Hu Yaobang's rise to power was engineered by Deng Xiaoping, and Hu rose to the highest levels of the Party after Deng displaced Hua Guofeng as China's "paramount leader". In 1980 Hu became Party Secretary General, and was elected to the powerful Politburo Standing Committee. In 1981, Hu became CPC Chairman, but helped abolish the position of Party chairman in 1982, as part of a broader effort to distance China from Maoist politics. Most of the chairman's functions were transferred to the post of General Secretary, a post taken by Hu. Deng's displacement of Hua Guofeng marked the Party leadership's consensus that China should abandon strict Maoist economics in favor of more pragmatic policies, and Hu directed many of Deng's attempts to reform the Chinese economy. By 1982, Hu was the second most powerful person in China, after Deng. Throughout the last decade of Hu's career, he promoted the role of intellectuals as being fundamental to China's achievement of the Four Modernizations.