Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (106 page)

Deng chose to be relatively lenient in 1984–1985 to ease the burden on intellectuals, who were still stung by the aborted campaign. For instance, Wang Ruoshui, a scholar admired by many intellectuals for his strong convictions and courage, was allowed to continue to write about humanism, and even after being attacked in January 1984, he published in Hong Kong a defense of his position. He would not be purged from the party until late 1984.

Other writers, buoyed by Deng's leniency in curbing the campaign against spiritual pollution, reached a new peak of confidence during the Fourth Congress of the Chinese Writers Association, held from December 29, 1984, to January 5, 1985. The organizers of the congress had the courage not to invite Hu Qiaomu or Deng Liqun, who was still director of the Propaganda Department. At the congress, Hu Yaobang dutifully presented the official point of view that placed limits on free expression, but his attendance alone gave a measure of confidence to the participants. Conservatives, predictably, were outraged that he attended and failed to stop the outspoken criticisms. The bold writers elected as president of the congress someone who had been criticized by both Hu Qiaomu and Deng Liqun—Ba Jin, a leading novelist in the 1930s. The famous investigative reporter Liu Binyan, a former rightist and one of the most outspoken critics of the party's treatment of intellectuals, was elected senior vice president. Liu used the forum to criticize those who had attacked him during the campaign against spiritual pollution.

In assessing the overall importance of the meeting, the writer Xia Yan declared the congress to be the writers' Zunyi conference. Just as Mao had achieved independence from Soviet domination at Zunyi in January 1935, so too were Chinese writers breaking away and declaring their independence.
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Such statements infuriated the conservatives. Although many of those present at the writers' congress were members of the Communist Party, Li Xiannian, upon hearing about the gathering from his son-in-law, Liu Yazhou, a PLA writer who had attended, denounced it as an anti-party meeting. Hu Qiaomu and Deng Liqun, too, were incensed by the rebellious spirit of the writers; Deng Liqun called the congress a “mess.” On January 2, 1985, while the conference was still in session, Deng Xiaoping, informed of developments at the congress, summoned Hu Yaobang for a private talk. Following that talk with Deng, Hu Yaobang gave a speech at the close of the congress that
was far more critical of the prevailing atmosphere than his earlier speech had been.
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Deng Xiaoping was furious about the audacious challenge to party authority that had occurred at the writers' congress. From Deng's perspective, Hu Yaobang was earning the goodwill of intellectuals by being an overly permissive official who failed to enforce party discipline. Moreover, Hu Yaobang's permissiveness made it appear that Deng Xiaoping was an arbitrary, overly strict authoritarian.
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Meanwhile, in an effort to achieve some common ground between the conservatives and intellectuals, Hu Qiaomu assisted Hu Yaobang in writing a speech for delivery at a February 8, 1985, party Secretariat meeting devoted to the party's handling of newspaper work.
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Although the speech was basically conservative, in the draft Hu Qiaomu tried to balance the ideas of the intellectuals with those of the conservatives. He wrote that spiritual pollution should be opposed, but that the expression “spiritual pollution” should be rarely if ever used.
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Deng Xiaoping was reportedly upset at Hu Qiaomu's change of tone and for backing down from placing limits on challenges to the authority of the party.
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In March 1985, during this atmosphere of greater freedom, leading investigative journalist Liu Binyan, who three decades earlier had been labeled a rightist, published
The Second Kind of Loyalty
, in which he contrasted party members who automatically accept orders from higher party officials with party members with a conscience who serve the ideals of the party. Liu Binyan's book hit a deep nerve among those who had agonized about whether to carry out party policy during the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution. It also had a tremendous influence on idealistic Chinese youth who sought independence from the party. Deng, who always believed in the importance of party discipline, regarded Liu's message as a challenge to party leadership, and as a result in 1987 Liu was expelled from the party. Yet unlike Mao, Deng was not vindictive. In 1988 he allowed both Liu Binyan and Wang Ruoshui to go abroad. In addition, Deng Xiaoping, fully aware of how much Deng Liqun had done to alienate intellectuals, had him removed as head of the Propaganda Department in July 1985. He was replaced by Zhu Houze, who until then had been provincial party secretary in his home province of Guizhou.
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Even though Zhu Houze did not have full control of the Propaganda Department because there were still many conservatives there, his appointment was a great victory for those who sought more freedom. Officials familiar
with the Propaganda Department commented that usually when a person becomes the head of the department, he becomes conservative because his job is to maintain party orthodoxy—but there was one exception: Zhu Houze. Zhu Houze's new approach, which he publicized as the three relaxations—more permissive, tolerant, and magnanimous
(kuan song, kuan rong, kuan hou)
—encouraged those party members who wished to express variant opinions.

Although Zhu Houze had suffered before and during the Cultural Revolution, because of his success in developing the backward province of Guizhou, he had been selected as a promising provincial official to attend the second year-long class at the Central Party School after it reopened in 1978 under the direction of Hu Yaobang (a Central Party School classmate of Zhu Houze's, Hu Jintao, would become the top leader of China in 2002). In his new position in Beijing, Zhu supported the appointment of Wang Meng, a well-known, open-minded creative writer, as minister of culture.
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Deng Liqun and other conservative theorists believed that Zhu Houze was creating an even larger mess by granting more freedoms to people like Fang Lizhi, Wang Ruowang, and Wang Ruoshui.
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They feared that the end result would be chaos. Outspoken intellectuals, meanwhile, were as pleased and enthusiastic with Zhu Houze's efforts as Deng Liqun and his fellows were dismayed.

Deng Xiaoping continued to attempt the almost impossible task of curbing criticism of the party without thoroughly alienating intellectuals. At the National Party Representatives Conference, held September 18–23, 1985, Deng compared the positive strength of socialism with bourgeois selfishness.
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He said that by preserving community ownership of rural land and state ownership of enterprises, China could “eliminate the greed, corruption, and injustice that are inherent in capitalism and other forms of exploitation. . . . We must firmly oppose any propaganda in favor of bourgeois liberalization, that is, in favor of the capitalist road.”
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But he still tried to prevent all-out attacks on intellectuals. He stated, “We should follow the policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom and uphold the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution and the laws of the state. With regard to erroneous ideological tendencies, we should follow the policy of persuasion and education and refrain from political movements and ‘mass criticism.’”
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Preparing for Succession, 1985

By 1985, Deng, endeavoring to settle the issue of high-level successions that had been dragging on for some time, proposed holding the 13th Party Congress
in 1985 instead of waiting until the 1987 scheduled date. When others strongly objected to altering the regular schedule of a party congress, Deng instead convened a special “National Party Representatives Conference” from September 18 to 23, 1985, which enabled the party to announce key retirements and appointments of potential successors. With 992 officials in attendance, the conference was almost as large as a party congress.
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Because the conference did not have the formal authority to select members of the Central Committee, the Fourth Plenum was held on September 16, just before the start of the conference, to accept the resignations. On September 24, immediately after the closing of the conference, the Fifth Plenum officially announced the new appointments. The issue of Deng's succession was not discussed publicly but it was already in the air on May 10, four months before the party conference, when Hu Yaobang was interviewed by Lu Keng, a former rightist who had become deputy editor of the Hong Kong semi-monthly
The Masses (Baixing).

After the interview appeared, Deng asked Qiao Shi to convey Deng's displeasure to Hu Yaobang. Deng complained to Qiao Shi that Hu was trying to appear as if he were an enlightened leader.
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Moreover, when Lu Keng had asked Hu Yaobang “While Deng is still healthy, why doesn't he simply pass on the leadership of the Central Military Commission [CMC] to you?” instead of completely quashing any implication that he was thinking of taking over from Deng the key position that would make him the leader of the third generation, Hu had responded that Deng could resolve military issues with one phrase, whereas for Hu it would take five phrases.
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Deng had let Hu Yaobang know he was thinking of retiring, but he did not want others pushing him to retire. He would retire at his own pace. He knew that Hu Yaobang had lost the support of Chen Yun and other conservatives for being too spontaneous without giving full consideration to balanced overall planning. In their view, Hu was winning the favor of intellectuals by being overly permissive and leaving the task of constraining them to others. He was derided in private by his adversaries as the “cricket”—“small, wily, rail-thin, and constantly jumping around.”
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Hu's supporters had thought that Hu might indeed be appointed head of the CMC at the National Party Representatives Conference, but Hu did not receive the appointment.
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As Deng later told Yang Shangkun, “If I have made an error, the error is in misjudging Hu Yaobang.”
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Although there was no explicit discussion of succession at the National Party Representatives Conference, it appeared to many attendees that Deng
had decided by then that Zhao Ziyang, fifteen years his junior (compared to Hu who was eleven years his junior), was a leading candidate. Zhao had done well with the urban economic reforms, he had not alienated the conservative leaders, and he had the poise of a leader. It was rare for Deng to praise other officials publicly, but when he met with several writers at the National Party Representatives Conference, Deng openly praised Zhao Ziyang, especially his support of the four cardinal principles.
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At the Fourth Plenum preceding the National Conference, a total of some sixty-four senior full and alternate members of the Central Committee, roughly one-fifth of the total membership, including nine members of the Politburo, announced their retirement. Of the sixty-four, sixty-one were over sixty-seven years of age. One was Marshal Ye Jianying, a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo. Because no replacement was named, Standing Committee membership was reduced from six to five, leaving Deng, Chen Yun, Li Xiannian, Hu Yaobang, and Zhao Ziyang.

In choosing new officials for high positions, two key considerations were age and educational level. The process of selection was conducted with great care by the Politburo and the party Secretariat over several months, beginning in May 1985. Of the sixty-four new members of the Central Committee, 76 percent were college graduates and their average age was just over fifty. The Politburo had in effect replaced senior officials with their younger, better-educated followers. Yao Yilin was close to Chen Yun; Hu Qili to Hu Yaobang; Tian Jiyun to Zhao Ziyang; Qiao Shi to Peng Zhen; and Li Peng to his adopted mother, Deng Yingchao.
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Among the younger new senior officials were Li Peng, then fifty-seven years old, and Hu Qili, then fifty-eight, who were considered potential candidates for premier and general secretary, respectively. Li Peng, trained in hydraulic engineering, did become acting premier in November 1987 and full premier in March 1998. Hu Qili, trained in physics at Peking University and a successful first party secretary in Tianjin from 1980 to 1982, was brought back to Beijing to be director of the party's General Office and party secretary of the Secretariat. He was fluent in English and very cosmopolitan.
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After graduating in 1951, he had served for five years as the Communist Youth League party secretary at Peking University and beginning in 1977 as deputy party secretary at Tsinghua University, which had just reopened.

Among the younger officials selected as alternate members of the Politburo were Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. After 1985, they could attend Politburo meetings, and assuming they continued to be deemed promising and made
no serious mistakes, they would be candidates for even higher positions at a later time.

Deng urged the new members of the Central Committee and the other new leaders to study the spirit of the senior officials who had built the party, united the country, and were now working hard for the four modernizations. He asked them to serve the Chinese people, to speak only the truth, to work realistically, to draw a sharp line separating public and private interests, to read Marxist theory, and to study changing circumstances and adapt accordingly.
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In effect, the new leaders became apprentices to the senior leaders, to be cultivated and tested for potential advancement to higher positions.