Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (22 page)

Since railways were to be the model for civilian consolidation, Deng personally plunged into the details of the national railway problem. He stated that the estimated loading capacity nationally was 55,000 rail cars per day, but only a little more than 40,000 cars were being loaded daily. “The present number of railway accidents is alarming. There were 755 major ones last year, some of them extremely serious.” (By comparison, in 1964 there had been only eighty-eight accidents.) Discipline was poor and rules and regulations were not enforced: “Train conductors go off to eat whenever they like, and therefore the trains frequently run behind schedule,” for instance, and rules against consuming alcohol on duty were not strictly observed. In addition, “if we don't take action now [against bad elements who speculate, engage in profiteering, grab power and money] … how much longer are we going to wait? … Persons engaging in factionalism should be reeducated and their leaders opposed.” To those participating in factions but who correct their mistakes, Deng said, “[We can] let bygones be bygones, but if they refuse to mend their ways, they will be sternly dealt with.” Meanwhile, “active factionalists must be transferred to other posts,” and if a factional ringleader refuses to be transferred, “stop paying his wages until he submits.” Switching to a more positive tone, Deng proclaimed, “I think the overwhelming majority” supports the decision. Railway workers are “among the most advanced and best organized sections of the Chinese working class.... If the pros and cons are clearly explained to them, the overwhelming majority of railway personnel will naturally give their support.... [and] the experience gained in handling the problems in railway work will be useful to the other industrial units.”
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This was vintage Deng. Paint the broad picture, tell why something needed to be done, focus on the task, cover the ideological bases, and seek public support for replacing officials who were not doing their jobs.

To implement Deng's plan, the day after the meeting concluded, Wan Li held a mass meeting of all the units under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Railways in the Beijing area. A summary of the key points in Document No. 9 and Deng's speech were distributed to the participants. The next day, in a telephone conference of railway units around the country, local officials were briefed on the significance of the document and Deng's speech. Wang Zhen spoke on the phone, saying he would be sending work teams from the Ministry of Railways to areas where blockages seemed serious. Officials knew that General Wang Zhen's work teams would include troops ready to use force if necessary.
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Sending work teams from higher levels had been a basic approach for imposing national policies on local areas ever since land reform.

Armed with national support for cracking down on railway stoppages, including a written document, on March 9 Wan Li, accompanied by a work team from Beijing, met party and government leaders of Jiangsu province and Xuzhou City.
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Upon his arrival, it was announced that Gu Binghua, the leader of the Xuzhou Railway Bureau, whom Deng had criticized by name four days earlier, had been arrested on a warrant personally approved by Deng.
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Wan Li knew that if Gu had not been arrested, some officials, still intimidated by Gu, would be cautious about sticking their necks out to criticize him. He also knew that others would still be frightened, as Deng had said in his speech, of being labeled rightists. An experienced revolutionary leader, Wan Li knew that for people to feel secure in denouncing Gu, a mass meeting would have to be held that displayed overwhelming support and that showed prominent people publicly denouncing Gu. The issuance of Document No. 9 was critical because it made clear that his crackdown was not just an expression of one leader who might soon be transferred but had the full support of the central party and government.

The day after he arrived in Xuzhou, then, Wan Li spoke at a huge (“10,000 person”) meeting for employees and their families in the Xuzhou Railway Bureau. He spelled out the content of Document No. 9 and urged them to make the bureau a model for promoting the smooth flow of transportation by the end of the month. The next day, at the Xuzhou gymnasium, Wan Li and others addressed a large meeting of Xuzhou City party officials. Wan Li passed on Chairman Mao's three directives as highlighted by Deng and repeated Mao's call for “stability and unity.” After Wan Li spoke at another mass meeting, this time of maintenance workers, their leaders guaranteed that freight would flow smoothly.
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After Gu's arrest, his closest associates continued to resist until they too were arrested. Wan Li and the work team from Beijing, like other work teams sent down to manage such occasions, distinguished between large-scale troublemakers, who were arrested or at least removed from their office, and those who with “education” could still cooperate with the new leadership team. Lower-level leaders were told to disband the factions and admit their errors; many did and were allowed to stay on. Then, in small groups, each individual declared that he or she would not take part in factions and would help ensure the smooth flow of freight.
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To strengthen support for the new leadership strategy, to help put the area's tumultuous history behind them, and to assure the local public that followers of the radical left would not easily return, past verdicts on some six thousand
people in the Xuzhou area who had been persecuted early during the Cultural Revolution were declared unjust and those people still under detention were freed. Apologies were offered to the relatives of those who had been killed in the factional fighting and living victims were compensated.
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Employment opportunities were found for many who had been unjustly punished.
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To motivate railway workers to meet their targets, Wan Li encouraged the local leadership team to help improve the workers' living situations. After Wan Li met with the newly selected leadership teams, he and his work team left Xuzhou, just twelve days after their arrival, leaving the local leadership team to follow up and send reports. By the end of March the average number of railway cars handled per day in Xuzhou had increased from 3,800 to 7,700 and those loaded per day had doubled from 700 to 1,400.
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In introducing new programs throughout the country, Communist leaders talked of moving from the point
(dian)
to the line
(xian)
, and from the line to the whole surface
(mian)
. Deng, after having made a great breakthrough in Xuzhou, built on that “point” experience to consolidate other railway centers and then to use the railway experience to consolidate other sectors. By late March, officials had moved from Xuzhou to railway centers in Nanjing and then elsewhere in Jiangsu.
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Deng first concentrated his efforts on the railway centers that exhibited serious problems, at Taiyuan, Kunming, and Nanchang. When he heard that a Taiyuan vice party secretary was interfering with progress in opening rail transport in his locality, Deng directed that the case be investigated immediately. If such a report was confirmed, the vice party secretary and any superiors who supported him were to be transferred by the end of the month.
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Wan Li continued to travel to railway trouble spots and followed up with visits to all the railway car factories—in Loyang, Taiyuan, Chengdu, and Liuzhou—to ensure the availability of railway equipment. On April 22, when Deng accompanied Kim Il Sung to Nanjing, Wan Li went to Nanjing to report to Deng on the progress on the railways.
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In other railway bottlenecks, Wan Li followed the same strategy used in Xuzhou: he met with small groups to hear reports on local conditions, publicized Document No. 9, reiterated Mao's commitment to stability and unity, and held mass meetings to get a broad public commitment to the changes, an effort that, if necessary, was backed by force. New leadership teams were selected and put in place. Not surprisingly, those who were replaced had been revolutionary rebels.

From June 30 to July 7, a work meeting was held in Beijing under Wan Li's
leadership to summarize the experiences of the previous few months following issuance of Document No. 9. Clearly the changes had been a great success. Wan Li reported that nationwide in the second quarter, rail freight transport had increased by 19.8 percent over the first quarter and in the same period some 18.4 percent more rail passenger cars were in use.
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Deng could not spend as much time on other cases as he did on resolving the Xuzhou railway blockages, but the case illustrates Deng's approach to overcoming chaos and the example others were to follow: he did what he could to make sure Mao remained on his side; he relied on officials with a proven record of success; he provided documents, held large mass meetings, and assigned troops to assure local people that there would be no easy return to Cultural Revolution policies; he arrested those who blocked progress; and he supervised the establishment of new leadership teams. Further, he did all this quickly and with a firm hand.

Extending the Xuzhou Model to Coal and Steel

After the great victory in Xuzhou, Deng used the Xuzhou model to drive consolidation elsewhere. On March 25, Deng had Wan Li report on progress in Xuzhou not to railway officials, but to a large meeting of all State Council employees. Deng usually listened quietly during such reports, but he became so intense that several times he interrupted Wan Li to amplify his comments.

Officials under Deng thus moved from attacking factionalism in Xuzhou to attacking factionalism in all of Xuhai prefecture, where Xuzhou was located, then in the rest of Jiangsu province. In 1975, Jiangsu was one of the most troubled provinces in the nation. By the end of 1974, national GNP had increased, but Jiangsu productivity had decreased by 3 percent. Wan Li was given support to move beyond railways to carry out overall consolidation in Jiangsu province, as he had in Xuzhou, by attacking factionalism and selecting new officials who seemed promising to bring order and growth. Within three months, Wan Li was reporting substantial progress in consolidating a new leadership in Jiangsu, and on June 2, Beijing issued Document No. 12, which in effect adapted Document No. 9 to report on progress made in Xuzhou, Haizhou, and other parts of Jiangsu. Deng praised the report, saying that Jiangsu's experience could be used as a guide for other localities.
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Indeed, from Jiangsu, the reforms moved on to Zhejiang. Although Zhejiang posed special problems because rebel resistance remained strong there, by
July 17 those problems essentially had been resolved, and Document No. 16, based on the Zhejiang experience, was drawn up as a model for consolidation in other provinces.
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On July 4, Deng outlined the tasks of extending consolidation from the points and lines to the whole surface, from railways and local governments to other sectors—first, coal and steel; next to other industries and other forms of transportation; then to commerce, finance, and agriculture; and finally from the economic sector to culture and education, from defense technology to technology in general, and from the military to local government.

The key to China's energy supply was coal, which was used to heat buildings, generate electricity, and power factories. Distribution was essential: roughly 40 percent of the total freight carried by the railways consisted of coal. But when during the Cultural Revolution transportation systems lagged, coal simply piled up near the coal mines and there was no incentive to mine more.

By mid-1975, as the railway bottlenecks began to be opened, Beijing began to pay more attention to coal production. Indeed, when Document No. 9 appeared, Deng encouraged Xu Jinqiang, minister of mining, to use the prospect of improved transportation to spur increases in coal mining. In the spring of 1975, Xu focused his attention on coal mines with access to rail transportation: in Shaanxi, Hebei, Henan, Anhui, and the Northeast.

Under Deng's leadership, Xu waged war on factionalism, focusing on provinces where the problems seemed especially severe. These mines, which provided about 40 percent of the coal for eastern China, played a key role in supplying steel plants in those provinces. Consolidation made a huge difference to their productivity: coal production expanded rapidly in the second quarter of 1975, so that by the end of the first half of the year, 55.5 percent of the new annual coal-transport quota had been achieved.
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During this time, improvements were also made in the production of fertilizer, light industrial goods, and electric power. Steel manufacturing, however, continued to lag. Steel production had peaked in 1973 at 25.3 million tons, but fell to 21.1 million tons in 1974, as a result of the disruptive campaign to criticize Lin Biao and Confucius. In early 1975 the annual target was set at 26 million tons.
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At the State Council meeting that Deng chaired on March 25, after Wan Li reported on how to use the Xuzhou example in other sectors, Deng said that “solving the steel problem must now occupy the top position in our work.”
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In a speech at a forum on steel that same month, Vice Premier Yu Qiuli declared bluntly: “There have been twenty-six years since the founding of our nation. We have invested over 50 billion yuan, we employ over 3 million people [in the steel industry] and we are still scarcely producing 20 million tons a year.” Yu stated that to increase steel production the government needed, first, to assure the long-term transportation of coal and to have the needed supply of heavy oil and electricity; second, to mobilize the masses and place in responsible positions good managers who understood the technology; and third, to deal with the weak links, especially the four large steel plants at Angang, Wugang, Baogang, and Taigang. If people did not perform their jobs, they were to be fired. They should “shit or get off the pot hole”
(buyao zhan maokeng bu lashi)
.
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