Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (12 page)

After breakfast, Deng and Zhuo Lin walked to the small county tractor-repair station, where they worked in the morning. Deng was employed as a machinist performing low-level manual tasks, much as he had done in the French factories half a century earlier. The repair station was located only a kilometer from the house, and local people had made a special secure path from the home to the station so that Deng and Zhuo Lin could walk to and from work each day without encountering other people.
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Fellow workers were aware of Deng's identity, but Deng told them simply to call him “Old Deng,” the familiar term for a senior colleague. While at work, Deng did not talk with the workers about anything beyond the immediate work and his local living arrangements.

At home, Deng's stepmother, Xia Bogen, prepared their food and was in charge of keeping house. After lunch, Deng and Zhuo Lin took naps, then read from among the books they had brought with them—some classic Chinese
history books, novels like
Dream of the Red Chamber
and
Water Margin
, and translations of Russian and French literature. Television was not yet available, but they listened to the evening news on Central People's Radio and at 10 p.m. read in bed for an hour before going to sleep. After their children finally arrived, one by one, they brought news of the outside world. When Pufang arrived in the summer of 1971, he repaired a radio so they could listen to shortwave broadcasts.

In addition to their factory work, Deng and Zhuo Lin worked in their vegetable garden. Deng also helped at home by washing the floor and splitting firewood.
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Deng's and Zhuo Lin's salaries were lower than their previous ones, and their life was spartan. Xia Bogen raised chickens so they could have eggs and meat. Deng cut down on his smoking to one pack every several days: he gave up smoking in the morning while in the factory and smoked only a few cigarettes each afternoon and evening. He also gave up wine, except for one glass of inexpensive local wine at lunch.
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Once they arrived, daughters Deng Lin and Deng Nan, who still received meager salaries from their work units, shared their salaries with their unemployed siblings.

As distressed as Deng was about the Cultural Revolution and what it meant for China, for himself and for his family, according to Deng Rong—who was with her parents much of the last two years they were in Jiangxi—her father “never let his emotions run away with him. He did not become depressed; he never gave up hope.”
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In this way he was unlike some of his compatriots. Marshal Chen Yi, for instance, mayor of Shanghai from 1949 to 1958 and foreign minister from 1958 to 1972—whom Deng knew in France and as a partner in the Huai Hai campaign—became depressed and listless while enduring his forced rustication in Henan.
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Li Shenzhi, once an assistant to Zhou Enlai, later an official at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and an adviser who accompanied Deng on his trip to the United States, said that Mao did not realize how much Deng had changed as a result of his time in Jiangxi.
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Upon his return to Beijing, Deng would do what was necessary to work under Mao, but he had come to the conclusion that China needed deeper changes and he had a clearer view about what directions he believed China should take.

Time to Ponder

Whatever Mao intended for Deng in Jiangxi, it proved to be an opportunity for Deng to gain distance from the intense political turmoil in Beijing when
those under suspicion were preoccupied with how to defend against the next unpredictable and potentially devastating attack. Like Churchill, de Gaulle, Lincoln, and other national leaders who fell from high positions and then spent time in the wilderness before returning to high office, Deng found that the time away from daily politics enabled him to achieve clarity about major, long-term national goals. It is hard to imagine that after 1977 Deng could have moved so deftly and forcefully had he not had a considerable length of time to ponder the nature of the reforms that China needed and how to achieve them. Just as Mao drew on his time in isolated Yan'an to consider overall strategies to pursue when the Communists took over the country, so Deng used his time in Jiangxi to consider directions he would pursue to achieve reform. But Mao in Yan'an, in formulating his policies, held daily discussions with his comrades and his assistants and with their help wrote essays. Deng in Jiangxi thought through things alone and kept his ideas to himself.

The withdrawal to Jiangxi enabled Deng quickly to regain his emotional calm. Although Deng did not easily display his feelings, his daughter Deng Rong reports that he was in fact an emotional person. She reports that her father, who had lost weight and seemed tired during the three years he was under attack in Beijing, in Jiangxi began to gain weight and regain his health. For many years he had taken sleeping pills, and during the Cultural Revolution he increased his dosage. On January 1, 1970, scarcely two months after he arrived in Jiangxi, he stopped taking sleeping pills altogether.
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Deng Rong reports that each afternoon while in Jiangxi, her father would take a walk of about five thousand paces, some forty times around the house on a garden path. She reports that he would “circle the house with quick steps … deep in thought… He walked around and around, day after day, year after year.”
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The prospect that he would again play an important role in Beijing gave purpose to his ruminations. Although Deng did not talk about high-level party business with his wife and children, his wife and daughter Deng Rong, living with him every day and knowing a great deal about Beijing politics, could observe his moods and sense his concerns.
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Deng Rong reports they could tell that as her father paced about he was thinking especially about his future and China's future, and about what he would do after he returned to Beijing.
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There was no way to anticipate when Deng would return to Beijing, what responsibilities Mao might give him, nor the precise circumstances China
would face at that time. He could reflect on how he might regain Mao's favor to return to office and he could go over in his mind all the dramatic life-and-death struggles of people with whom he had worked. But he could also think about some fundamentals—about how the party could deal with the legacy of Mao, who was already in his last years, and how he could maintain the people's respect for the party while allowing Mao's successors to pursue a different direction. From his vast personal connections with all the party leaders, Deng could evaluate the roles the various leaders might play. He could consider how to realize the goal of four modernizations that Zhou Enlai had enunciated and that he and his closest associates had already worked so hard to realize.

One of the first things China needed to do was to restore order after the disastrous Cultural Revolution. Deng Pufang was the last of Deng Xiaoping's five children to be allowed to visit in Jiangxi. In 1968, Deng Pufang had been under such constant torment from the Red Guards that he fell from a high window and broke his spine. Initially, hospitals were afraid to treat him since his father was being criticized and his condition grew worse. He was finally admitted to Beijing No. 3 Hospital, where doctors found that he had fractured his spine and suffered compound fractures of his chest vertebra; he was also running a high fever. At the hospital, Pufang went in and out of consciousness for three days. Doctors kept him alive but did not perform the surgery that would have prevented the severe paralysis that was to leave him with no sensation from the chest down and with no control over his urinary and bowel functions. He was then transferred to Peking University Hospital, but still the surgery that would have helped his condition was not performed. Pufang's sisters Deng Rong and Deng Nan moved near the hospital so they could take turns caring for him. In mid-1969 when Deng Nan was allowed to visit her parents while they were still in Beijing, she told them what had happened to Pufang. Deng Rong reports that when her parents learned of their son's permanent paralysis, Zhuo Lin cried for three days and nights while Deng sat in silence, smoking cigarettes one after another.
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When Pufang, who had been the closest of all the children to his father, was finally allowed to join his parents in Jiangxi in June 1971, because he could not move his body on his own, he was given a room on the first floor of the home so he could be easily moved. He was also required to rest on a hard bed and his body had to be rotated every two hours to avoid sores. Deng Xiaoping, with help from Deng Rong, Zhuo Lin, and Xia Bogen, was responsible
for rotating him during the day. Deng also helped to wash and massage him. When a foreigner would later raise the topic of the Cultural Revolution, Deng passionately described it as a disaster.

Mao was so powerful as a personality and as a leader—with his enormous contributions, ruthless devastation of good comrades, and brilliant use of stratagems—that it was difficult for anyone to be neutral about him. It was especially difficult for Deng, whose life had been so deeply intertwined with Mao's. Deng had great admiration for Mao's spectacular achievements and served him faithfully for almost four decades. Yet Mao's policies had devastated the country. And Mao had launched the Red Guards to attack not only Deng as the nation's number-two enemy but also, by extension, the entire Deng family. It would have been inhuman not to feel betrayed, and Deng was very human. Deng had to consider how to get along with Mao if given a chance to return to high office. The question for Deng became not only how to work with Mao while he was still alive—since as long as Mao was alive, Mao would still dominate—but also how to maximize any decision-making leeway that Mao might tolerate. When Deng was sent to Jiangxi, Mao was already seventy-five years old and not well. He would not live forever. It was essential to begin to think through how to handle Mao's reputation and what directions to pursue after he departed from the scene.

Having been in Moscow in 1956 when Khrushchev denounced Stalin, Deng was fully aware that Khrushchev's emotional attack had devastated the Soviet Communist Party and all those who had worked with Stalin. Although the Chinese press was filled with criticisms of Deng that portrayed him as China's Khrushchev, long before he was sent to Jiangxi Deng had already decided that he would not be China's Khrushchev. The question was how to manage the awe and respect that Mao evoked from the masses, the fury of those whose careers and lives had been ruined by Mao, and the awareness among many party officials of the severity of Mao's errors. How could Deng preserve the party's aura of providing correct leadership and avoid tainting those who had worked with Mao, even as he changed Mao's economic and social policies?

All evidence points to Deng's having resolved in his own mind by the time he returned from Jiangxi the basic approach he would take for dealing with the problem. Chinese leaders should praise Mao and keep him on a pedestal. But they also should interpret Mao's teachings not as a rigid ideology, but as a successful adaptation to the conditions of the time—an interpretation that would give Mao's successors the leeway to adapt to new conditions.

By the time Deng was sent to Jiangxi, he could already sense the dawning of a sea change in China's relationship with the West. Ever since the Korean War, and even in the early 1960s when Deng had supervised the exchange of nine hostile letters with the Soviet Union, China had remained closed to the West. But given the threatening Brezhnev doctrine of September 1968 that justified interfering in the internal affairs of Communist countries when their basic system was threatened, and the fighting with the Soviets along the Ussuri River, China needed the cooperation of other countries against the Soviet threat. When Mao asked four marshals—Chen Yi, Nie Rongzhen, Xu Xiangqian, and Ye Jianying—to recommend a response to the dangers from the Soviet Union, they responded, as they knew Mao wanted them to, by suggesting that China initiate overtures with the West.

While in Jiangxi, Deng could receive newspapers and, after Pufang arrived, listen to foreign radio broadcasts. In 1970 Deng learned that China and Canada had normalized relations. He immediately understood what Kissinger later admitted U.S. officials did not understand at the time: Mao's invitation to Edgar Snow to attend the National Day celebrations in 1970 signaled a readiness to expand relations with the United States. In 1971 Deng, still in Jiangxi, learned that Beijing had replaced Taiwan as representative of China in the United Nations, that eleven additional countries had formally recognized China, and that Kissinger had visited Beijing to prepare for Nixon's 1972 visit. The next year he learned that Japan had formally recognized China.

Knowing how assistance from the Soviet Union had helped upgrade China's economy and technology in the 1950s, Deng would naturally begin to think about how to expand this opening to the West to help modernize China. He would think through how to manage the domestic conservative opposition as China opened up and how to preserve a political structure that was both strong and flexible.

One Asian country that had already benefited from closer ties to the West was Japan, and by the time Deng left for Jiangxi, he knew that Japan was completing a decade-long period of double-digit increases in personal income—while China, behind closed doors, had fallen only further behind. The West's willingness to transfer technological know-how and equipment had been central to Japan's modernization. How could China develop a relationship with the United States so that it could reap similar benefits?