Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (134 page)

In 1927 when the Guomindang split with the Communists, Chen Yun was forced to go underground, often changing aliases and locations. Under Zhou Enlai, he was also responsible for the assassination of Guomindang officials who might have killed Communists. Unlike Deng, who had spent five years in a capitalist country, Chen Yun, repulsed by the capitalism he saw in Shanghai during the 1920s, never spent any time in a capitalist country and later did not take part in meetings with Western leaders.

In 1928, after the split between the Communists and Guomindang, the Comintern representatives from the Soviet Union advised the Chinese Communists that they must rely on the workers because intellectuals, who overwhelmingly came from
landlord and bourgeois families, were not a reliable base for the revolutionary movement. Since China at that time had such a miniscule industrial workforce and almost no workers with sufficient education to provide leadership, the Chinese Communist Party sorely needed bright “workers” in its leadership. Chen Yun, already a labor leader and well educated from the environment at the Commercial Press, was chosen and then rapidly promoted. In fact, although he was a year younger than Deng, for over two decades, beginning in 1931 when he became a member of the Central Committee, Chen ranked much higher in the party than Deng.

In 1933 in Jiangxi, Chen Yun, the only high official from a “worker background,” was soon promoted to membership on the Politburo Standing Committee, making him one of the top seven leaders of the Chinese Communist Party. On the eve of the famous Zunyi conference in 1935 on the Long March, Chen Yun participated in the key meeting that increased the number of participants to take part at Zunyi, with more people supporting Mao, thus paving the way for Mao to gain the upper hand at Zunyi. After the Zunyi conference, the small group of Chinese Communists, to maintain Comintern support, needed someone to reestablish connections with the Comintern in Shanghai and to report to it on their leadership changes. Chen Yun, who was able to disguise himself as a local merchant speaking the local Shanghai dialect, was selected by party leaders to report to the Comintern in Shanghai. When he arrived there, however, the situation was dangerous: he could easily have been recognized by the many former Communists who were then siding with the Guomindang. He was thus advised to take a freighter right away to Vladivostok, from where he would make his way to the Comintern in Moscow to report to the Soviet leaders on developments at the Zunyi conference—in particular, the rise of Mao Zedong. He remained in Moscow for two years.

Unlike Deng, who was in Moscow under the New Economic Policy (NEP), Chen Yun was there after Stalin had built a socialist structure and had established the Soviet five-year plans. Deng had traveled to the Soviet Union as a student, but Chen Yun went as a high official who interacted with Soviet leaders and even met Stalin. After leaving Moscow he spent half a year in Xinjiang, where he attempted to build up a regular transport route between the Soviet Union and China (an effort that failed due to the power of local warlord Ma Bufang and his cavalry).

Later, in the early 1950s when Chen Yun was playing a leading role in Chinese economic planning, he enjoyed good relations with the Soviet advisers who helped him put in place China's First Five-Year Plan. In contrast to Deng, who led the Chinese side in the quarrel with the Soviets in the early 1960s, Chen Yun maintained good relations with Soviet leaders. After Chen Yun joined Mao in Yan'an in the 1930s, he was put in charge of the Organization Department. Since the situation in Yan'an was more stable than that in the Jiangxi Soviet, he was able to develop files on party members, and because the Organization Department was then responsible for the personal lives of party members, including family connections and marriages,
Chen knew a great deal about all the important Communist leaders. Chen Yun was active in recruiting intellectual youth from the cities; although he acknowledged the need to weed out Guomindang spies, he found it difficult to attack many of his own recruits in the rectification campaign: instead he reported sick, spent months recuperating, and was replaced by Peng Zhen who vigorously pursued the campaign. Chen Yun was then reassigned to work on economic affairs, drawing on his experience at the Commercial Press where he had handled accounts and traveled as a salesman. A key responsibility was breaking the economic blockade the Guomindang had imposed; his solution was to make it profitable for outside merchants to make money in their own currency by buying and selling opium and other products from the Communists. After his success in breaking the blockade, he was given responsibility for the overall development of the economy in the Northwest (where Yan'an is located).

After World War II, Mao sent Chen Yun and other high-level Communist officials to the Northeast (then known as Manchuria). There they were to take advantage of the region's proximity to the Soviet Union, as well as the industrial machinery left behind there by the Japanese, to build a base from which to fight the civil war. As the Communist base area in the Northeast expanded, Chen Yun helped guide the development of the regional economy. And after the Communist troops won military battles in the Northeast, Chen worked to organize a network of grain and other supplies from the Northeast to serve the Communist army as it moved south.

When the Communist troops took over their first city, Harbin, economic stability was critical, so Chen Yun, with experience in economic affairs, was given responsibility for managing the transition to Communist rule, including ensuring that local facilities continued to operate. This required him to cooperate with many officials who had served under the Guomindang. When Communist troops took over an even larger city, Shenyang, Chen Yun was again put in charge of bringing the city administration under Communist rule. He was sufficiently successful in guiding this difficult process that the Shenyang takeover became a model for Communist takeovers of other cities as the troops swept south and west, unifying the country.

When the Communists established their capital in Beijing, Chen Yun, having brought economic order to the Northeast, was placed in charge of the national economy. His most pressing problem was the rampant inflation that had never been tamed during the decades that the warlords had struggled for power and that had spun out of control after World War II. Chen Yun used strong administrative punishments to force businesspeople to stop raising prices, and when they refused, he made use of the market: he took goods out of the warehouses and flooded the market, forcing prices down precipitously and devastating the resistant merchants. Through a combination of administrative controls and use of the market, by 1952 the Communists, under Chen Yun's leadership, had achieved what the Guomindang and the
warlords for decades had been unable to accomplish: they brought inflation under control.

Chen Yun's next assignments were to develop a socialist economic planning system—which also entailed taking control of supplies of key goods—and then, in 1955–1956, to nationalize large enterprises and direct the collectivization of smaller enterprises and the countryside. His efforts brought the entire economy under socialist planning. Starting in the 1950s and until the Great Leap Forward, Chen Yun managed to unify a national system of collecting grain that ensured the collection of sufficient grain from the countryside to supply the urban areas. This advance, along with the introduction of industrial projects from the Soviet Union, enabled the Chinese economy to grow rapidly until the 1958 Great Leap, when Mao cast aside the cautious Chen Yun, derailed the planning apparatus, and destroyed the economy. When the disaster persisted, Mao recalled Chen Yun to lead the recovery effort. In the early 1960s, Chen Yun once again brought order to the economy. Why is it, Mao once asked, that only Chen Yun seems able to make the economy successful?

Chen Yun was a sober, cautious person of delicate disposition who, in times of stress, especially when criticized by Mao, complained of a heart condition and took weeks and even months off to recuperate. In 1962, when Mao criticized him for suggesting the possibility of contracting rural production down to the household, Chen Yun was so devastated that he could not speak for two weeks and recovered very slowly. Mao once said that Chen Yun was so frightened that if a leaf falls, he is afraid it will land on his head. Chen was also a private man who seldom met visitors and who often ate by himself.

Unlike Deng, who wanted to read fifteen newspapers and many reports each day, Chen read the
People's Daily
from cover to cover and had an assistant bring him daily just the five most important daily reports, which he read with great care. His experiences as a shop clerk in keeping accounts and as a planner in keeping track of each item and then seeing the system derailed reinforced his natural carefulness. Unlike Deng, who believed that the troops might lose an opportunity if they waited until everything was carefully investigated and all the desired information was collected, Chen Yun's favorite saying was “exchange views, compare, go over the issues again and again”
(jiaohuan, bijiao, fanfu).
As the father of Chinese economic planning who spent years putting the details in place, Chen Yun had an understandable attachment to the system that had once worked and a determination not to let anyone ruin his painstaking handiwork, which had already been destroyed once, during the Great Leap Forward.

Although Chen Yun possessed higher qualifications that dated back earlier than Deng's, he was not seriously considered for the top position in the party. He had virtually no military experience, he had had no contact with the West that would be important for the new era, and he was sickly. Chen Yun was far more imaginative
and flexible in his thinking than his critics acknowledged, but he lacked the bold leadership style that Deng used to rally people behind him. Chen Yun also had little experience leading an independent unit or locality. After Mao's death, Chen Yun himself declared that Deng was the only person appropriate to be the top leader of the party.

Deng and Chen Yun both survived epic struggles in an age of revolutionary heroes. Each would have been less than human had he not taken pride in his own achievements, beyond the pride of ordinary bureaucrats who rose to high positions in a stable organization. After 1979, when Deng received international adulation, with his picture on the cover of
Time
magazine as the “man of the year,” Chen Yun allowed Deng Liqun to present a series of talks at the Central Party School so lavish in praise of Chen Yun that they compared his contributions in the economic sphere with Mao Zedong's in the political sphere, without giving comparable praise to Deng Xiaoping. The
Selected Works of Chen Yun
was rushed to press even before publication of the
Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping.
Although Deng and Chen Yun never split openly, it is understandable that their relationship had an edge to it, as they became the magnets for two opposing views on China's modernization: that China should move more boldly or that China should avoid taking dangerous risks.

Deng Liqun

Deng Liqun (no relation to Deng Xiaoping)—head of the Political Research Office of the party Secretariat after 1980 and leader of the Propaganda Department from 1983 to 1985—was not one of China's highest-ranking officials. His influence, however, greatly exceeded his rank, and not simply because he supervised the influential, twice-daily intelligence briefs that came from the party Secretariat to the top officials; helped draft many of Deng's speeches; and employed on his staff Mao's daughter Lina; Chen Yun's wife, Yu Ruomu; and one of Chen Yun's secretaries. Deng Liqun was also influential because he was fearless in expressing his views, knowledgeable about theory, and was supported by Chen Yun and Wang Zhen, whose opinions he often voiced. He was ready to accept a job loss, a prison sentence, or even heavy physical labor to do what he regarded as correct. Well-organized and skilled at strategic maneuvering, Deng Liqun also protected and looked after his subordinates, who in turn became appreciative and devoted followers.

Deng Xiaoping found Deng Liqun useful for curbing intellectuals critical of the party. Because Deng Liqun was smart, fearless, frank, and helpful in speechwriting, and because he was not an official with line responsibilities, Deng Xiaoping could interact with him more easily than with officials who had line responsibilities. Deng solicited his views more often than those of other officials in more important positions. With powerful conservative support, Deng Liqun dared to attack not only intellectuals but also General Secretary Hu Yaobang. In fact, he became Hu's chief
critic, voicing the despair of the senior conservatives who believed Hu was allowing too much freedom and not adequately defending the authority of the party. Deng Liqun strongly advocated the importance of maintaining party discipline and he did not hesitate to attack intellectuals and officials who criticized the party. Intellectuals advocating more freedom were convinced that Deng Liqun exercised a pernicious influence, provoking senior officials into cracking down unnecessarily on freedoms. After the death of Kang Sheng, who was secretive and devious, the official whom intellectuals and liberal officials most hated was Deng Liqun.

Deng Liqun was born in Guidong county, Hunan province, in 1915. He was officially classified as a rich peasant, but his family home, which had stood for more than three hundred years, had more than twenty rooms. Deng Liqun's father had passed the imperial civil-service examination although he never became an official; after the failed 1898 reforms, he founded the first Western-style school in his home area. An elder brother of Deng's had been chairman of the Hunan Provincial Government under the Guomindang and a member of the Guomindang Central Committee. Deng Liqun went to Beiping (renamed Beijing when it became the capital) to study at an American missionary school and in the fall of 1935 passed the exam to enter Peking University, where he enrolled as an economics major. Before finishing his first year, however, shortly after the December 9 anti-Japanese demonstrations, he left the university and set out for Yan'an.
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