Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (10 page)

As the Communist troops advanced, taking over cities one by one, some of the troops remained behind in each city and town, both to set up the Military Control Commission that would administer the city and to begin the transition to Communist rule. After the Communist military victory in Shanghai, Deng was for several weeks personally in charge of the Military Control Commission that took over the various branches of the Shanghai government. Communist Party members, who until then had kept their membership secret, as well as “progressive” youth in Shanghai who favored the Communists, assisted in the takeover. Deng met with various local leaders, explained Communist policies, and selected and assigned subordinates
to provide additional local support beyond the brief transition. He also expanded the recruitment of new party members to provide leadership in the Shanghai area. The local citizenry, alienated from the Guomindang because of its well-known corruption and the rampant inflation, generally welcomed the Communists, but it would take several years to overcome the damage and chaos generated by the civil war. After guiding the transition to Communist rule in Shanghai, Deng left Shanghai and rejoined his forces as they marched into the Southwest.

Establishing Communist Rule in the Southwest, 1949–1952

It took the Communists more than two years, from 1947 when they captured the northeast, until 1949, to gain control of the entire country. As they took over each of the six major regions of China, they set up a regional bureau to rule that region; until 1952 the six regional bureaus together had the major responsibility of ruling the country while the central party and government were gradually built up in Beijing. To establish these bases of Communist rule, Mao usually chose leaders for a region who were from that region. Liu Bocheng, like Deng, was from Sichuan, by far the largest province in the Southwest. In wartime, the political commissar was expected to yield to the commander, but in peacetime, the commander was expected to yield to the commissar. Deng Xiaoping was thus made first secretary of the Southwest Bureau, representing the last of the six major regions, with its population of 100 million, to come under Communist control. Deng was to remain in this position until 1952, when major regional leaders, and their responsibilities, were transferred to Beijing.

While first secretary of the Southwest Bureau, Deng was in charge of pacifying the area, managing the transition of governance from the Guomindang to the Communists, recruiting and training party members to lead the government and society, overcoming the chaos of the wartime years, and guiding the region's overall economic development.
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As the Communist Party extended its roots into society, Deng took on responsibility for every aspect of public life—security, the economy, industry and commerce, transportation and communication, culture and education, and health.

Pacifying the countryside was more difficult in the Southwest than in some other regions because Guomindang
supporters had remained there since World War II, when it had been their headquarters, and because for Guomindang soldiers the Southwest was the end of the line, where they either deserted or blended into the local populations. Some continued to resist Communist rule, passively or actively. To ensure that these troublemakers were rounded up or pacified at last, General He Long and his First Field Army came from the Northwest region to reinforce commander Liu Bocheng's troops. The last province to come under Communist control was Tibet. In 1951 Deng drew from troops based in both the Southwest and the Northwest to gain control and establish order there. The Tibetans did not have strong military forces, and their losses in western Sichuan before the invasion made the military conquest of Tibet relatively easy.

Deng realized that long-term success or failure in the Southwest depended on his ability to recruit and retain talented subordinates. He drew heavily on the political commissars from the Second Field Army, who had experience in keeping up the morale of the troops and managing relations between the troops and the local population, to staff high party and government positions, while allowing many government officials who had served under the Guomindang to remain if they were prepared to cooperate with the Communists. He then supervised his subordinates as they recruited and trained able youth to staff the local party and government.

Deng gave great attention to gaining the cooperation and support of the people in the region. In speeches and in articles in the press, Deng explained Communist rule to local government officials and the people. He also organized the recruitment and training of officials to administer the land reform that would wipe out the landlord class and pass control of the land to the tillers. Unlike Ye Jianying in south China, who was criticized for being too soft on local landlords, Deng was praised by Mao for his success in land reform by attacking landlords, killing some of the landlords with the largest holdings, allocating their land to peasants, and mobilizing local peasants to support the new leadership.

Deng also pushed hard to realize the project that he regarded as the most crucial for development of the Southwest, one that Deng's father and his acquaintances had envisioned a generation earlier: construction of a railway between the region's two largest cities, Chongqing and Chengdu. The task was formidable, given the primitive construction equipment then available. Nonetheless Deng and the workers persevered, and in 1952, just before Deng left the Southwest to take up his position in Beijing, he proudly joined the celebration for the completed railway project.

Building Socialism, 1952–1959

In 1952, when regional leaders were transferred to the central government that now ruled the country, Deng was appointed vice premier in the central government. Not long thereafter, Mao wrote a note indicating that government documents going to the party center should first be cleared by Deng Xiaoping. It was a measure of Mao's deep confidence in Deng and in the central role Deng had in coordinating activities from the time of his arrival in Beijing. In 1956 Deng was made secretary general of the party, the key position for administering the daily work of the party, and a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo. He took part in meetings with Mao to discuss the establishment of the First Five-Year Plan and to plan for “socialist transformation,” which involved organizing individual farms into collectives, collectivizing small enterprises, and nationalizing large enterprises.

In 1953, when Bo Yibo lost his position as finance minister because Mao complained that he had been too soft in assessing taxes on the capitalists, Mao appointed Deng to replace him. Deng's year as finance minister coincided with the first year of the First Five-Year Plan; he thus supervised the political process of negotiating with the provinces to determine how much grain and how much tax revenue each would pass on to higher levels and how much the government would disburse to the various provinces. Deng did not make final decisions, but at a time when the country was very poor, he had to make judgments with great consequences and report to Mao and Zhou about the capacity of the provinces to meet grain quotas and to pay taxes.
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In those days Mao often met with his top officials; Deng attended meetings with him as often as several times a month. In 1953, Deng and Chen Yun (see Key People in the Deng Era, p. 717) went to Mao to inform him of the biggest personnel problem facing China in its early years of Communist rule: the threat that Gao Gang might split the party. Mao heeded their warning, and Deng and Chen Yun played a central role in managing the case.
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While playing the central role in leading the daily work of the party, Deng could see firsthand how Mao weighed the issues facing China and how he made decisions affecting the country. In his later years Mao was to commit devastating errors, yet he remained a brilliant political leader with deep insight and bold strategies. In addition, as Kissinger was later to consider Premier Zhou Enlai one of the greatest leaders he ever encountered, Deng could see how this great master, whom he had known well in Paris and Shanghai,
dealt with foreign relations and with managing overall government activity. By taking part in top-level meetings with both Mao and Zhou, Deng had an opportunity to learn how China's two greatest leaders of their generation assessed the major issues facing the country. Further, as a participant in the building of new organizations, Deng had the chance to see the logic of major decisions and to consider the broader framework of fundamental changes, experiences that would serve him well as he endeavored to rebuild China's economic and political framework in the 1980s.

Mao in 1960 split with the Soviet Union and kept China a closed country, but he spent a great deal of time considering how to deal with the great powers. Deng, as vice premier in the government from 1952 to 1955, was included in discussions on foreign relations. As general secretary of the party from 1956 to 1966, he dealt with relations with other Communist parties (not with non-Communist countries), at a time when most of China's important foreign relationships were with these Communist countries. In February 1956, for instance, he was the political leader of the Chinese delegation to Moscow for the 20th Soviet Party Congress, when Khrushchev denounced Stalin. Like other foreign comrades attending the congress, Deng was not allowed to attend the session in which Khrushchev made his speech, but he was allowed to read the text of that speech the next day. Deng, who was shrewd enough to recognize immediately that the speech had not just domestic but also international implications, assigned two interpreters to work all night to translate the speech, even as he also carefully avoided addressing the content of the speech until Mao decided how to respond. He therefore returned to Beijing and reported on the speech to Mao (who was vulnerable to many of the same criticisms made of Stalin), and Mao made the decisions about how to proceed.
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Deng was immediately aware that the massive criticism of Stalin would affect those who worked with Stalin and weaken the authority of the Soviet Communist Party.

From September 15–27, 1956, after China's agriculture and handicrafts had been collectivized and its industry had been nationalized, the Chinese Communist Party held its 8th Party Congress, the first party congress to be held since the 7th Party Congress in 1945 that had set out the tasks on the eve of the civil war. The congress was comprehensive and carefully prepared; it offered a vision of a party with responsibility for governing a great nation. The early stage of socialism had arrived, five-year plans had been introduced, the bourgeois and landlord classes no longer existed, and class warfare had ended. Zhou Enlai, Deng, and others hoped that the party could thereafter
concentrate on strengthening regular procedures and advancing orderly economic growth.
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Deng played a central role at the 8th Party Congress; he was promoted to general secretary of the party, making him, as a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, one of the top six leaders of the party (after Mao, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and Chen Yun). His 1954 position of secretary general had been one of an office manager, albeit a strong one who was deeply involved in the decision-making process for all major decisions. In 1956, however, as general secretary—a position he continued to hold until the Cultural Revolution—he became the leader in charge of daily party work. He was responsible for supervising the party leadership organs in Beijing and in dealing with provincial party leaders. Under Mao's overall leadership, Liu Shaoqi, as first vice chairman of the party, provided guidance to the Standing Committee of the Politburo, which made the decisions that were then implemented by Deng.

When Deng traveled with Mao to Moscow in November 1957, Mao was extremely pleased with Deng's fierce and effective arguments with Mikhail Suslov, the great Soviet theorist. Toward the end of the meetings in Moscow, Mao pointed to Deng and said, “See that little man there? He's highly intelligent and has a great future ahead of him.”
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As Khrushchev recalled, “Mao regarded him as the most up-and-coming member of the leadership.”
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Beginning in the spring of 1957, many intellectuals and leaders of the minority parties, who had been encouraged to speak out in the campaign to “let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend,” surprised Mao with the depth of their criticism. Mao lashed back at those “bourgeois intellectuals” who could not erase their class origins even though capitalism had already been eliminated. In the summer of 1957, Mao launched the “anti-rightist campaign” to discredit all those who had been so critical of the party. During the campaign, which Mao tapped Deng to manage, Mao led a vicious attack on some 550,000 intellectual critics branded as rightists. Deng, who during the Hundred Flowers period had told local party officials to listen to criticism and not to fight back, was disturbed that some intellectuals had arrogantly and unfairly criticized officials who were trying to cope with their complex and difficult assignments. During the anti-rightist campaign, Deng strongly supported Mao in defending the authority of the party and in attacking the outspoken intellectuals. These attacks, and Deng's role in them, would not be forgotten by China's intellectual elite.

The anti-rightist campaign destroyed many of China's best scientific and technical minds and alienated many others. Critics who might have restrained Mao from launching his Great Leap Forward, a utopian ill-conceived and brutally implemented effort to transform the economy and society of China within only a few years, were too frightened to speak out. Beginning with the Great Leap Forward, Mao consulted his officials less often than previously. Many loyal Maoists were also silenced.