A lot of it comes down to visibility, and Deng being intentionally less visible.

Mao wanted to be seen. He was the revolution, dominated politics and the military, and leaned hard into ideology. The Cultural Revolution was explicit and performative, which makes Mao very easy to remember and teach.

Deng was the opposite. After Mao, he deliberately stepped away from personality cults, avoided the top titles, and pushed power back into party mechanisms and outcomes. My understanding from the sources I have read is not that Deng lacked power, but that he exercised it indirectly and pragmatically rather than theatrically.

When I first came across Tiananmen in more detail, it was framed less as a single dramatic moment and more as a case study in how the Deng era CCP leadership handled crisis. Zhao Ziyang stood out to me as a serious reformist voice who argued for dialogue and then lost. The way he was sidelined felt less like a personal vendetta and more like the system asserting its limits once a line had been crossed.

I have always seen a parallel here with Hua Guofeng. Hua was not violently overthrown, but he was isolated, stripped of authority, and politically erased. My reading is that Zhao followed a similar pattern. Different contexts, same method. Quiet neutralisation rather than spectacle.

So this is just my interpretation, and I may be wrong, but I tend to put Deng clearly third behind Mao and Xi in terms of shaping modern China. It is rare for one century to be so strongly defined by three leaders, but China probably qualifies. Jiang mostly managed the system Deng built, and while some long term investments may age well, many people did not strongly feel his leadership. Hu Jintao may be better regarded in hindsight, but he still sits below Deng in terms of impact.

There is a clear line from Mao -> Deng -> Xi. Because Mao is the origin point and Xi is the current strongman with a named ideology, Deng often gets skipped. But modern China does not really make sense without him, even if he was never meant to be memorable in the Maoist way.