However, much of Mao's authority was informal, earned after years of building clout through the civil war and intra-party struggles. After Mao died in 1976, his successor as party chairman, Hua Guofeng, was unable to build a strong coalition of support in spite of having a wide range of official titles. Deng Xiaoping emerged as the pre-eminent leader of China in 1978, and was indisputably the highest authority in the country throughout the 1980s even though he held only one formal government post, that of chairman of the Central Military Commission.