of the day. With inexpensive tickets and extensive routes, usually no further than four blocks from commuters' residences, the colectivo is the most popular mode of transport around the city.


title: Buenos Aires

text: Buenos Aires has recently opened a bus rapid transit system, the Metrobus. The system uses modular median stations that serve both directions of travel, which enable pre-paid, multiple-door, level boarding. The first line, opened on 31 May 2011, runs across the Juan B. Justo Ave has 21 stations. The system now has 4 lines with 113 stations on its network, while numerous other lines are under construction and planned.


title: Buenos Aires

text: The port of Buenos Aires is one of the busiest in South America, as navigable rivers by way of the Rio de la Plata connect the port to northeastern Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay. As a result, it serves as the distribution hub for said vast area of the South American continent. The Port of Buenos Aires handles over annually, and Dock Sud, just south of the city proper, handles another . Tax collection related to the port has caused many political problems in the past, including a conflict in 2008 that led to protests and a strike in the agricultural sector after the government raised export tariffs.


title: Buenos Aires

text: Buenos Aires is also served by a ferry system operated by the company Buquebus that connects the port of Buenos Aires with the main cities of Uruguay, (Colonia del Sacramento, Montevideo and Punta del Este). More than 2.2 million people per year travel between Argentina and Uruguay with Buquebus. One of these ships is a catamaran, which can reach a top speed of about .


title: Buenos Aires

text: A fleet of 40,000 black-and-yellow taxis ply the s at all hours. Some taxi drivers may try to take advantage of tourists., but radio-link companies provide reliable and safe service; many such companies provide incentives for frequent users. Low-fare limo services, known as "remises", are also popular. though currently giving way to ridesharing companies like Uber or Cabify, whose legal status has been the cause of much dispute with the city government


title: Buenos Aires

text: As Buenos Aires is strongly influenced by European culture, the city is sometimes referred to as the "Paris of South America". With its scores of theaters and productions, the city has the busiest live theater industry in Latin America. In fact, every weekend, there are about 300 active theaters with plays, a number that places the city as 1st worldwide, more than either London, New York or Paris, cultural Meccas in themselves. The number of cultural festivals with more than 10 sites and 5 years of existence also places the city as 2nd worldwide, after Edinburgh. The Centro Cultural Kirchner (Kirchner Cultural Center), located in Buenos Aires, is the largest cultural center of Latin America, and the third worldwide.


title: Buenos Aires

text: Buenos Aires is the home of the Teatro Colón, an internationally rated opera house. There are several symphony orchestras and choral societies. The city has numerous museums related to arts and crafts, history, fine arts, modern arts, decorative arts, popular arts, sacred art, theater and popular music, as well as the preserved homes of noted art collectors, writers, composers and artists. The city is home to hundreds of bookstores, public libraries and cultural associations (it is sometimes called "the city of books"), as well as the largest concentration of active theaters in Latin America. It has a zoo and botanical garden, a large number of landscaped parks and squares, as well as churches and places of worship of many denominations, many of which are architecturally noteworthy.


title: Buenos Aires

text: The city has been a member of the UNESCO Creative Cities Network after it was named "City of Design" in 2005.


title: Buenos Aires

text: The identity of "porteños" has a rich and complex history, and has been the subject of much analysis and scrutiny. The great European immigration wave of the early 20th century was integral to "the growing primacy of Buenos Aires and the accompanying urban identity", and established the division between urban and rural Argentina more deeply. Immigrants "brought new traditions and cultural markers to the city," which were "then reimagined in the "porteño" context, with new layers of meanings because of the new location." The heads of state's attempt to populate the country and reframe the national identity resulted in the concentration of immigrants in the city and its suburbs, who generated a culture that is a "product of their conflicts of integration, their difficulties to live and their communication puzzles." In response to the immigration wave, during the 1920s and 1930s a nationalist trend within the Argentine intellectual elite glorified the gaucho figure as an exemplary archetype of Argentine culture; its synthesis with the European traditions conformed the new urban identity of Buenos Aires. The complexity of Buenos Aires' integration and identity formation issues increased when immigrants realized that their European culture could help them gain a greater social status. As the rural population moved to the industrialized city from the 1930s onwards, they reaffirmed their European roots, adopting endogamy and founding private schools, newspapers in foreign languages, and associations that promoted adherence to their countries of origin.


title: Buenos Aires

text: "Porteños" are generally characterized as night owls, cultured, talkative, uninhibited, sensitive, nostalgic, observant and arrogant. Argentines outside Buenos Aires often stereotype its inhabitants as egotist people, a feature that people from the Americas and westerners in general commonly attribute to the entire Argentine population and use as the subject of numerous jokes. Writing for BBC Mundo Cristina Pérez felt that "the idea of the [Argentines'] vastly developed ego finds strong evidence in lunfardo dictionaries," in words such as ""engrupido"" (meaning "vain" or "conceited") and ""compadrito"" (meaning both "brave" and "braggart"), the latter being an archetypal figure of tango. Paradoxically, "porteños" are also described as highly self-critical, something that has been called "the other side of the ego coin." Writers consider the existence of these behaviors the consequence of the European immigration and prosperity that the city experienced during the early 20th century, which generated a feeling of superiority in parts of the population.


title: Buenos Aires

text: Buenos Aires has a thriving arts culture, with "a huge inventory of museums, ranging from obscure to world-class." The "barrios" of Palermo and Recoleta are the city's traditional bastions in the diffusion of art, although in recent years there has been a tendency of appearance of exhibition venues in other districts such as Puerto Madero or La Boca; renowned venues include MALBA, the National Museum of Fine Arts, Fundación Proa, Faena Arts Center, and the Usina del Arte. Other popular institutions are the Buenos Aires Museum of Modern Art, the Quinquela Martín Museum, the Evita Museum, the Fernández Blanco Museum, the José Hernández Museum, and the Palais de Glace, among others. A traditional event that occurs once a year is "La Noche de los Museos" ("Night of the Museums"), when the city's museums, universities, and artistic spaces open their doors for free until early morning; it usually takes place in November.


title: Buenos Aires

text: The first major artistic movements in Argentina coincided with the first signs of political liberty in the country, such as the 1913 sanction of the secret ballot and universal male suffrage, the first president to be popularly elected (1916), and the cultural revolution that involved the University Reform of 1918. In this context, in which there continued to be influence from the Paris School (Modigliani, Chagall, Soutine, Klee), three main groups arose.


title: Buenos Aires

text: Buenos Aires has been the birthplace of several artists and movements of national and international relevance, and has become a central motif in Argentine artistic production, especially since the 20th century.


title: Buenos Aires

text: Examples include: the Paris Group – so named for being influenced by the School of Paris – constituted by Antonio Berni, Aquiles Badi, Lino Enea Spilimbergo, Raquel Forner and Alfredo Bigatti, among others; and the La Boca artists – including Benito Quinquela Martín and Alfredo Lazzari, among others – who mostly came from Italy or were of Italian descent, and usually painted scenes from working-class port neighborhoods. During the 1960s, the Torcuato di Tella Institute – located in Florida Street – became a leading local center for pop art, performance art, installation art, conceptual art, and experimental theater; this generation of artists included Marta Minujín, Dalila Puzzovio, David Lamelas, Clorindo Testa and Diana Dowek.


title: Buenos Aires

text: Buenos Aires has also become a prominent center of contemporary street art; its welcoming attitude has made it one of the world's top capitals of such expression. The city's turbulent modern political history has "bred an intense sense of expression in "porteños"," and urban art has been used to depict these stories and as a means of protest. However, not all of its street art concerns politics, it is also used as a symbol of democracy and freedom of expression. Murals and graffiti are so common that they are considered "an everyday occurrence," and have become part of the urban landscape of "barrios" such as Palermo, Villa Urquiza, Coghlan and San Telmo. This has to do with the legality of such activities —provided that the building owner has consented—, and the receptiveness of local authorities, who even subsidize various works. The abundance of places for urban artists to create their work, and the relatively lax rules for street art, have attracted international artists such as Blu, Jef Aérosol, Aryz, ROA, and Ron English. Guided tours to see murals and graffiti around the city have been growing steadily.


title: Buenos Aires

text: Buenos Aires has long been considered an intellectual and literary capital of Latin America and the Spanish-speaking world. Despite its short urban history, Buenos Aires has an abundant literary production; its mythical-literary network "has grown at the same rate at which the streets of the city earned its shores to the pampas and buildings stretched its shadow on the curb." During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, culture boomed along with the economy and the city emerged as a literary capital and the seat of South America's most powerful publishing industry, and "even if the economic path grew rocky, ordinary Argentines embraced and stuck to the habit of reading." By the 1930s, Buenos Aires was the undisputed literary capital of the Spanish-speaking world, with Victoria Ocampo founding the highly influential "Sur" magazine—which dominated Spanish-language literature for thirty years— and the arrival of prominent Spanish writers and editors who were escaping the civil war.


title: Buenos Aires

text: Buenos Aires is one of the most prolific book publishers in Latin America and has more bookstores per capita than any other major city in the world. Buenos Aires has at least 734 bookstores—roughly 25 bookshops for every 100,000 inhabitants—far above other world cities like London, Paris, Madrid, Moscow and New York. The city also has a thriving market for secondhand books, ranking third in terms of secondhand bookshops per inhabitant, most of them congregated along Avenida Corrientes. Buenos Aires' book market has been described as "catholic in taste, immune to fads or fashion", with "wide and varied demand." The popularity of reading among "porteños" has been variously linked to the wave of mass immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and to the city's "obsession" with psychoanalysis.


title: Buenos Aires

text: The Buenos Aires International Book Fair has been a major event in the city since the first fair in 1975, having been described as "perhaps the most important and largest annual literary event in the Spanish-speaking world," and "the most important cultural event in Latin America". In its 2019 edition, the Book Fair was attended by 1.8 million people.


title: Buenos Aires

text: According to the "Harvard Dictionary of Music", "Argentina has one of the richest art music traditions and perhaps the most active contemporary musical life" in South America. Buenos Aires boasts of several professional orchestras, including the Argentine National Symphony Orchestra, the Ensamble Musical de Buenos Aires and the Camerata Bariloche; as well as various conservatories that offer professional music education, like the Conservatorio Nacional Superior de Música. As a result of the growth and commercial prosperity of the city in the late 18th century, theater became a vital force in Argentine musical life, offering Italian and French operas and Spanish zarzuelas. Italian music was very influential during the 19th century and the early 20th century, in part because of immigration, but operas and salon music were also composed by Argentines, including Francisco Hargreaves and Juan Gutiérrez. A nationalist trend that drew from Argentine traditions, literature and folk music was an important force during the 19th century, including composers Alberto Williams, Julián Aguirre, Arturo Berutti and Felipe Boero. In the 1930s, composers such as Juan Carlos Paz and Alberto Ginastera "began to espouse a cosmopolitan and modernist style, influenced by twelve-tone techniques and serialism"; while avant-garde music thrived by the 1960s, with the Rockefeller Foundation financing the Centro Interamericano de Altos Estudios Musicales, which brought internationally famous composers to work and teach in Buenos Aires, also establishing an electronic music studio.


title: Buenos Aires

text: The Río de la Plata is known for being the birthplace of tango, which is considered an emblem of Buenos Aires. The city considers itself the Tango World Capital, and as such hosts many related events, the most important being an annual festival and world tournament. The most important exponent of the genre is Carlos Gardel, followed by Aníbal Troilo; other important composers include Alfredo Gobbi, Ástor Piazzolla, Osvaldo Pugliese, Mariano Mores, Juan D'Arienzo and Juan Carlos Cobián. Tango music experienced a period of splendor during the 1940s, while in the 1960s and 1970s nuevo tango appeared, incorporating elements of classical and jazz music. A contemporary trend is neotango (also known as electrotango), with exponents such as Bajofondo and Gotan Project. On 30 September 2009, UNESCO's Intergovernmental Committee of Intangible Heritage declared tango part of the world's cultural heritage, making Argentina eligible to receive financial assistance in safeguarding tango for future generations.


title: Buenos Aires

text: The city hosts several music festivals every year. A popular genre is electronic dance music, with festivals including Creamfields BA, SAMC, Moonpark, and a local edition of Ultra Music Festival. Other well-known events include the Buenos Aires Jazz Festival, Personal Fest, Quilmes Rock and Pepsi Music. Some music festivals are held in Greater Buenos Aires, like Lollapalooza, which takes place at the Hipódromo de San Isidro in San Isidro.


title: Buenos Aires

text: Argentine cinema history began in Buenos Aires with the first film exhibition on 18 July 1896 at the Teatro Odeón. With his 1897 film, "La bandera Argentina", Eugène Py became one of the first filmmakers of the country; the film features a waving Argentine flag located at Plaza de Mayo. In the early 20th century, the first movie theaters of the country opened in Buenos Aires, and newsreels appeared, most notably "El Viaje de Campos Salles a Buenos Aires". The real industry emerged with the advent of sound films, the first one being "Muñequitas porteñas" (1931). The newly founded Argentina Sono Film released "¡Tango!" in 1933, the first integral sound production in the country. During the 1930s and the 1940s (commonly referred as the "Golden Age" of Argentine cinema), many films revolved around the city of Buenos Aires and tango culture, reflected in titles such as "La vida es un tango", "El alma del bandoneón", "Adiós Buenos Aires", "El Cantor de Buenos Aires" and "Buenos Aires canta". Argentine films were exported across Latin America, specially Libertad Lamarque's melodramas, and the comedies of Luis Sandrini and Niní Marshall. The popularity of local cinema in the Spanish-speaking world played a key role in the massification of tango music. Carlos Gardel, an iconic figure of tango and Buenos Aires, became an international star by starring in several films during that era.


title: Buenos Aires

text: In response to large studio productions, the "Generation of the 60s" appeared, a group of filmmakers that produced the first modernist films in Argentina during the early years of that decade. These included Manuel Antín, Lautaro Murúa and René Mugica, among others.


title: Buenos Aires

text: During the second half of the decade, films of social protest were presented in clandestine exhibitions, the work of Grupo Cine Liberación and Grupo Cine de la Base, who advocated what they called "Third Cinema". At that time, the country was under a military dictatorship after the coup d'état known as Argentine Revolution. One of the most notable films of this movement is "La hora de los hornos" (1968) by Fernando Solanas. During the period of democracy between 1973 and 1975, the local cinema experienced critical and commercial success, with titles including "Juan Moreira" (1973), "La Patagonia rebelde" (1974), "La Raulito" (1975), and "La tregua" (1974) – which became the first Argentine film nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. However, because of censorship and a new military government, Argentine cinema stalled until the return of democracy in the 1980s. This generation – known as "Argentine Cinema in Liberty and Democracy" – were mostly young or postponed filmmakers, and gained international notoriety. "Camila" (1984) by María Luisa Bemberg was nominated for the Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards, and Luis Puenzo's "La historia oficial" (1985) was the first Argentine film to receive the award.


title: Buenos Aires

text: Located in Buenos Aires is the Pablo Ducrós Hicken Museum of Cinema, the only one in the country dedicated to Argentine cinema and a pioneer of its kind in Latin America. Every year, the city hosts the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema (BAFICI), which, in its 2015 edition, featured 412 films from 37 countries, and an attendance of 380 thousand people. Buenos Aires also hosts various other festivals and film cycles, like the Buenos Aires Rojo Sangre, devoted to horror.


title: Buenos Aires

text: Buenos Aires is home to five Argentine television networks: America, Television Pública Argentina, El Nueve, Telefe, and El Trece. Four of them are located in Buenos Aires, and the studios of America is located in La Plata.


title: Buenos Aires

text: Buenos Aires' inhabitants have been historically characterized as "fashion-conscious". National designers display their collections annually at the Buenos Aires Fashion Week (BAFWEEK) and related events. Inevitably being a season behind, it fails to receive much international attention. Nevertheless, the city remains an important regional fashion capital. According to Global Language Monitor, the city is the 20th leading fashion capital in the world, ranking second in Latin America after Rio de Janeiro. In 2005, Buenos Aires was appointed as the first UNESCO City of Design, and received this title once again in 2007. Since 2015, the Buenos Aires International Fashion Film Festival Buenos Aires (BAIFFF) takes place, sponsored by the city and Mercedes-Benz. The government of the city also organizes La Ciudad de Moda ("The City of Fashion"), an annual event that serves as a platform for emerging creators and attempts to boost the sector by providing management tools.


title: Buenos Aires

text: The fashionable neighborhood of Palermo, particularly the area known as Soho, is where the latest fashion and design trends are presented. The ""sub-barrio"" of Palermo Viejo is also a popular port of call for fashion in the city. An increasing number of young, independent designers are also setting up their own shops in Bohemian San Telmo, known for its wide variety of markets and antique shops. Recoleta, on the other hand, is the epicenter of branches of exclusive and upscale fashion houses. In particular, Avenida Alvear is home to the most exclusive representatives of haute couture in the city.


title: Buenos Aires

text: Buenos Aires architecture is characterized by its eclectic nature, with elements resembling Paris and Madrid. There is a mix, due to immigration, of Colonial, Art Deco, Art Nouveau, Neo-Gothic, and French Bourbon styles. Italian and French influences increased after the declaration of independence at the beginning of the 19th century, though the academic style persisted until the first decades of the 20th century. Attempts at renovation took place during the second half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, when European influences penetrated into the country, reflected by several buildings of Buenos Aires such as the Iglesia Santa Felicitas by Ernesto Bunge; the Palace of Justice, the National Congress, all of them by Vittorio Meano, and the Teatro Colón, by Francesco Tamburini and Vittorio Meano. The simplicity of the "Rioplatense" baroque style can be clearly seen in Buenos Aires through the works of Italian architects such as André Blanqui and Antonio Masella, in the churches of San Ignacio, Nuestra Señora del Pilar, the Cathedral and the Cabildo.


title: Buenos Aires

text: In 1912, the Basilica del Santisimo Sacramento was opened to the public; its construction was funded by the generous donation of Argentine philanthropist Mercedes Castellanos de Anchorena, a member of Argentina's most prominent family. The church is an excellent example of French neo-classicism. With extremely high-grade decorations in its interior, the magnificent Mutin-Cavaillé coll organ (the biggest ever installed in an Argentine church with more than four thousand tubes and four manuals) presided the nave. The altar is full of marble, and was the biggest ever built in South America at that time.


title: Buenos Aires

text: In 1919, the construction of Palacio Barolo began. This was South America's tallest building at the time and was the first Argentine skyscraper built with concrete (1919–1923). The building was equipped with 9 elevators, plus a lobby hall with paintings in the ceiling and Latin phrases embossed in golden bronze letters. A 300,000-candela beacon was installed at the top (110 m), making the building visible even from Uruguay. In 2009, the Barolo Palace went under an exhaustive restoration, and the beacon was made operational again.


title: Buenos Aires

text: In 1936, the Kavanagh building was inaugurated. The Kavanagh building, with its 12 elevators (provided by Otis) and the world's first central air conditioning system (provided by the North American company "Carrier"), is still an architectural landmark in Buenos Aires.


title: Buenos Aires

text: The architecture of the second half of the 19th century continued to reproduce French neoclassic models, such as the headquarters of the Banco de la Nación Argentina built by Alejandro Bustillo, and the Museo Hispanoamericano de Buenos Aires of Martín Noel. However, since the 1930s, the influence of Le Corbusier and European rationalism consolidated in a group of young architects from the University of Tucumán, among whom Amancio Williams stands out. The construction of skyscrapers proliferated in Buenos Aires until the 1950s. Newer modern high-technology buildings by Argentine architects in the last years of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st include the Le Parc Tower by Mario Álvarez, the Torre Fortabat by Sánchez Elía, and the Repsol-YPF tower by César Pelli.


title: Buenos Aires

text: Buenos Aires has over 280 theaters, more than any other city in the world. Because of this, Buenos Aires is declared the "World's Capital of Theater". They show everything from musicals to ballet, comedy to circuses. Some of them are:


title: Buenos Aires

text: Buenos Aires has been a candidate city for the Summer Olympic Games on three occasions: for the 1956 Games, which were lost by a single vote to Melbourne; for the 1968 Summer Olympics, held in Mexico City; and in 2004, when the games were awarded to Athens. However, Buenos Aires hosted the first Pan American Games (1951) and was also host city to several World Championship events: the 1950 and 1990 Basketball World Championships, the 1982 and 2002 Men's Volleyball World Championships and, most remembered, the 1978 FIFA World Cup, won by Argentina on 25 June 1978, when it defeated the Netherlands at the Estadio Monumental 3–1. In September 2013, the city hosted the 125th IOC Session, Tokyo was elected the host city of the 2020 Summer Olympics and Thomas Bach was new IOC President. Buenos Aires bid to host the 2018 Summer Youth Olympics. On 4 July 2013, the IOC elected Buenos Aires as the host city. Buenos Aires hosted the 2006 South American Games too.


title: Buenos Aires

text: Football is a popular pastime among many of the city's citizens, as Buenos Aires, featuring no fewer than 24 professional teams, has the highest concentration of teams of any city in the world. with many of its teams playing in the major league. The best-known rivalry is the one between Boca Juniors and River Plate, the match is better known as Superclásico. Watching a match between these two teams was deemed one of the "50 sporting things you must do before you die" by "The Observer". Other major clubs include San Lorenzo de Almagro, Club Atlético Huracán, Vélez Sarsfield, Chacarita Juniors, Club Ferro Carril Oeste, Nueva Chicago and Asociación Atlética Argentinos Juniors. Diego Maradona, born in Lanús Partido, a county south of Buenos Aires, is widely hailed as one of the sport's greatest players of all time. Maradona started his career with Argentinos Juniors and went on to play for Boca Juniors, the national football team and others (most notably FC Barcelona in Spain and SSC Napoli in Italy).


title: Buenos Aires

text: In 1912, the practice of basketball in Argentina was started by the "Asociación Cristiana de Jóvenes (YMCA)" of Buenos Aires, when Canadian Professor Paul Phillip was in charge of teaching basketball at the YMCA of Paseo Colón Avenue. The first basketball clubs in Argentina, Hindú and Independiente, were located at the YMCAs of the Greater Buenos Aires metropolitan area. By 1912 the first basketball games were held by YMCA headquarters in Buenos Aires. Nowadays, the Argentine Basketball Confederation is headquartered in Buenos Aires.


title: Buenos Aires

text: Argentina has been the home of world champions in professional boxing. Carlos Monzon was a hall of fame World Middleweight champion, and the former lineal Middleweight champion Sergio Martinez hails from Argentina. Omar Narvaez, Lucas Matthysse, Carolina Duer, and Marcos Maidana are five modern-day world champions as well.


title: Buenos Aires

text: Argentines' love for horses can be experienced in several ways: horse racing at the "Hipódromo Argentino de Palermo" racetrack, polo in the "Campo Argentino de Polo" (located just across Libertador Avenue from the "Hipódromo"), and pato, a kind of basketball played on horseback that was declared the national game in 1953. Polo was brought to the country in the second half of the 19th century by English immigrants.


title: Buenos Aires

text: The first rugby union match in Argentina was played in 1873 in the Buenos Aires Cricket Club Ground, located in the neighborhood of Palermo, where the Galileo Galilei planetarium is located today. Rugby enjoys widespread popularity in Buenos Aires, most especially in the north of the city, which boasts more than eighty rugby clubs. The city is home to the Argentine Super Rugby franchise, the Jaguares. The Argentina national rugby union team competes in Buenos Aires in international matches such as the Rugby Championship.


title: Buenos Aires

text: Buenos Aires native Guillermo Vilas (who was raised in Mar del Plata) and Gabriela Sabatini were great tennis players of the 1970s and 1980s and popularized tennis Nationwide in Argentina. Vilas won the ATP Buenos Aires numerous times in the 1970s. Other popular sports in Buenos Aires are golf, basketball, rugby and field hockey.


title: Buenos Aires

text: Juan Manuel Fangio won five Formula One World Driver's Championships, and was only outstripped by Michael Schumacher and Lewis Hamilton, with seven Championships. The Buenos Aires Oscar Gálvez car-racing track hosted 20 Formula One events as the Argentine Grand Prix, between 1953 and 1998; it was discontinued on financial grounds. The track features various local categories on most weekends. The 2009, 2010, 2011, 2015 Dakar Rally started and ended in the city.


title: Buenos Aires

text: Buenos Aires is part of the Union of Ibero-American Capital Cities from 12 October 1982 establishing brotherly relations with the following cities:


title: National League (division)

text: The National League, known as the Vanarama National League for sponsorship reasons, is the highest level of the National League System and fifth-highest of the overall English football league system. It is the highest league that is semi-professional in the English football league system. Notable former English Football League clubs that compete in the National League include: Scunthorpe United, Chesterfield FC, Oldham Athletic, Notts County, Wrexham and Torquay United F.C. The National League is the lowest division in the English football pyramid organised on a nationwide basis. Formerly the Conference National, the league was renamed the National League from the 2015–16 season.


title: National League (division)

text: The longest tenured team currently competing in the National League is Wrexham, having been in the National League since the 2008–09 season. As of the 2022–23 season, there is one former Premier League club competing in the National League: Oldham Athletic.


title: National League (division)

text: The league was formed as the Alliance Premier League in 1979, coming into force for the 1979–80 season. The league drew its clubs from the Northern Premier League and the Southern League.


title: National League (division)

text: It greatly improved the quality of football at this lower level, as well as improving the financial status of the top clubs. This was reflected in 1986–87, when the Football League began accepting direct promotion and relegation between the Conference and the bottom division of the Football League, which at that time was known as the Football League Fourth Division and is now EFL League Two. The first team to be promoted by this method was Scarborough, and the first team relegated was Lincoln City, who regained their Football League status a year later as Conference champions.


title: National League (division)

text: Since 2002–03, the league has been granted a second promotion place, with a play-off deciding who joins the champions in League Two. Previously, no promotion from the Conference would occur if the winners did not have adequate stadium facilities. As of the start of the 2002–03 season, if a club achieves the automatic promotion or the play-off places but does not have an adequate stadium, their place will be re-allocated to the next highest placed club that has the required facilities.


title: National League (division)

text: In 2004–05, the Conference increased its size by adding two lower divisions, the Conference North and Conference South respectively, with the original division being renamed Conference National. For the 2006–07 season, the Conference National expanded from 22 to 24 teams by promoting four teams while relegating two teams and introduced a "four up and four down" system between itself and the Conference North and Conference South.


title: National League (division)

text: The league's first sponsor was Gola during the 1984–85 and 1985–86 seasons. When Gola's sponsorship ceased, carmaker Vauxhall Motors—then the British subsidiary of General Motors—took over and sponsored the league until the end of the 1997–98 season.


title: National League (division)

text: The 1998–99 Conference campaign began without sponsors for the Conference, but just before the end of the season a sponsorship was agreed with Nationwide Building Society. This lasted until the end of the 2006–07 season, after which Blue Square took over. This would also prompt the leagues being renamed, with the Conference National becoming the Blue Square Premier, the Conference North becoming Blue Square North and the Conference South becoming Blue Square South. In April 2010, Blue Square announced a further three-year sponsorship deal. From the start of the 2010–11 season the divisions were renamed, with the addition of the word "Bet" after "Blue Square".


title: National League (division)

text: In July 2013 the Conference agreed another sponsorship deal with online payment firm Skrill. This lasted for only one year and the following July the Conference announced a brand-new three-year deal with Vanarama, later extended by two more years.


title: National League (division)

text: In 2015, the Football Conference was renamed the National League. The top division was also officially renamed the National League and the lower divisions renamed as National League North and National League South. In January 2019 the League signed a three-year deal with Motorama, Vanarama's sister company. It was extended to three more years in March 2021. Because of that sponsorship, the three divisions are known as the Motorama National League, Motorama National League North and Motorama National League South.


title: National League (division)

text: In August 2006 Setanta Sports signed a five-year deal with the Conference. Under the deal, Setanta Sports started showing live matches in the 2007–08 season, with 79 live matches each season. Included in the deal were the annual play-off matches as well as the Conference League Cup, a cup competition for the three Football Conference divisions. Setanta showed two live matches a week, with one on Thursday evening and one at the weekend.


title: National League (division)

text: In Australia the Conference National was broadcast by Setanta Sports Australia. Setanta Sports suffered financial problems and ceased broadcasting in the United Kingdom on 23 June 2009. Sky Sports broadcast the Conference play-off final 2010 at Wembley Stadium.


title: National League (division)

text: On 19 August 2010, Premier Sports announced that it bought the live and exclusive UK television rights to 30 matches per season from the Conference Premier for a total of three seasons. The 30 matches selected for broadcast included all five Conference Premier play-offs. The deal with the Football Conference was a revenue sharing arrangement whereby clubs received 50% of revenue from subscriptions, on top of the normal rights fee paid by the broadcaster, once the costs of production were met. The Conference also earned 50% from all internet revenue associated with the deal, which allowed them to retain advertising rights allied to those adverts shown with their matches. During the 2010–11 season, Premier Sports failed to attract enough viewers to its Conference football broadcasts to share any revenue with the clubs beyond the £5,000 broadcast fee paid to home clubs and £1,000 to away clubs.


title: National League (division)

text: In July 2013, BT Sport announced a two-year deal to broadcast 30 live games per season including all five play-off matches. In 2015 the National League announced that it renewed a three-year deal with BT Sport.


title: National League (division)

text: The highest average league attendance was in 2021–22 season, when 1.5 million fans attended National League matches, at an average of 3,084 per game. The lowest average league attendance came in the 2014–15 season, when 1 million spectators watched at an average of 1,853 per game. The highest seasonal average for a club was 8,647 for Wrexham in the 2021–22 season.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: Paulo Exequiel Dybala (born 15 November 1993) is an Argentine professional footballer who plays as a forward for Serie A club Roma and the Argentina national team.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: Nicknamed ""La Joya"" ("The Jewel"), Dybala began his senior club career in 2011 playing for Instituto de Córdoba, before signing for Palermo in 2012, at age 18, where he won a Serie B title. In 2015, Dybala signed for Juventus and won five league titles and four Coppas Italia. He was also voted Serie A Most Valuable Player once, was also included in the Serie A Team of the Year four times, and ranks as Juventus' ninth-highest all-time goalscorer.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: Dybala made his senior international debut for Argentina in 2015 at age 21, and has since earned over 30 caps, including appearing at the 2018 FIFA World Cup, 2019 Copa América and 2022 World Cup, winning the latter tournament.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: Dybala was born in Laguna Larga, Córdoba, Argentina. His grandfather, Bolesław Dybała, was from the village of Kraśniów in Poland; he fled from his country of birth to Argentina during World War II. Some of his grandfather's family moved to Canada. Dybala's family also has partial Italian origins through his maternal great-grandmother, who was from the Province of Naples.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: Nicknamed ""La Joya"" or ""El pibe de la pensión"", Dybala made his professional debut in the Primera B Nacional (Argentine second division) with his hometown club Instituto Atlético Central Córdoba at age 17. In total, he played 40 matches with the club, scoring 17 goals. He was the youngest to score a goal, beating the record of Mario Kempes. Dybala was also the first to play 38 consecutive matches in a professional league in the country (again edging Kempes), and was also the first to score two hat-tricks in a season. Dybala also scored in six consecutive games, surpassing the previous record of four matches.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: On 29 April 2012, U.S. Città di Palermo president Maurizio Zamparini announced the signing of Dybala stating, "We have got Paulo Dybala – the new Sergio Agüero." Later the same day, however, Instituto's general secretary José Teaux stated that the man who had completed the negotiations with Palermo did not have the mandate to sell Dybala. Nonetheless, on 20 July 2012 Palermo released a press announcement confirming the signing of Dybala, who signed a four-year deal with the Sicilian club. According to the financial filing of the club, the transfer fee was €8.64 million.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: Dybala made his debut for the club in a Serie A match against Lazio. He scored his first and second goal in Italy on 11 November 2012 when Palermo defeated Sampdoria at home, 2–0. Dybala had his breakthrough season in the 2014–15 Serie A where he scored ten goals in the first half of the season, forming a successful striking partnership with fellow Argentine–Italian Franco Vázquez and being linked with several top European clubs. He finished the season with 13 goals and 10 assists, which made him one of the top assist providers in the league.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: On 4 June 2015, Juventus announced the signing of Dybala on a five-year deal for a fee of €32 million (plus €8 million in add-ons). He was assigned the number 21 shirt, previously worn by Andrea Pirlo, who left the club that summer. On 8 August, he came on as a 61st-minute substitute for Kingsley Coman against Lazio in the 2015 Supercoppa Italiana. He scored the second goal in the 73rd minute in a 2–0 win in Shanghai. On 30 August 2015, Dybala scored his first league goal for the club in the 87th minute in a 2–1 defeat to Roma. In his first 16 appearances of the season, Dybala managed six goals and two assists in all competitions, with a ratio of a goal every 151 minutes, which was superior to Carlos Tevez's and Alessandro Del Piero's goalscoring ratios in their debut seasons with Juventus. In the club's history, only Roberto Baggio maintained a superior goalscoring record in the opening games of his debut season.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: Dybala scored his first career Coppa Italia goal in a 4–0 win over cross-city rivals Torino on 16 December. On 23 February 2016, Dybala scored his first UEFA Champions League goal in a 2–2 home draw to Bayern Munich in Juventus' first round of 16 leg. On 15 March, it was announced Dybala would miss the second round of 16 leg of the Champions League against Bayern on 16 March due to an edema overload of his left soleus muscle. He returned to action four days later in a 4–1 away win over Torino, but was substituted after sustaining yet another injury. On 21 April, Dybala scored two goals in a 3–0 home win over Lazio, which took his league tally to 16 goals in 31 appearances and also saw him score his 20th goal of the season in all competitions in the process. He finished the season as Juventus' top scorer with 23 goals in all competitions and 19 goals in Serie A, as the club celebrated their Serie A title victory.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: Following the departure of Paul Pogba to Manchester United in the summer of 2016, Dybala was offered the number 10 jersey by Juventus, although he turned it down, preferring to keep the number 21 jersey that he had worn during his previous season. Following manager Massimiliano Allegri's switch to a 4–2–3–1 formation, the 2016–17 season saw Dybala operate in a deeper playmaking role behind the club's new signing Gonzalo Higuaín, which saw a decrease in his goalscoring output as he took on increasing defensive and creative duties. After struggling to score at the beginning of the season, Dybala scored his first goal of the 2016–17 campaign on 27 September, in a 4–0 away win over Dinamo Zagreb in the Champions League. He scored his first Serie A goal of the season that weekend, on 2 October, in a 3–0 away win over Empoli.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: On 11 April, Dybala scored two goals in Juventus's first-leg Champions League quarter-final fixture against Barcelona, helping the club to a 3–0 home victory. On 13 April 2017, Dybala renewed his contract with Juventus until 2022. On 3 June, Dybala started in the 2017 Champions League Final, but Juventus were defeated 4–1 by defending champions Real Madrid, missing out on the treble.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: On 4 August 2017, Dybala was named one of the three finalists for the Forward of the 2016–17 UEFA Champions League season award. On 9 August, Dybala was confirmed to wear the number 10 shirt for Juventus. On 13 August he scored two goals in a 3–2 defeat to Lazio in the 2017 Supercoppa Italiana. On 15 August, Dybala placed sixth in the 2017 UEFA Best Player of the Year Award. On 26 August, Dybala scored his first hat-trick in Serie A in a 4–2 away win over Genoa. He repeated the feat on 17 September, in his 100th appearance for Juventus, scoring all three goals, including one free-kick, in the club's 3–1 away win over Sassuolo, marking his second hat-trick in Serie A. On 11 March 2018, Dybala scored a brace in a 2–0 home win over Udinese in Serie A; his first goal of the match was also his 100th career goal. He made his 150th appearance in Serie A in a 0–0 away draw against S.P.A.L., on 17 March.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: On 1 September 2018, Dybala made his 100th Serie A appearance for Juventus, coming on as a late second-half substitute in a 2–1 away win over Parma. On 2 October, Dybala scored a hat-trick in a 3–0 home win over Young Boys in the Champions League. In Juventus's following Champions League group match on 23 October, Dybala scored the only goal of the game in a 1–0 away win over Manchester United. With the arrival of Cristiano Ronaldo, Dybala was often deployed out of position in a deeper role by manager Allegri during the 2018–19 season; as a result of this positional switch, as well as struggles with injuries, and difficulties with his manager, Dybala suffered a loss of form, and his goalscoring output decreased significantly, as he managed to score only five goals in 30 league matches, and 10 goals across 42 appearances in all competitions. However, Juventus managed to retain the Serie A title.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: Following a disappointing 2018–19 campaign, Dybala was initially linked with moves to Premier League sides Manchester United and Tottenham, although he ultimately remained with Juventus for the 2019–20 season. Although he was initially not expected to start under the club's new manager Maurizio Sarri, he eventually broke into the first XI and scored his first goal of the season on 6 October 2019, in a 2–1 away win over rivals Inter, to help his side overtake the "Nerazzurri" at the top of the Serie A table. On 7 December, he made his 200th appearance for Juventus in a 3–1 away defeat to Lazio in Serie A.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: In the 2020 Coppa Italia Final against Napoli on 17 June, following a 0–0 draw after regulation time, Dybala missed Juventus's first spot-kick in the resulting shoot-out, with his shot being saved by Alex Meret; Napoli ultimately won the match 4–2 on penalties. At the end of the season, Dybala was awarded the Serie A MVP award for the 2019–20 season. He finished the campaign with 11 goals and 6 assists, helping Juventus win their 9th consecutive title.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: On 20 October 2020, Dybala made his first appearance of the new season in Juventus's opening Champions League game, coming on as a second–half substitute in a 2–0 away win over Dynamo Kyiv. Dybala scored his first goal of the season on 4 November against Ferencváros in a 4–1 win during a Champions League group stage match. On 21 March 2022, Juventus chief executive officer Maurizio Arrivabene announced that the club had decided not to renew Dybala's contract which would expire in the summer, citing changes in the club's project following the arrival of striker Dušan Vlahović earlier that year. After being sidelined for months due to injury, Dybala made his return on 7 April 2021, scoring the winning goal of a 2–1 home win over Napoli. On 12 May, he scored a goal in a 3–1 away win over Sassuolo, to reach his 100th goal for Juventus in all competitions, hence he became the first non-European player in doing so. On 15 May 2022, Dybala announced on social media that he would leave Juventus at the end of the season. Dybala played his final home match for Juventus on 16 May 2022 against Lazio, being substituted by Martin Palumbo in the 78th minute, for which he received a standing ovation.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: On 20 July 2022, Dybala signed for Roma on a three-year contract that runs until 30 June 2025. On 14 August, he made his debut for the club in a 1–0 away win against Salernitana in the Serie A.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: Due to his family heritage, Dybala was eligible to play for Poland and Italy, but expressly stated that he feels Argentine and had always dreamed of playing for Argentina. Dybala stated "I feel 100 percent Argentinian, I wouldn't be happy in a national team that didn't feel like mine, to hear an anthem that isn't my own, in colours that don't belong to me".


title: Paulo Dybala

text: Dybala was called by the Argentina under-17 team to participate in the XVI Pan American Games, but ultimately did not take part in the competition. On 19 July 2012, he received his first call-up for the under-20 team, but declined the invitation.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: On 22 September 2015, Dybala was called for the first time for the Argentina senior team by manager Gerardo Martino, but his first appearance was on 13 October 2015, coming off the bench to replace Carlos Tevez in the 75th minute during a 2018 FIFA World Cup qualifying match against Paraguay. In May 2016, he was omitted from Argentina's 23-man squad for the Copa América Centenario. Although Juventus insisted that they would not release Dybala for the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, he was included in Martino's 35-man preliminary under-23 squad for the tournament on 24 May; he was not included in the final squad for the tournament, however.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: On 1 September 2016, Dybala was sent off in the first half of a 1–0 home win over Uruguay in a 2018 World Cup qualifier for a second bookable offence. On 13 June 2017, he set up a goal for Joaquín Correa in a 6–0 away friendly win over Singapore.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: In May 2018, Dybala was named in Argentina's preliminary 35-man squad for the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia; later that month, he was included in Jorge Sampaoli's final 23-man squad for the tournament. He made his World Cup debut in Argentina's second group match on 21 June, coming on as a second-half substitute for Enzo Pérez in the 68th minute of an eventual 3–0 defeat to Croatia. This was his only appearance in the tournament, as Argentina were eliminated in the round of 16 on 30 June, following a 4–3 defeat to France.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: Later that year, he scored his first senior international goal on 20 November, in a 2–0 friendly home win over Mexico.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: In May 2019, Dybala was included in Argentina manager Lionel Scaloni's preliminary 40-man squad for the 2019 Copa América. Later that month, he was included in the final 23-man squad for the tournament. In Argentina's final group match against Qatar on 23 June, Dybala assisted Agüero's goal in a 2–0 win after coming off the bench for Lautaro Martínez, which enabled them to advance to the knock-out stages of the competition. In the third-place match against Chile on 6 July, Dybala made his first start of the tournament, and scored Argentina's second goal in an eventual 2–1 win, to help his team capture the bronze medal.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: On 1 June 2022, Dybala scored Argentina's final goal in a 3–0 win over reigning European Champions Italy at Wembley Stadium in the 2022 Finalissima.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: He was included in the final 26-man squad for the 2022 FIFA World Cup by Lionel Scaloni. On 13 December, he made his first appearance against Croatia, replacing Julián Álvarez, in a 3–0 semi-final victory. Five days later, in the final, he substituted Nicolás Tagliafico right before the penalty shoot-out as the match ended 3–3 at extra-time. He scored the second penalty in the shoot-out as his team eventually defeated France 4–2 to win the World Cup.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: A quick, creative, elegant, and agile player, with excellent technical ability and a low centre of gravity, Dybala is known for his powerful and accurate shots from outside the box, dribbling skills, balance, and close control in limited spaces, as well as his ability to beat opponents in one on one situations and protect or hold up the ball for teammates with his back to goal. Due to his speed on the ball, positioning, intelligent movement, and ball skills, he excels during counter-attacks and at beating the offside trap when making attacking runs. A hardworking player, he is also known for his stamina and defensive contribution off the ball. Dybala is capable both of creating chances for teammates, as well as scoring goals himself, due to his vision, passing, link-up play, and ability to drop deep and play off other players, as well as his powerful and accurate ball-striking ability from both inside and outside the area. Despite his diminutive stature, Dybala is also effective at scoring with his head, due to his acceleration over short distances, and his ability to anticipate defenders inside the box.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: A versatile forward, he is capable of playing in any offensive position: he started out playing as a left winger for Instituto in Argentina towards the beginning of his career, but since moving to Italy he has been deployed in a variety of attacking roles, including as a main striker, as a centre-forward, as a second striker, as an attacking midfielder, in a free role as a wide playmaker, as a right-sided inside forward, as a false attacking midfielder, as a false 9, or even as an inverted winger on the right flank, where he is able to cut into the centre and curl shots on goal with his stronger left foot. He has also been used in a free attacking role on occasion, in which he is given licence to roam about the final third of the pitch, and either drop into the middle, or switch between the flanks, due to his ability to create from the left or cut inside and score from the right. Because of his work-rate and involvement in the build-up of his team's attacking plays, in addition to his goalscoring ability, his former manager at Juventus Massimiliano Allegri even deployed Dybala as an offensive-minded central midfielder on occasion (known as a "mezzala", in Italian), and described him as a "box-to-box player" ("tuttocampista", in Italian) in 2018. He has also operated in a deeper playmaking role on occasion. Dybala is also accurate from both free kicks and penalties. His playing style has drawn comparisons with compatriots Sergio Agüero, Javier Pastore, Carlos Tevez, Omar Sívori, Diego Maradona, and Lionel Messi, as well as former Italian forwards Vincenzo Montella, Alessandro Del Piero, and Roberto Baggio; the latter described Dybala as the number 10 of the future in 2017. Widely considered to be a highly talented prospect in world football, in 2014, "Don Balón" named him one of the 100 most promising young players in the world born after 1993. Despite his talent, however, his mentality, consistency, and leadership qualities have come into question at times in the media. Moreover, he has also struggled with injuries throughout his career.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: After scoring a goal, Dybala is known for using his signature "mask" celebration; regarding the gesture, he commented: "My mask gesture isn't so much a goal celebration but rather a message. It's an ideal mask, which gladiators wore to fight. In Doha against Milan, after we lost Supercoppa, the idea of this celebration was born."


title: Paulo Dybala

text: Dybala obtained Italian citizenship on 13 August 2012, in order to facilitate his move to Palermo, and circumvent FIGC regulations that permit only a maximum of two non-EU players in any Serie A team. Dybala initially attempted to obtain Polish citizenship through ancestry from his grandfather, but the bureaucracy proved too complex.


title: Paulo Dybala

text: Since the summer of 2018 he has been in a romantic relationship with the Argentine actress and singer Oriana Sabatini. Dybala has several tattoos on his body: two stripes on his left arm, an Arabic tattoo as well as a crowned football on his leg.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Deng Xiaoping (22 August 1904 – 19 February 1997) was a Chinese revolutionary leader, military commander and statesman who served as the paramount leader of the People's Republic of China (PRC) from December 1978 to November 1989. After CCP chairman Mao Zedong's death in 1976, Deng gradually rose to supreme power and led China through a series of far-reaching market-economy reforms earning him the reputation as the "Architect of Modern China". He contributed to China becoming the world's second largest economy by GDP nominal in 2010.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Born in the province of Sichuan in the Qing dynasty, Deng studied and worked in France in the 1920s, where he became a follower of Marxism–Leninism and joined the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1924. In early 1926, Deng travelled to Moscow to study Communist doctrines and became a political commissar for the Red Army upon returning to China. In late 1929, Deng led local Red Army uprisings in Guangxi. In 1931, he was demoted within the party due to his support of Mao, but was promoted again during the Zunyi Conference. Deng played an important role in the Long March (1934–1935), the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and the Chinese Civil War (1945–1949). Following the founding of the PRC on 1 October 1949, Deng worked in Tibet as well as in southwest China as the regional party chief to consolidate CCP control until 1952, when he returned to Beijing to serve in the central government. In 1955, when the PLA adopted a Russian-style rank system, Deng was considered for the rank of Marshal of the People's Republic of China, which he declined to accept. As the party's Secretary-General under Chairman Mao Zedong and Vice Premier under Premier Zhou Enlai in the 1950s, Deng presided over the Anti-Rightist Campaign launched by Mao and became instrumental in China's economic reconstruction following the disastrous Great Leap Forward (1958–1960). However, his right-leaning political stance and economic policies eventually caused him to fall out of favor with Mao, and he was purged twice during the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976).


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Following Mao's death in September 1976, Deng outmaneuvered the late chairman's chosen successor Hua Guofeng and became China's de facto paramount leader in December 1978 at the 3rd Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee. Having inherited a country beset with institutional disorder and disenchantment with Communism resulting from the chaotic political movements of the Mao era, Deng started the "Boluan Fanzheng" program which gradually brought the country back to order. From 1977 to early 1979, he resumed the National College Entrance Examination that had been interrupted by the Cultural Revolution for ten years, initiated the Reform and Opening-up of China, designated special economic zones including Shenzhen, and started a one-month Sino-Vietnamese War. On 1 January 1979, the PRC established diplomatic relations with the United States, and Deng became the first Chinese paramount leader to visit the U.S. In August 1980, Deng embarked on a series of political reforms by setting constitutional term limits for state officials and other systematic revisions, which were incorporated in China's third Constitution (1982). In the 1980s, Deng supported the one-child policy to cope with China's perceived overpopulation crisis, helped establish China's nine-year compulsory education, and launched the 863 Program for science and technology. Deng also proposed the One Country, Two Systems principle for the governance of Hong Kong and Macau, as well as the future unification with Taiwan.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: The reforms carried out by Deng and his allies gradually led China away from a planned economy and Maoist ideologies, opened it up to foreign investments and technology, and introduced its vast labor force to the global market, thus turning China into one of the world's fastest-growing economies. He was eventually characterized as the "architect" of a new brand of thinking combining socialist ideology with free enterprise, dubbed "socialism with Chinese characteristics" (now known as Deng Xiaoping Theory). Despite never holding office as either the PRC's head of state or head of government nor as the head of CCP, Deng is generally viewed as the "core" of the CCP's second-generation leadership, a status enshrined within the party's constitution. Deng was named the "Time" Person of the Year for 1978 and 1985. He was criticized for ordering a military crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, yet was praised for his reaffirmation of the reform program in his Southern Tour of 1992 as well as the reversion of Hong Kong to Chinese control in 1997 and the return of Macau in 1999.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Deng's ancestors can be traced back to Jiaying County (now renamed as Meixian), Guangdong, a prominent ancestral area for the Hakka people, and had settled in Sichuan for several generations. Deng's daughter Deng Rong wrote in the book "My Father Deng Xiaoping" () that his ancestry was probably, but not definitely, Hakka. Sichuan was originally the origin of the Deng lineage until one of them was hired as an official in Guangdong during the Ming dynasty, but when the Qing dynasty planned to increase the population in 1671, they moved back to Sichuan. Deng was born in Guang'an District, Guang'an on 22 August 1904 in Sichuan province.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Deng's father, Deng Wenming, was a mid-level landowner who had studied at the University of Law and Political Science in Chengdu, Sichuan. He was locally prominent. His mother, surnamed Dan, died early in Deng's life, leaving Deng, his three brothers, and three sisters. At the age of five, Deng was sent to a traditional Chinese-style private primary school, followed by a more modern primary school at the age of seven.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Deng's first wife, one of his schoolmates from Moscow, died aged 24 a few days after giving birth to their first child, a baby girl who also died. His second wife, Jin Weiying, left him after Deng came under political attack in 1933. His third wife, Zhuo Lin, was the daughter of an industrialist in Yunnan. She became a member of the Communist Party in 1938, and married Deng a year later in front of Mao's cave dwelling in Yan'an. They had five children: three daughters (Deng Lin, Deng Nan and Deng Rong) and two sons (Deng Pufang and Deng Zhifang).


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: When Deng first attended school, his tutor objected to his having the given name "Xiansheng" (), calling him "Xixian" (), which includes the characters "to aspire to" and "goodness", with overtones of wisdom.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: In the summer of 1919, Deng graduated from the Chongqing School. He and 80 schoolmates travelled by ship to France (travelling steerage) to participate in the Diligent Work-Frugal Study Movement, a work-study program in which 4,001 Chinese would participate by 1927. Deng, the youngest of all the Chinese students in the group, had just turned 15. Wu Yuzhang, the local leader of the Movement in Chongqing, enrolled Deng and his paternal uncle, Deng Shaosheng, in the program. Deng's father strongly supported his son's participation in the work-study abroad program. The night before his departure, Deng's father took his son aside and asked him what he hoped to learn in France. He repeated the words he had learned from his teachers: "To learn knowledge and truth from the West in order to save China." Deng was aware that China was suffering greatly, and that the Chinese people must have a modern education to save their country.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: In December 1920 a French packet ship, the "André Lyon", sailed into Marseille with 210 Chinese students aboard including Deng. The sixteen-year-old Deng briefly attended middle schools in Bayeux and Châtillon, but he spent most of his time in France working, including at a Renault factory and as a fitter at the Le Creusot Iron and Steel Plant in La Garenne-Colombes, a north-western suburb of Paris where he moved in April 1921. Coincidentally, when Deng's later political fortunes were down and he was sent to work in a tractor factory in 1974 during the Cultural Revolution, he found himself a fitter again and proved to still be a master of the skill.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: In La Garenne-Colombes Deng met future CCP leaders Zhou Enlai, Chen Yi, Nie Rongzhen, Li Fuchun, Li Lisan and Li Weihan. In June 1923 he joined the Chinese Communist Youth League in Europe. In the second half of 1924, he joined the Chinese Communist Party and became one of the leading members of the General Branch of the Youth League in Europe. In 1926 Deng traveled to the Soviet Union and studied at Moscow Sun Yat-sen University, where one of his classmates was Chiang Ching-kuo, the son of Chiang Kai-shek.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: In late 1927, Deng left Moscow to return to China, where he joined the army of Feng Yuxiang, a military leader in northwest China, who had requested assistance from the Soviet Union in his struggle with other local leaders in the region. At that time, the Soviet Union, through the Comintern, an international organization supporting the Communist movements, supported the Communists' alliance with the Nationalists of the Kuomintang (KMT) party founded by Sun Yat-sen.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: He arrived in Xi'an, the stronghold of Feng Yuxiang, in March 1927. He was part of the Fengtian clique's attempt to prevent the break of the alliance between the KMT and the Communists. This split resulted in part from Chiang Kai-shek's forcing them to flee areas controlled by the KMT. After the breakup of the alliance between communists and nationalists, Feng Yuxiang stood on the side of Chiang Kai-shek, and the Communists who participated in their army, such as Deng Xiaoping, were forced to flee. In 1929 Deng led the Baise Uprising in Guangxi province against the Kuomintang (KMT) government. The uprising failed and Deng went to the Central Soviet Area in Jiangxi.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Although Deng got involved in the Marxist revolutionary movement in China, the historian Mobo Gao has argued that "Deng Xiaoping and many like him [in the Chinese Communist Party] were not really Marxists, but basically revolutionary nationalists who wanted to see China standing on equal terms with the great global powers. They were primarily nationalists and they participated in the Communist revolution because that was the only viable route they could find to Chinese nationalism."


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: After leaving the army of Feng Yuxiang in the northwest, Deng ended up in the city of Wuhan, where the Communists at that time had their headquarters. At that time, he began using the nickname "Xiaoping" and occupied prominent positions in the party apparatus. He participated in the historic emergency session on 7 August 1927 in which, by Soviet instruction, the Party dismissed its founder Chen Duxiu, and Qu Qiubai became the general secretary. In Wuhan, Deng first established contact with Mao Zedong, who was then little valued by militant pro-Soviet leaders of the party.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Between 1927 and 1929, Deng lived in Shanghai, where he helped organize protests that would be harshly persecuted by the Kuomintang authorities. The death of many Communist militants in those years led to a decrease in the number of members of the Communist Party, which enabled Deng to quickly move up the ranks. During this stage in Shanghai, Deng married a woman he met in Moscow, Zhang Xiyuan.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Beginning in 1929, he participated in the military struggle against the Kuomintang in Guangxi. The superiority of the forces of Chiang Kai-shek caused a huge number of casualties in the Communist ranks. The confrontational strategy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership was a failure that killed many militants against a stronger opponent. The response to this defeat catalyzed one of the most confusing episodes in the biography of Deng: in March 1931, he left the Communist Army seventh battalion to appear sometime later in Shanghai.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: His official biography states that Deng had been charged by his superiors with deserting from the battle zone before fleeing to Shanghai, where there were leaders of the underground Communist Party. Although he was not punished in Shanghai, this episode in his biography remains unclear and would be used against him to question his devotion to the Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution era.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: The campaigns against the Communists in the cities represented a setback for the party and in particular to the Comintern Soviet advisers, who saw the mobilization of the urban proletariat as the force for the advancement of communism. Contrary to the urban vision of the revolution, based on the Soviet experience, the Communist leader Mao Zedong saw the rural peasants as the revolutionary force in China. In a mountainous area of Jiangxi province, where Mao went to establish a communist system, there developed the embryo of a future state of China under communism, which adopted the official name of the Chinese Soviet Republic, but was better known as the "Jiangxi Soviet".


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: In one of the most important cities in the Soviet zone, Ruijin, Deng took over as secretary of the Party Committee in the summer of 1931. In the winter of 1932, Deng went on to play the same position in the nearby district of Huichang. In 1933 he became director of the propaganda department of the Provincial Party Committee in Jiangxi. It was then that he married a young woman he had met in Shanghai named Jin Weiying.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: The successes of the Soviet in Jiangxi made the party leaders decide to move to Jiangxi from Shanghai. The confrontation among Mao, the party leaders, and their Soviet advisers was increasingly tense and the struggle for power between the two factions led to the removal of Deng, who favored the ideas of Mao, from his position in the propaganda department. Despite the strife within the party, the Jiangxi Soviet became the first successful experiment of communist rule in rural China. It even issued stamps and paper money under the letterhead of the Soviet Republic of China, and the army of Chiang Kai-shek finally decided to attack the communist area.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Surrounded by the more powerful nationalist army, the Communists fled Jiangxi in October 1934. Thus began the epic movement that would mark a turning point in the development of Chinese communism. The evacuation was difficult because the Army of the Republic had taken positions in all areas occupied by the Communists. Advancing through remote and mountainous terrain, some 100,000 men managed to escape Jiangxi, starting a long strategic retreat through the interior of China, which ended one year later when between 8,000 and 9,000 survivors reached the northern province of Shaanxi.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: During the Zunyi Conference at the beginning of the Long March, the so-called 28 Bolsheviks, led by Bo Gu and Wang Ming, were ousted from power and Mao Zedong, to the dismay of the Soviet Union, became the new leader of the Chinese Communist Party. The pro-Soviet Chinese Communist Party had ended and a new rural-inspired party emerged under the leadership of Mao. Deng had once again become a leading figure in the party.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: The confrontation between the two parties was temporarily interrupted, however, by the Japanese invasion, forcing the Kuomintang to form an alliance for the second time with the Communists to defend the nation against external aggression.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: The invasion of Japanese troops in 1937 marked the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War. During the invasion, Deng remained in the area controlled by the Communists in the north, where he assumed the role of deputy political director of the three divisions of the restructured Communist army. From September 1937 until January 1938, he lived in Buddhist monasteries and temples in the Wutai Mountains. In January 1938, he was appointed as Political Commissar of the 129th division of the Eighth Route Army commanded by Liu Bocheng, starting a long-lasting partnership with Liu.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Deng stayed for most of the conflict with the Japanese in the war front in the area bordering the provinces of Shanxi, Henan and Hebei, then traveled several times to the city of Yan'an, where Mao had established the basis for Communist Party leadership. While in Henan, he delivered the famous report, "The Victorious Situation of Leaping into the Central Plains and Future Policies and Strategies", at a Gospel Hall where he lived for some time. In one of his trips to Yan'an in 1939, he married, for the third and last time in his life, Zhuo Lin, a young native of Kunming, who, like other young idealists of the time, had traveled to Yan'an to join the Communists.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Deng was considered a "revolutionary veteran" because of his participation in the Long March. He took a leading role in the Hundred Regiments Offensive which boosted his standing among his comrades.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: After Japan's defeat in World War II, Deng traveled to Chongqing, the city in which Chiang Kai-shek established his government during the Japanese invasion, to participate in peace talks between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. The results of those negotiations were not positive and military confrontation between the two antagonistic parties resumed shortly after the meeting in Chongqing.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: While Chiang Kai-shek re-established the government in Nanjing, the capital of the Republic of China, the Communists were fighting for control in the field. Following up with guerrilla tactics from their positions in rural areas against cities under the control of the government of Chiang and their supply lines, the Communists were increasing the territory under their control, and incorporating more and more soldiers who had deserted the Nationalist army.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: In the final phase of the war, Deng again exercised a key role as political leader and propaganda master as Political Commissar of the 2nd Field Army commanded by Liu Bocheng where he was instrumental in the PLA's march into Tibet. He also participated in disseminating the ideas of Mao Zedong, which turned into the ideological foundation of the Communist Party. His political and ideological work, along with his status as a veteran of the Long March, placed him in a privileged position within the party to occupy positions of power after the Communist Party managed to defeat Chiang Kai-shek and founded the People's Republic of China.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: On 1 October 1949, Deng attended the proclamation of the People's Republic of China in Beijing. At that time, the Communist Party controlled the entire north, but there were still parts of the south held by the Kuomintang regime. He became responsible for leading the pacification of southwest China, in his capacity as the first secretary of the Department of the Southwest. This organization had the task of managing the final takeover of that part of the country still held by the Kuomintang; Tibet remained independent for another year.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: The Kuomintang government was being forced to leave Guangzhou (Canton), and established Chongqing (Chungking) as a new provisional capital. There, Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo, a former classmate of Deng in Moscow, wanted to stop the advance of the Communist Party forces.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Under the political control of Deng, the Communist army took over Chongqing in late November 1949 and entered Chengdu, the last bastion of power of Chiang Kai-shek, a few days later. At that time Deng became mayor of Chongqing, while he simultaneously was the leader of the Communist Party in the southwest, where the Communist army, now proclaiming itself the People's Liberation Army, suppressed resistance loyal to the old Kuomintang regime. In 1950, the Communist Party-ruled state also seized control over Tibet.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Deng Xiaoping would spend three years in Chongqing, the city where he had studied in his teenage years before going to France. In 1952 he moved to Beijing, where he occupied different positions in the central government.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: In July 1952, Deng came to Beijing to assume the posts of Vice Premier and Deputy Chair of the Committee on Finance. Soon after, he took the posts of Minister of Finance and Director of the Office of Communications. In 1954, he was removed from all these positions, holding only the post of Vice Premier. In 1956, he became Head of the Communist Party's Organization Department and member of the Central Military Commission.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: After officially supporting Mao Zedong in his Anti-Rightist Movement of 1957, Deng acted as General Secretary of the Secretariat and ran the country's daily affairs with President Liu Shaoqi and Premier Zhou Enlai. Deng and Liu's policies emphasized economics over ideological dogma, an implicit departure from the mass fervor of the Great Leap Forward.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Both Liu and Deng supported Mao in the mass campaigns of the 1950s, in which they attacked the bourgeois and capitalists, and promoted Mao's ideology. However, the economic failure of the Great Leap Forward was seen as an indictment on the ability of Mao to manage the economy. Peng Dehuai openly criticized Mao, while Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, though more cautious, began to take charge of economic policy, leaving Mao out of day-to-day affairs of the party and state. Mao agreed to cede the presidency of the People's Republic of China (China's "de jure" head of state position) to Liu Shaoqi, while retaining his positions as leader of the party and the army.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: In 1955, he was considered as a candidate for the PLA rank of Marshal of the People's Republic of China but he was ultimately not awarded the rank.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: At the 8th National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 1956, Deng supported removing all references to "Mao Zedong Thought" from the party statutes.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: In 1963, Deng traveled to Moscow to lead a meeting of the Chinese delegation with Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev. Relations between the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union had worsened since the death of Stalin. After this meeting, no agreement was reached and the Sino–Soviet split was consummated; there was an almost total suspension of relations between the two major communist powers of the time.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: After the "Seven Thousand Cadres Conference" in 1962, Liu and Deng's economic reforms of the early 1960s were generally popular and restored many of the economic institutions previously dismantled during the Great Leap Forward. Mao, sensing his loss of prestige, took action to regain control of the state. Appealing to his revolutionary spirit, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, which encouraged the masses to root out the right-wing capitalists who had "infiltrated the party". Deng was ridiculed as the "number two capitalist roader".


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Mao feared that the reformist economic policies of Deng and Liu could lead to restoration of capitalism and end the Chinese Revolution. For this and other reasons, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966, during which Deng fell out of favor and was forced to retire from all his positions.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: During the Cultural Revolution, he and his family were targeted by Red Guards, who imprisoned Deng's eldest son, Deng Pufang. Deng Pufang was tortured and jumped out, or was thrown out, of the window of a four-story building in 1968, becoming a paraplegic. In October 1969 Deng Xiaoping was sent to the Xinjian County Tractor Factory in rural Jiangxi province to work as a regular worker. In his four years there, Deng spent his spare time writing. He was purged nationally, but to a lesser scale than President Liu Shaoqi.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: In 1971, Mao's second official successor and the sole Vice Chairman of the party, Lin Biao, was killed in an air crash. According to official reports, Lin was trying to flee from China after a failed coup against Mao. Mao purged all of Lin's allies, who made up nearly all of the senior ranks of the PLA, leaving Deng (who had been political commissar of the 2nd Field Army during the civil war) the most influential of the remaining army leaders. Premier Zhou Enlai was Mao's third successor but he fell ill with cancer and made Deng his choice as successor. In 1973, Deng returned to Beijing, after Zhou brought him back from exile in order for Deng to focus on reconstructing the Chinese economy. Zhou was also able to convince Mao to bring Deng back into politics in October 1974 as First Vice-Premier, in practice running daily affairs. He remained careful, however, to avoid contradicting Maoist ideology on paper. In January 1975, he was additionally elected Vice Chairman of the party by the 10th Central Committee for the first time in his party career; Li Desheng had to resign in his favour. Deng was one of five Vice Chairmen, with Zhou being the First Vice Chairman.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: During his brief ascendency in 1973, Deng established the Political Research Office, headed by intellectuals Hu Qiaomu, Yu Guangyuan and Hu Sheng, delegated to explore approaches to political and economic reforms. He led the group himself and managed the project within the State Council, in order to avoid rousing the suspicions of the Gang of Four.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: The Cultural Revolution was not yet over, and a radical leftist political group known as the Gang of Four, led by Mao's wife Jiang Qing, competed for power within the Party. The Gang saw Deng as their greatest challenge to power. Mao, too, was suspicious that Deng would destroy the positive reputation of the Cultural Revolution, which Mao considered one of his greatest policy initiatives. Beginning in late 1975, Deng was asked to draw up a series of self-criticisms. Although he admitted to having taken an "inappropriate ideological perspective" while dealing with state and party affairs, he was reluctant to admit that his policies were wrong in essence. His antagonism with the Gang of Four became increasingly clear, and Mao seemed to lean in the Gang's favour. Mao refused to accept Deng's self-criticisms and asked the party's Central Committee to "discuss Deng's mistakes thoroughly".


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Zhou Enlai died in January 1976, to an outpouring of national grief. Zhou was a very important figure in Deng's political life, and his death eroded his remaining support within the Party's Central Committee. After Deng delivered Zhou's official eulogy at the state funeral, the Gang of Four, with Mao's permission, began the so-called "Criticize Deng and Oppose the Rehabilitation of Right-leaning Elements" campaign. Hua Guofeng, not Deng, was selected to become Zhou's successor as Premier on 4 February 1976.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: On 2 February 1976, the Central Committee issued a Top-Priority Directive, officially transferring Deng to work on "external affairs" and thus removing Deng from the party's power apparatus. Deng stayed at home for several months, awaiting his fate. The Political Research Office was promptly dissolved, and Deng's advisers such as Yu Guangyuan suspended. As a result, the political turmoil halted the economic progress Deng had labored for in the past year. On 3 March, Mao issued a directive reaffirming the legitimacy of the Cultural Revolution and specifically pointed to Deng as an internal, rather than external, problem. This was followed by a Central Committee directive issued to all local party organs to study Mao's directive and criticize Deng.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Deng's reputation as a reformer suffered a severe blow when the Qingming Festival, after the mass public mourning of Zhou on a traditional Chinese holiday, culminated in the Tiananmen Incident on 5 April 1976, an event the Gang of Four branded as counter-revolutionary and threatening to their power. Furthermore, the Gang deemed Deng the mastermind behind the incident, and Mao himself wrote that "the nature of things has changed". This prompted Mao to remove Deng from all leadership positions, although he retained his party membership. As a result, on 6 April 1976 Premier Hua Guofeng was also appointed to Deng's position as Vice Chairman and at the same time received the vacant position of First Vice Chairman, which Zhou had held, making him Mao's fourth official successor.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Following Mao's death on 9 September 1976 and the purge of the Gang of Four in October 1976, Premier Hua Guofeng succeeded as Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and gradually emerged as the "de facto" leader of China. Prior to Mao's death, the only governmental position Deng held was that of First Vice Premier of the State Council, but Hua Guofeng wanted to rid the Party of extremists and successfully marginalised the Gang of Four. On 22 July 1977, Deng was restored to the posts of vice-chairman of the Central Committee, Vice-chairman of the Military Commission and Chief of the General Staff of the People's Liberation Army.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: By carefully mobilizing his supporters within the party, Deng outmaneuvered Hua, who had pardoned him, then ousted Hua from his top leadership positions by 1980. In contrast to previous leadership changes, Deng allowed Hua to retain membership in the Central Committee and quietly retire, helping to set the precedent that losing a high-level leadership struggle would not result in physical harm.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: During his paramount leadership, his official state positions were Chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference from 1978 to 1983 and Chairman of the Central Military Commission (an "ad hoc" body comprising the most senior members of the party elite) of the People's Republic of China from 1983 to 1990, while his official party positions were Vice Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party from 1977 to 1982, Chairman of the Central Military Commission of the Chinese Communist Party from 1981 to 1989 and Chairman of the Central Advisory Commission from 1982 to 1987. He was offered the rank of General First Class in 1988 when the PLA restored military ranks, but as in 1955, he once again declined. Even after retiring from the Politburo Standing Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in 1987 and the Central Military Commission in 1989, Deng continued to exert influence over China's policies until his death in 1997.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Important decisions were always taken in Deng's home in Zhongnanhai with a caucus of eight senior party cadres, called "Eight Elders", especially with Chen Yun and Li Xiannian. Deng ruled as "paramount leader" although he never held the top title of the party, and was able to successively remove three party leaders, including Hu Yaobang. Deng stepped down from the Central Committee and its Politburo Standing Committee. However, he remained as the chairman of the State and Party's Central Military Commission and was still seen as the paramount leader of China rather than General Secretary Zhao Ziyang and Presidents Li Xiannian and Yang Shangkun.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Deng repudiated the Cultural Revolution and, in 1977, launched the "Beijing Spring", which allowed open criticism of the excesses and suffering that had occurred during the period, and restored the National College Entrance Examination (Gao Kao) which was cancelled for ten years during the Cultural Revolution. Meanwhile, he was the impetus for the abolition of the class background system. Under this system, the CCP removed employment barriers to Chinese deemed to be associated with the former landlord class; its removal allowed a faction favoring the restoration of the private market to enter the Communist Party.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Deng gradually outmaneuvered his political opponents. By encouraging public criticism of the Cultural Revolution, he weakened the position of those who owed their political positions to that event, while strengthening the position of those like himself who had been purged during that time. Deng also received a great deal of popular support. As Deng gradually consolidated control over the CCP, Hua was replaced by Zhao Ziyang as premier in 1980, and by Hu Yaobang as party chairman in 1981, despite the fact that Hua was Mao Zedong's designated successor as the "paramount leader" of the Chinese Communist Party and the People's Republic of China. During the "Boluan Fanzheng" period, the Cultural Revolution was invalidated, and victims of more than 3 million "unjust, false, wrongful cases" by 1976 were officially rehabilitated.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Deng's elevation to China's new number-one figure meant that the historical and ideological questions around Mao Zedong had to be addressed properly. Because Deng wished to pursue deep reforms, it was not possible for him to continue Mao's hard-line "class struggle" policies and mass public campaigns. In 1982 the Central Committee of the Communist Party released a document entitled "On the Various Historical Issues since the Founding of the People's Republic of China". Mao retained his status as a "great Marxist, proletarian revolutionary, militarist, and general", and the undisputed founder and pioneer of the country and the People's Liberation Army. "His accomplishments must be considered before his mistakes", the document declared. Deng personally commented that Mao was "seven parts good, three parts bad". The document also steered the prime responsibility of the Cultural Revolution away from Mao (although it did state that "Mao mistakenly began the Cultural Revolution") to the "counter-revolutionary cliques" of the Gang of Four and Lin Biao.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Deng prioritized China's modernization and opening up to the outside world, stating that China's "strategy in foreign affairs is to seek a peaceful environment" for the Four Modernizations. Under Deng's leadership, China opened up to the outside world, to learn from more advanced countries. Deng developed the principle that in foreign affairs, China should keep a low-profile and bide its time. He continued to seek an independent position between the United States and the Soviet Union. Although Deng retained control over key national security decisions, he also delegated power to bureaucrats in routine matters, ratifying consensus decisions and stepping in if a bureaucratic consensus could not be reached.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: In November 1978, after the country had stabilized following political turmoil, Deng visited Bangkok, Kuala Lumpur and Singapore and met with Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew. Deng was very impressed with Singapore's economic development, greenery and housing, and later sent tens of thousands of Chinese to Singapore and countries around the world to learn from their experiences and bring back their knowledge. Lee Kuan Yew, on the other hand, advised Deng to stop exporting Communist ideologies to Southeast Asia, advice that according to Lee, Deng later followed. In late 1978, the aerospace company Boeing announced the sale of 747 aircraft to various airlines in the PRC, and the beverage company Coca-Cola made public their intention to open a production plant in Shanghai.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: On 1 January 1979, the United States recognized the People's Republic of China, leaving the (Taiwan) Republic of China's nationalist government to one side, and business contacts between China and the West began to grow.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: In early 1979, Deng undertook an official visit to the United States, meeting President Jimmy Carter in Washington as well as several Congressmen. The Chinese insisted that former President Richard Nixon be invited to the formal White House reception, a symbolic indication of their assertiveness on the one hand, and their desire to continue with the Nixon initiatives on the other. During the visit, Deng visited the Johnson Space Center in Houston, as well as the headquarters of Coca-Cola and Boeing in Atlanta and Seattle, respectively. With these visits so significant, Deng made it clear that the new Chinese regime's priorities were economic and technological development. Deng took personal charge of the final negotiations with the United States on normalizing foreign relations between the two countries. In response to criticism from within the Party regarding his United States policy, Deng wrote, "I am presiding over the work on the United States. If there are problems, I take full responsibility."


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Sino-Japanese relations improved significantly. Deng used Japan as an example of a rapidly progressing power that set a good example for China economically.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Deng initially continued to adhere to the Maoist line of the Sino–Soviet split era that the Soviet Union was a superpower as "hegemonic" as the United States, but even more threatening to China because of its close proximity. Relations with the Soviet Union improved after Mikhail Gorbachev took over the Kremlin in 1985, and formal relations between the two countries were finally restored at the 1989 Sino-Soviet Summit.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Deng quoted the old proverb "it doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white, if it catches mice it is a good cat." The point was that capitalistic methods worked. Deng worked with his team, especially as Zhao Ziyang, who in 1980 replaced Hua Guofeng as premier, and Hu Yaobang, who in 1981 did the same with the post of party chairman. Deng thus took the reins of power and began to emphasize the goals of "four modernizations" (economy, agriculture, scientific and technological development and national defense). He announced an ambitious plan of opening and liberalizing the economy. On Deng's initiative, the CCP revoked the position of Chairman and made the General Secretary the "ex officio" leader of the party.