Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (104 page)

The Retirement of Senior Officials

In his speech of August 18, 1980, Deng took up another very divisive issue: “The primary task [of older comrades] is to help the Party organizations find worthy successors . . . [who will] take the ‘front-line’ posts while the older comrades give them the necessary advice and support.”
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There was then no retirement age, and many senior officials were dragging their feet in the search for successors. Having been removed during the Cultural Revolution for almost a decade during the peak of their careers, they believed that they had sacrificed themselves for the cause of the party and now had only a few brief years left to play the roles they had long hoped for. Furthermore, these senior officials were reluctant to give up not only the power but also the perquisites of office: housing, access to a chauffeur-driven car, a staff of assistants, a seat at important meetings, and fancy banquets.

At this point, the party had not developed an overall policy on retirement for high-level officials. Managing the issue of retirement at lower levels was not a problem: the higher-level officials established the rules and made the lower levels implement them. The problem was how to deal with the retirement of high-level leaders in Beijing. The party leaders were able to reach a consensus on the need for general rules regarding their retirement. But the
devil was in the details—how to deal with the retirement of each of the top several hundred leaders given that China was entering a critical period during which these senior officials were needed to train and cultivate the next generation of leaders.

In his speech of August 18, Deng laid out a proposed solution: the creation of a high-level Central Advisory Commission (CAC) that would bestow on senior officials honor and the perquisites of their positions. Senior officials had no difficulty discerning that Deng meant “honor without power.” In July 1975, he had proposed a similar solution to the problem of military retirement. In effect, the senior members of the Politburo Standing Committee would be transferred to the CAC as core members.

At the time, Deng was himself planning to retire within the next several years. Several days after his August speech, when journalist Oriana Fallaci asked if he was going to give up his post of vice premier, Deng replied, “I will not be the only one to resign. All other comrades of the older generation are giving up their concurrent posts. . . . Previously . . . there was life tenure in leading posts. . . . [This] institutional defect . . . was not evident in the sixties because we were then in the prime of life . . . it would be better for us old comrades to take an enlightened attitude.”
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A few weeks later, Deng would express his exasperation that the older generation did not take an “enlightened attitude.” On December 25, at the end of a ten-day conference to begin preparations for the Sixth Plenum and the 11th Party Congress, Deng complained, “In the past year the Central Committee has repeatedly emphasized that veteran officials should make the selection and training of middle-aged and young officials their first and most solemn duty. If we fail to do other work well, naturally we ought to make self-criticisms; but if we fail to do this work well, we will have made a mistake of historic magnitude.”
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In 1982 the CAC was formally established and Deng hoped that the members would give up their regular positions. Membership required forty years of party membership and leadership experience. Deng Xiaoping served as the first chairman, with the special right to take part in meetings of the Standing Committee of the Politburo.
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All 172 members appointed were allowed to retain their full salaries, ranks, and perquisites, but they were to cease serving on regular decision-making bodies.
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Deng announced that the CAC would remain in existence for ten to fifteen years. He explained that it was created because the members had special revolutionary experience that would be needed during the transition period.

Deng's effort to give honor and perquisites without power was only partially successful. Many senior officials, including Chen Yun, Wang Zhen, and Song Renqiong, became members of the CAC, but also retained their previous positions. After they retired, Zhao Ziyang recorded that during the 1980s he and Hu Yaobang were like secretary generals, in effect office managers, since power throughout the decade was still in the hands of Deng, Chen Yun, Li Xiannian, and “the six-person small group” (Bo Yibo, Peng Zhen, Deng Yingchao, Song Renqiong, Yang Shangkun, and Wang Zhen). Deng was paramount, but he simply did not have the absolute power required to force all the others to retire. In fact, in March 1982, in response to pressure from senior officials, it was announced that because of the size of the party and the country and for the sake of stable leadership, it was necessary for “a few dozen old comrades to remain in the central leading posts of the Party and the State.”
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But Deng did establish the principle that the CAC would come to an end when these revolutionary veterans passed from the scene. In the future, too, all positions would have term limits. As planned, the CAC was abolished in 1992. It had given its members honor and it had reduced but not entirely eliminated their power until Deng himself fully stepped down in 1992.

“Unrequited Love” and Cultural Limits

In July 1981, Hu Qiaomu and Deng Liqun asked Deng for his judgment on whether the recently completed movie
Unrequited Love
should be made available to the general public. The movie, which was based on a very popular drama, was brought to Deng's attention because it was controversial and had the potential of being one of the biggest hits in years. The screenplay,
Bitter Love (Kulian)
, which had appeared in the magazine
October (Shiyue)
in September 1979, told of an artist who had been forced to flee China during the Japanese occupation. After leading a good life abroad, he decided in 1949 to return to China to help his motherland. For having gone abroad, he was always considered suspect and punished, but he continued to dedicate himself to his country. When the artist's daughter wished to go abroad, the artist was reluctant to grant his permission. In frustration, she said to her father, “You love the motherland, but does your nation love you?” Shortly after this conversation, the artist, when attempting to flee from the Red Guards who hounded him, collapsed and died. In the movie version that Deng reviewed, the father, while reflecting on his daughter's question as he trudged along in
the snow, fell and died, leaving his body in the shape of a big question mark set against the white snow.

After viewing the movie, Deng declared that it “gives the impression that the Communist Party and the socialist system are bad.” He acknowledged that the movie was well done, which, he said, made it all the more dangerous: “The movie vilifies the party to such an extent that one wonders what has happened to the author's party spirit.”
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Deng's decision provided a guideline for propaganda officials trying to make difficult distinctions among the many stories of suffering during the Cultural Revolution.
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What should be prohibited is what reflects badly on the party as a whole and what should be permitted is what reflects badly only on certain individuals.

In his effort to create a better atmosphere than that which had existed during Mao's era, Deng allowed the author of the play, Bai Hua, to remain in the party, even though he was criticized. At the time, Deng also allowed Liu Binyan, a popular investigative journalist who had written vivid firsthand accounts of corrupt officials, to remain a party member. Even Hu Qiaomu, the keeper of orthodoxy, said that documents coming from Beijing should drop the expression “literature in service of politics,” which had alienated so many intellectuals. Hu Qiaomu substituted “literature in service of the people and in service of socialism,” an expression that expanded the range of acceptable writing.
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But among the endless number of stories that were written about the past, it was impossible to draw a sharp line between those that were permissible and those that were not. Disagreements continued to rage. Less than two weeks after Deng's attack on
Unrequited Love
, at a Forum on Problems on the Ideological Battlefront called by the Propaganda Department, Deng Liqun and Hu Qiaomu tried to build on the momentum created by Deng's decision on
Unrequited Love
to build a stronger bulwark against literature criticizing communism and the Communist Party. At that same meeting, however, Zhou Yang, who had been cultural czar in the 1950s, gave a rousing speech in favor of literary diversity that was enthusiastically received by the audience. After his personal suffering in the Cultural Revolution, Zhou Yang was now emerging as the champion of a literature that, as cultural czar, he would have criticized twenty-five years earlier. At this forum, Zhou Yang rhetorically asked whether it was better for culture to be like a stagnant pond or the roaring Yangtze. His answer: better to have the roaring Yangtze, even if it did carry a little sediment.

The enthusiastic support of the audience for Zhou Yang placed Hu
Qiaomu, who acknowledged that there were differences among comrades, in a difficult position. But he persisted in saying that it was important to resist “bourgeois liberalization,” a term that he, Deng Liqun, and Deng Xiaoping himself would use throughout the 1980s to criticize those leaders whom they considered too enamored with the freedoms in the West.
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Wang Zhen Tightens Up the Party School, 1982–1983

For Chinese youth and many intellectuals, the winds of freedom that they felt from the West after 1978 were exhilarating. But high-level officials disagreed among themselves about how much freedom could be given to the public (many of whom had suffered from political attacks), given that no one wanted to return to the chaos of the period before 1949 or of the Cultural Revolution. Hu Yaobang, the high official most sympathetic to intellectuals who wanted more freedoms and to local officials who wanted more flexibility, was under constant pressure from conservatives who were worried about the consequences of leniency. Deng, though always ready to enforce discipline when he deemed it necessary, continued to support Hu Yaobang, even when attacked by conservatives.

One important battleground was the Central Party School. After December 1978, Hu Yaobang had little time to devote to the Central Party School as its de facto president, but the staff that he supported there and the spirit of free inquiry that he encouraged continued to nurture promising young officials. Scholars in the theory section of the school enjoyed high regard for their role in preparing the article “Practice Is the Sole Criterion for Judging Truth” and for criticizing the “two whatevers.” Three scholars—Wu Jiang, Sun Changjiang, and Ruan Ming—buoyed by the respect they enjoyed and with the support of the deputy head of the school, Feng Wenbin, continued to push for additional freedom of expression, much to the consternation of senior party officials, who feared an erosion of party discipline and principles. Wang Zhen and Chen Yun were particularly upset with the criticisms of the party that flourished in the permissive atmosphere, which had been reported to them by Deng Liqun after he had visited and lectured at the Central Party School. In August 1981, the party Central Organization Department sent a team to the school to investigate the three scholars. Chen Yun wrote a letter to the head of academic training at the school declaring that just as the Whampoa Military Academy had turned out disciplined young military officers, so too he hoped the Central Party School
would train disciplined party officials, not those who encourage criticism of the party.

When the question of a new president of the Central Party School arose in 1981, Hu Yaobang supported the appointment of Xiang Nan, an enlightened, well-educated party official who later became party secretary of Fujian province. Chen Yun, however, supported the appointment of Wang Zhen as a way to rein in permissiveness at the school.
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Progressive party members were outraged by the possibility of a man whom they regarded as crude, rustic, and ill-informed about the wider world leading some of the country's most enlightened scholars.
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Nevertheless, Deng Xiaoping approved the appointment and Wang Zhen took over the Central Party School in 1982.

Upon assuming power at the school, Wang immediately removed Feng Wenbin and expelled Wu Jiang, Ruan Ming, and Sun Changjiang. Ruan Ming was permitted to migrate to the United States, where he wrote about his dismissal in great detail.
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Sun Changjiang was appointed to a faculty position at a lesser university, Shoudu Teachers University—a move that Chen Yun supported. (Sun once joked that he was thankful that Wang Zhen sent him to the smallest university, not the largest elementary school.
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) And Wu Jiang was transferred to the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).

Apart from cleaning out faculty who were considered too permissive, Wang Zhen played no role at the school. Instead, Chen Yun, who despite his political conservatism believed in high educational standards, arranged for Jiang Nanxiang, a well-educated intellectual, to become the new de facto head of the school. Jiang upheld the school's intellectual standards while placing limits on the free expression of ideas. Overall, the attack on faculty members and redirection of intellectuals were understood as indirect criticisms of Hu Yaobang, who had created the freer atmosphere in the first place.