On October 27, 1950, Ren Bishi (Jen Pi-shih in Wade-Giles)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren_Bishi a member of the Chinese Communist Party's Politburo, died of a stroke in Beijing. Ren had been born in 1904; he was only four months older than his successor as Chief Secretary of the party organization, Deng Xiaoping--who died in 1997. What if Ren had lived as long as Deng?
Odd Arne Westad in *Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946-1950,* summarizes Ren's tole in the early PRC as follows:
"The triumvirate that would be in regular control of the planning of the new state were Liu Shaoqi, Ren Bishi, and Zhou Enlai. At times during the civil war, Mao had criticized each of them for lack of revolutionary 'vigor' and political consciousness, but he still regarded them as the ones within the party leadership who best understood the challenges the party faced in the 'new' areas. Of the three, Liu was without doubt the most influential, and much of the work in setting up the political and economic institutions of the new regime was done under his leadership. Ren Bishi, the Moscow-educated Chief Secretary of the party organization, introduced a number of key ideas concerning political structures in both rural and urban areas, usually influenced by Soviet practices. In terms of actual position within the party, Ren's stature was in ascendance, although he remained number five in the formal party hierarchy. Zhou Enlai, different from the other two, had clearly defined tasks within his brief. His areas were 'united front' issues-—relations with nonparty leaders, propaganda, and intelligence--and foreign affairs. His position as Premier-designate reflected those briefs. The government was to deal with the 'external' the party with the 'internal.'
"A key problem for the CCP in mid-1949 was economic planning for the period immediately before and immediately after the new state was set up. The big problem was that the Communists had no idea what to expect: What happened when a bourgeois state formation like the Guomindang collapsed, and the Communists controlled the government? Would the capitalists sabotage the new regime by simply ending their economic activities? The Center had had a working group headed by Ren Bishi report on Marxist theory on the matter since mid-1948, but no unified views had emerged. The triumvirate of Ren, Liu, and Zhou tended to think that the capitalists could be goaded into continuing to operate their plants and businesses for the time being (even though by doing so they objectively would be preparing their own destruction by helping the CCP state). Both the Soviet experience and the CCP's own lessons from Manchuria pointed in this direction, Ren thought. The goal of Communist cadres was therefore to convince the capitalists that they would be well treated by the new government..."
https://books.google.com/books?id=JBCOecRg5nEC&pg=PA261
Westad views Ren's death as contributing to the radicalization of the regime:
"Other events also contributed to the radicalization of the Chinese revolution and the renewed turn to mass campaigns. On 27 October 1950, Ren Bishi died in Beijing at the age of forty-six. Ren had been a member of the party leadership since the mid-1930s and was perhaps its main Marxist theoretician. During the latter stage of the civil war, Ren had increasingly come to ally himself with Liu Shaoqi's Soviet-inspired gradualist approach to reform. His death deprived Liu of crucial support, and made it easier for other leaders, such as Gao Gang, to challenge Liu's positions. With Ren gone, the constraints on Mao Zedong in requesting more radical policies were also reduced. In early 1951, as Mao was beginning to think of the 'new-democratic' phase of the revolution as ending with the completion of land reform-—and not beginning with it, as Liu had claimed—-a clash was unavoidable. When Liu in July L951 criticized Gao's policies in the Northeast as 'an erroneous, dangerous, and utopian notion of agrarian socialism,' Mao sided with Gao, telling Liu and his associates that he could not 'side with them' but was 'with the minority that holds the truth.' As with the Korean War, the majority caved in because the Chairman held other views. Liu Shaoqi's political turn enabled him to outmaneuver Gao Gang and keep his position as Mao's chief lieutenant, but it defeated his political purpose. Instead of a gradual transition to socialism, China got a series of campaigns intended to catapult the country into the kind of modernity that Mao envisaged..."
https://books.google.com/books?id=JBCOecRg5nEC&pg=PA325
Even Chinese Communist leaders who had their reservations about some of Mao's radical moves in the 1950's had to go along in order to survive. In Liu's case he retained power until the Cultural Revolution; Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping managed to survive it (though Deng was in eclipse for some years). So it's very hard to say how long Ren would have survived politically even if he had survived physically. There are some signs however that he did have moderate inclinations (apart from his already-mentioned conciliatory line toward the capitalists in the early days of the PRC):
(1) He had shown some reluctance on Chinese entry into the Korean War:
"Mao Zedong seems to have been in little doubt that the PRC would have to intervene for the sake of the Korean revolution and revolutionary movements elsewhere in East Asia. But the majority in the Politburo and among the PLA leadership had serious reservations about sending Chinese troops to Korea. Civilian leaden such as Liu Shaoqi and Ren Bishi feared that a new war would throw up immense difficulties for a gradual and well-organized reform process in China. Many military leaders, including Lin Biao, thought that a Chinese offensive in Korea would be logistically and tactically difficult, and could endanger Chinese security in Manchuria and in areas along the coast. For both groups the prospect of an all-out war with the United States must have loomed large: Just as the Chinese revolution was being completed in spite of the constant danger of imperialist intervention, Kim and Stalin were asking the CCP to go to war by their own will with the most powerful imperialist nation in the world.
"At the extended Politburo meeting on 2 October no clear-cut decision could be arrived at, and it took at least three more days of intense dicussion before Mao's line won out. The three core arguments that the Chairman put forward in favor of intervention were the CCP's debt to the Koreans who had fought with them during the Chinese civil war, the U.S. threat to Chinese security, and the availability of Soviet support for the war effort. But beyond the persuasiveness of each of these points, it was Mao's immense prestige in military and political affairs that won the day. Mao was the leader who had brought the party victory in the civil war. Even when they disagreed with him, as the majority did in the crucial case of intervention in Korea, his colleagues in the CCP leadership were willing to defer to his wishes, since Mao alone was seen to have the strategic vision that could make the party achieve its political aims...." Westad, *Decisive Encounters,* p. 325.
https://books.google.com/books?id=JBCOecRg5nEC&pg=PA325
(2) In 1946, Ren, like Zhou Enlai, had held out hope for a political solution which Mao did not:
"While Zhou attempted to get CCP members in the cities to 'appear as ordinary people to actively influence the protests against the government,' Ren Bishi was mainly preoccupied with the long-term implications of gaining and keeping allies outside the party. More than anybody within the party leadership, Ren viewed the civil war as a defensive battle that some day would have to be replaced by political activities, both in the cities and especially in the countryside. Ren worried that radical land reform, while an excellent defensive weapon in times of crisis, did not prepare the CCP well for the political contest that would have to come in rural areas. The excessive delineation between poor peasants, who stood to gain from CCP policies, and everyone else, the potential victims of confiscations and random violence, made the Communists too many enemies and too few friends, he complained.
"What would decide the long-term prospects for peace, Zhou and Ren agreed, was the issue of the national assembly that Jiang Jieshi was determined to call by mid-November. If Jiang could be pressured to halt the military offensives and include CCP members in the parliament, the Communists could gradually turn the political game to their advantage, while getting the respite from fighting they badly needed. Two meetings of the Politburo in early October concluded that there was no hope of returning to the framework for a National Assembly worked out through negotiations that past spring. But there could still be a chance that the victorious Generalissimo, pressured by the Americans and the Chinese liberals, would ask the CCP to come to Nanjing for the assembly. The Soviets advised Yan'an to do whatever it could to be represented in the new assembly.
"Mao disagreed with this perspective. The Chairman thought that the National Assembly was a sham that Jiang had constructed to crown his military victories against the Communists. '0ver the past eight months,' he wrote to Zhou on 24e August, 'we have too many times been cheated by the GMD and the Americans; we should be more alert now.' Almost alone among the central party leadership, Mao believed in military victory, that the tide would turn, and that Jiang's divisions would be forced back. Gradually, during October, Mao's views on the National Assembly won out..."
https://books.google.com/books?id=JBCOecRg5nEC&pg=PA58
(3) "Jen Pi-shih included a statement on intellectuals in his widely-quoted discussion of land reform problems, also dated January, 1948. His message was essentially the same as Mao's, except that Jen's specific reference point was the intellectual offspring of landlord and rich peasant families. We must not reject all intellectuals related to the feudal system, he said, just because we want to destroy feudalism. Many students, including some sons and daughters of landlords and rich peasants, were favorably inclined toward the revolution and did not oppose land reform. They were gradually realizing that land reform was a basic element of the democracy they desired. Besides, he continued, within three to five years the revolution is going to be victorious throughout the country and we are going to need large numbers of medical personnel, agronomists, accountants, specialists of all kinds, teachers, and civilian railway technicians. It took many years to train such people and as yet the liberated areas did not contain many of them. Jen emphasized the necessity of using existing talent but, at the same time, reeducating it politically and training it to serve the people." Suzanne Pepper, Civil War in China: The Political Struggle, 1945-1949, p. 222
https://books.google.com/books?id=pWWD57YCJkgC&pg=PA222
(This may seem to be the most ordinary common sense and was not in fact opposed to the CCP's line in 1948, which warned against "leftist errors" in the treatment of intellectuals. Still, it is of some note, because some CCP radicals did apparently think otherwise: "For an example of what Jen was cautioning against, see Isabel and David Crook, *Revolution in a Chinese Village: Ten Mile Inn,* pp. 143-49. A village teacher teacher was suspended and made to wear a badge proclaiming him a “first class struggle object,” because he was of rich peasant origin, although he himself had not engaged in any anti-social activities." Pepper, p. 222)
All in all, Ren's ideas for China's internal development seem more based on the Soviet model than Mao's--which should not be surprising, inasmuch as he had been trained in Moscow and translated numerous Soviet works (including Stalin's "Dialectical and Historical Materialism") into Chinese. Again, though, Mao's prestige was such that it is doubtful Ren could block Mao's wilder initiatives any more than Liu, Zhou, or Deng could...