HONG KONG — He was as obstinate as a Hunan mule, the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping said. China’s reformist officials and liberal intellectuals came to detest him, and he often fought them with equal venom.
Deng Liqun, who died on Tuesday in Beijing at 99, was a senior Communist Party propaganda and ideology official who began the 1980s as a powerful proponent of change, yet became one of the most vehement and divisive foes of China’s liberalization. His death, after many years spent bedridden, was reported by Xinhua, the state-run news agency.
The Xinhua announcement eulogized Mr. Deng as an “outstanding leader on the party’s front line of thought, theory and propaganda.” But that was euphemism for a staunch traditionalist whose legacy can be detected in the party’s current revival of Leninist and Maoist rhetoric.
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In the 1990s, Mr. Deng kept fighting. He founded a party history research institute and supported Marxist traditionalists who opposed China’s renewed embrace of economic liberalization. He also wrote his memoirs, first circulated privately in Beijing and then reprinted abroad, which settled scores with foes and defended his positions.
Mr. Deng’s wife, Luo Liyun, died four years ago, said Warren Sun, a historian of the Chinese Communist Party at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, who spoke to one of Mr. Deng’s aides after his death. Their son, Deng Yingtao, died in 2012, and Mr. Deng is survived by Luo Xiaoyun, a daughter from that marriage, and by two daughters from a much earlier marriage that ended in divorce, Mr. Sun said.
In his memoirs, Mr. Deng wrote, “Battered by storms, I never lost the political mettle and character that a Communist Party member should have.”
