Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (124 page)

Patriotic Education

After the immediate crises in the weeks following June 4, Deng and other leaders began to deal with the larger problem of alienation among Chinese youth toward their government and the Communist Party. When he discussed
the problems that had led to June 4, Deng referred to the failure to provide youth with “education,” by which, like Mao, he meant political education. Yet Deng's idea of education did not focus on “ideology,” which he considered too rigid; instead he endeavored to provide civic and moral training. After June 4, 1989, what would this mean?

The collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the USSR had revealed that youth in the Communist world had lost faith in Marxism-Leninism, the socialist economy, and Communist orthodoxy. Deng and his fellow party elders realized that political training in Marxism-Leninism or even Maoism could no longer be expected to appeal to the sensibilities of Chinese youth. Nor, even if Deng had personally supported it, would class struggle against the landlord and bourgeois classes resonate with the youth as it had at the height of the Mao era.

What should replace Marxism-Leninism and Maoist ideology to win the hearts and minds of China's youth? The answer seemed obvious: patriotism.
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Patriotic education that emphasized the history of the century of humiliation by foreign imperialists had been the main theme of propaganda in the 1940s, and it had never disappeared. It had, however, played only a secondary role as China had built up socialism beginning in the 1950s, and it had languished in the 1980s as Deng tried to build closer relations with the West. Yet after 1989, when Western countries were imposing sanctions, there was a widespread patriotic reaction against foreign sanctions. To many Westerners, sanctions on China were a way of attacking Chinese leaders who used force on June 4, but to Chinese people the sanctions hurt all Chinese. Patriotic “education” linked nationalism to the Communist Party, as the Communists in World War II appealed to patriotism and nationalism to rally support against the Japanese. Conversely, criticism of the Communist Party was ipso facto unpatriotic.
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The timing was right for such a shift in ideology. During the Deng era there was, as the scholar Benjamin Schwartz has pointed out, a “progressive reclaiming of Chinese history.” Under Deng, the historical figures criticized by Mao for representing the exploitative landlord and bourgeois classes were gradually recast as having been “progressive for their time.” That is, during the Deng era it became easier to study Chinese history in a more objective way; historical figures once vilified as class enemies emerged as human beings who possessed admirable, or at least understandable, qualities. In the late 1980s, even Chiang Kai-shek, the arch-enemy of the civil war, began to be treated more sympathetically, although to be sure his achievements paled by
comparison with Mao's.
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In the aftermath of 1989, then, the Propaganda Department used this trend to encourage young people to take pride in Chinese history.
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As one Chinese intellectual describing the layers of Chinese thinking discerned, even in the 1980s when Chinese were attacking their own traditions and worshipping Western things, “beneath the rebellious message . . . throbs the impatient heart of a full-blooded new generation with an urgent sense of mission to reassert the pride of being Chinese.”
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Even without Chinese patriotic education, by the late 1980s many Chinese had realized that when China first opened to the outside after 1978, the Chinese people had over-glamorized the West (as some propaganda officials put it, some Chinese youth “thought the Western moon was larger than the Chinese moon”). But as China began to grow rapidly and modernize, the Chinese naturally began to take more pride in their country.

The sanctions imposed by foreign countries and the criticism of foreigners that followed June 4 provided Deng and his colleagues with a useful vehicle for enhancing this patriotism. Within weeks after the Tiananmen tragedy, Deng began emphasizing his patriotic message. The Propaganda Department skillfully publicized anti-Chinese statements by foreigners that caused many Chinese, even students who advocated democracy, to feel outraged. The efforts by foreign countries to keep China out of the GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which in 1994 was replaced by the World Trade Organization) were publicized so as to focus Chinese anger on the prejudices of foreigners toward China. The refusal by foreign countries to supply modern technology was framed as an effort to unfairly prevent the Chinese from sharing in the fruits of modernization. Foreign criticism of China for its treatment of Tibetans, Uighurs, and other minority groups was presented to the Chinese public as part of an organized effort by foreign powers to weaken China. The West's support for Taiwan and resistance to China's claims to the islands in the South China Sea and the East China Sea were also offered up to the public as examples of efforts to keep China down. These stories and others had their intended effect. In the years after 1989, students who had shouted slogans against the government for corruption and for not granting more democracy and freedom began supporting the government and the party by shouting slogans against foreigners, who they felt were unfairly criticizing China.

One issue that was particularly successful in arousing the patriotism of youth was the clever publication of comments by foreigners who, due to
the events of 1989, opposed allowing Beijing to host the 2000 Olympics. When President Yang Shangkun's announcement to the International Olympic Committee in 1990 that China wanted to host the 2000 Olympics was met with resistance abroad, Chinese youth were outraged. Youth who had opposed their government in 1989 were now passionately supporting their government's claims that China was being mistreated by other countries.

Among these efforts to teach patriotism, nothing was more effective than the revival of anti-Japanese propaganda that had promoted Chinese patriotism during World War II. When Japanese politicians visited the Yasukuni Shrine to Japanese fighters in World War II or when extreme right-wing politicians denied the Nanjing Massacre, even when these events received no publicity in Japan, their comments would receive play in Chinese media, stirring up strong anti-Japanese sentiments and support for Chinese political leaders.

By late 1991, too, the Propaganda Department had developed a more systematic approach to teaching patriotic education—through textbooks, lectures, and media guides. In November 1991, it issued a document entitled “Fully Using Cultural Relics to Conduct Education in Patriotism and Revolutionary Traditions.” It then issued a “Circular on Carrying out Education in Patriotism in Primary and Secondary Schools throughout the Country by Films and Television.” In both these documents, the focus was on educating those too young to have experienced the war against Japan or the civil war.

In the aftermath of the Tiananmen tragedy, Deng criticized foreign countries for imposing sanctions, and there is no record that before he stepped down in 1992 he opposed the efforts by the Propaganda Department to stir up patriotism, even with its anti-foreign slant. The danger that China might fall apart, as the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries were falling apart, required a serious effort to win back the support of China's youth, and patriotism, along with economic growth and expanded economic opportunities, was part of the solution. But the stirring up of anti-foreign sentiment went far beyond what Deng encouraged, and it became even stronger after he stepped down. As foreign countries reduced their sanctions in the 1990s, China had to balance this anti-foreign patriotism with efforts to revive the good relations with other countries that Deng had fostered since 1977.

A generation earlier, in 1965, Mao had been unhappy with the “bourgeois” policies of Beijing over which he did not have full control. Unable to get his views aired in the central party newspaper, the
People's Daily
, he published them in Shanghai's
Wenhui bao;
the next day the article also appeared in the Shanghai party newspaper, the
Liberation Daily.
Then Mao, seventy-one years old, journeyed on his special train to the southern cities of Hangzhou, Shaoshan, and Wuhan, where he lit the fire that launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966.

This series of events would be echoed in 1991 when Deng found himself unhappy with the conservative economic policies of Beijing, policies over which he did not have full control. Unable to get his views published in the
People's Daily
, he had them published in another paper, Shanghai's
Liberation Daily.
But the fire did not take in 1991, so in 1992 a determined Deng ignited a bigger fire. He took a southern journey at age eighty-seven in his special train to Wuhan, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Shanghai, where he successfully lit the fire for further market opening and faster growth.

The panic over inflation in 1988, the near collapse of the Beijing government after the failure of martial law in May 1989, and the news of continuing failures in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe had created in Beijing an atmosphere of near desperation and heightened tensions. Chen Yun remained the magnet for cautious planners and Deng remained the magnet for the bold advocates of further opening and faster growth. In the late 1970s and the early 1980s the “builders” were largely central government officials trying to bring in new plants and technology. By the end of the 1980s,
local governments along the coast had built up their own wealth and provided a larger base of support that Deng could appeal to against the cautious planners.

The cautious planners under Chen Yun who believed that the failure to control inflation in 1988 was responsible for the tragedy of 1989 became even more determined to set the country on what they considered the only safe path. Deng, who felt that Communist rule would be in danger if the country did not grow rapidly, became equally adamant in his view that only more rapid growth and opening could keep the popular support necessary for China to survive. The fear of collapse heightened the tensions.
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Deng's Failures, 1990–1991

On his winter vacation in Shanghai from January 21 until February 13, 1990, Deng was already working to gain the political leverage he needed to overcome the conservative economic policies. In Shanghai, he talked to local leaders about their visions for a huge development project in Pudong.
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Shanghai leaders, he knew, were itching to be permitted to develop Pudong, if only Beijing would approve. Pudong included a vast area of some 188 square miles within Shanghai, conveniently located near the mouth of the Yangtze River. At the time it was largely rural and thus easy to develop, even though earlier in the century Sun Yat-sen had broached the idea of developing it into a large port. Local officials hoped that it would become the financial center of China.
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Even though Shanghai had been held back by the central government, there was substantial growth of industry in the area around the Yangtze River delta, including not only Shanghai but also nearby Jiangsu and Zhejiang.

Deng, who was thinking strategically about what might enhance Chinese economic growth, knew that Shanghai was large enough and contained enough talent that any growth there would have an immediate and positive influence on national growth, not only in the nearby provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu, but also for the hundreds of millions of people living in areas all along the Yangtze River.
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Deng had first experienced the dynamism of Shanghai when he spent a week there in 1920 on his way to France; a decade later he had spent several months working in the Shanghai underground; and in 1949 he had been in charge of the Communist takeover there. When he visited the city for his winter “vacation” in the late 1980s, he could feel the vibrant population's pent-up energy waiting to be released. Even officials far
less perceptive than Deng were fully aware that Shanghai leaders, proud of the city's preeminence as the cosmopolitan business center of Asia in the 1930s when Hong Kong was still a minor city, had bristled in the early 1980s when the provinces of Guangdong and Fujian were given the green light to move ahead and Shanghai was not. Shanghai leaders made no effort to hide their view that Shanghai had far higher levels of education, science, technology, and industry than any city in either Guangdong or Fujian. Shanghai leaders, with full support of the public, would be great allies in Deng's efforts to speed up growth.

In 1984, as a part of the opening of the fourteen coastal cities, Shanghai had been given some leeway to develop, but from 1984 to 1990, it had still received little assistance from the central government, and the city had scarcely begun to realize its potential. In Guangdong it was relatively easy to get foreign businesses to invest: erecting a completely new plant on undeveloped land entailed a large but manageable cost. But remaking the large old industries in Shanghai required an initial outlay of capital that only the government could provide. Shanghai leaders, upset that their city was required to make such a heavy contribution to the national budget while receiving so little help, had long been urging Beijing to change its policies. Some leaders in Beijing's ministries were sympathetic to investing more in Shanghai, for they were beginning to fear that they were losing control over Guangdong, where financial resources came largely from outsiders and not from the Chinese government. If Beijing were to supply capital to Shanghai, national planners would be able to maintain greater control there than they had been able to achieve in Guangdong.