Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (37 page)

Ever since Mao's death, Hua had asserted that he was following Mao's legacy and continuing his policies. But some ideologues and hardcore followers of Mao continued to criticize him for straying from Mao's party line. To answer such critiques, Hua directed his supporters to prepare a theoretical article to show his commitment to the Maoist legacy. The resulting article appeared on February 7, 1977, as an editorial in the
People's Daily, Red Flag
, and the PLA newspaper
Jiefangjun bao
. The editorial declared that whatever policies Mao supported, and whatever instructions Mao gave, should still be followed. The editorial became known as the “two whatevers,” Hua's banner for showing that he was fully committed to Mao's legacy.
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Hua apparently had not anticipated that it would become a target for those who believed that China needed to distance itself from the policies that Mao had pursued during the last two decades of his life.

For Hua to provide overall national leadership for a new era, he needed to convene a party congress, much as Mao had done in 1956 (the 8th Party
Congress); Lin Biao had done in 1969 (the 9th Party Congress); and Mao had done yet again in 1973, after Lin Biao's demise (the 10th Party Congress). It takes many months to formulate economic plans, achieve consensus on policies in major spheres, and prepare the documents needed for a party congress. Hua began the work almost immediately after Mao's death and convened the 11th Party Congress on August 12–18, 1977. The Fifth National People's Congress (NPC), designed to provide overall government leadership, followed in March 1978.

To hold the party congress so soon after taking the reins of power, Hua had to leave many issues unresolved. Ideology and party platitudes were used to cover up disagreements about policy in Hua's four-hour speech to the 11th Party Congress. Yet there were real problems that needed the leaders' attention, and Hua tried to address at least some of them. Following Zhou Enlai and Deng, he continued the focus on the four modernizations. For his closest economic advisers he chose “builders” who were ready to quickly expand new construction projects and imports of industrial plants from abroad, rather than economic planners and finance officials who were more cautious. (For more on “builders” and “cautious planners,” see
Chapter 15
.) He relied especially on Yu Qiuli, the great leader of the Daqing oilfield, to lead the effort to update Deng's ten-year vision with even loftier goals. He also relied heavily on Gu Mu, the head of the State Construction Commission who in December 1974 had been chosen by Mao and Zhou Enlai to be vice premier.

In foreign affairs, Hua began as an amateur. When he met Singapore's prime minister Lee Kuan Yew in Beijing in the spring of 1976, Hua, unaware of the details of Chinese policy, responded to comments and questions with platitudes and slogans. After succeeding Mao, however, Hua made a serious effort to get up to speed on foreign policy issues: by the time he led a delegation to Yugoslavia, Romania, and Iran in August 1978, he was far better informed than he had been in 1976.

In contrast to Deng who was on a leash from Chairman Mao when he traveled abroad in 1974 and 1975, Hua traveled to Yugoslavia and Romania in 1978 as China's top leader, on the first trip abroad by China's top leader since 1957 (when Mao had traveled to Moscow). Upon his return, Hua reported on what China could learn from Yugoslavia and Romania: those countries accepted foreign currency, had joint ventures with foreign companies, carried on compensation trade (countertrade in which investments are repaid from their profits), and brought in foreign technology—all without any loss of sovereignty. Hua commented that the factories he had seen in
Eastern Europe, while not as large as those in China, were far more efficient. The conclusion was obvious: China should follow the examples of Eastern Europe and bring in more foreign technology.

On the problem of improving rural organization, an area in which he did have considerable personal experience, Hua not only sought to retain the socialist structure of communes and production teams, but also organized several conferences to study Dazhai, the national model village for collective agriculture, where extraordinarily large groups were put to work and agricultural engineering projects like large-scale irrigation canals were extolled. Hua's main hope for improving agriculture overall lay in technology. Like Deng, Hua wanted to make up for lost time and move ahead quickly, but he had less experience in judging the institutional developments required to make such progress. His push to achieve a technological breakthrough in agricultural mechanization within four years (by 1980) was naïvely optimistic.

After Deng became the top official in December 1978, Hua underwent a self-criticism for having tried to push ahead too quickly without considering China's shortage of foreign currency, its inability to absorb so much technology so quickly, and its budget imbalances. Some of the criticism may have been warranted: for instance, Hua encouraged Yu Qiuli to consider developing within a few years ten oilfields as large as Daqing, a totally unrealistic goal. But in his overall aim to move China ahead quickly and hasten the import of foreign technologies, Hua was like many other leaders, including Deng Xiaoping.

It is often said that China's policy of opening to the outside world—including its readiness to learn from other countries and eagerness to bring in foreign technology—originated under Deng's leadership at the Third Plenum in December 1978. These efforts were, in fact, all begun under the leadership of Hua Guofeng in 1977, and the policies Hua advanced were not original. Hua and Deng both promoted policies that many party officials regarded as necessary to set China on a new path.

Maneuvering over Deng's Return, October 1976–April 1977

The question of whether Deng should return to work and, if so, with what responsibilities, loomed large from the moment the Gang of Four was arrested. Party leaders agreed that Deng was a rare talent, and senior officials who had returned to work regarded him as their proven leader. As soon as
Mao's death was announced, the media in Hong Kong and the West began speculating about an impending power struggle between Deng and Hua. Within China at the time, however, no one seriously challenged Mao's right to name his successor or Hua's right to be chairman of the party. There was a consensus that, at least for the time being, Hua had the right to keep the positions that Mao had selected for him.

In the months after Mao died, those in elite party circles wondered: should Deng be brought back to perform the work of premier under Chairman Hua Guofeng, as Zhou had served under Mao—and as Deng, in the first half of 1974, had served under Wang Hongwen—or should he become the dominant leader? Hua's senior advisers, Marshal Ye and Li Xiannian, supported Deng's return to work at some point and in some position, but under Hua's leadership. Soon after the arrest of the Gang of Four, Li Xiannian went to visit Deng in the CMC villa in the Western Hills, where Deng was then living, and encouraged him to be prepared to come back.
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Marshal Ye and Li, the kingmakers, repeated to others their support for Deng's return.
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Hua never said specifically that Deng should not be allowed to return to work, but on October 26, 1976, scarcely two weeks after the arrest of the Gang of Four, Hua directed that criticism of Deng and his efforts to allow more senior officials to return (the so-called rightist reversal of verdicts) should continue.
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By the Central Party Work Conference in March 1977, however, Hua's encouragement of the criticism of Deng had ended. In response to the complaints of many officials that Deng had been unfairly accused of being responsible for the April 5 demonstrations, Hua directed that the Propaganda Department no longer raise the topic of the April 5 demonstrations. He also acknowledged that the vast majority of those who had taken part in the April 5 protests were not counter-revolutionary and that Deng had not been involved in planning the incident.

On December 12, 1976, there was another breakthrough for Deng. Marshal Ye received a letter from his longtime colleague Geng Biao, then head of the party's International Liaison Department. With his letter, Geng Biao enclosed a batch of documents showing that the Gang of Four had doctored evidence for the report on the April 5 incident, thus deceiving Mao and the party center. Ye immediately told his subordinates that this new evidence was important and that the verdict on the April 5 incident should be reversed.
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Two days after Marshal Ye received these materials, Deng was again permitted
to see party documents. By this point, it was assumed by many that Deng's return was simply a matter of time, even though Marshal Ye had said that the time was not yet ripe. On January 6, 1977, the question of Deng's return was discussed at a Politburo meeting and it was decided that he would be returning to serve in some position.

When Hua's “two whatevers” editorial, entitled “Study the Documents Well and Grasp the Key Link [that is, class struggle]”
(Xuehao wenjian zhuazhu gang)
appeared on February 7, 1977, it immediately became a point of contention among high-level officials. If all the policies that Mao had approved and all Mao's directives were to be followed, then the judgment that the April 5 demonstrations were counter-revolutionary and the removal of Deng could not be reconsidered. The “two whatevers” editorial galvanized Hua's critics, and the question of whether Deng should return became a focus of the debate. Hu Jiwei, chief editor of the
People's Daily
, later said that the “two whatevers” editorial blocked the return to work of Deng and other senior officials, the reversal of verdicts on those who had taken part in the April 5 Tiananmen incident, and the dismissal of charges against others who had suffered from unjust, fake, and incorrect judgments.
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Among those who were galvanized into action against the “two whatevers” was Deng Liqun, who took the issue to Wang Zhen, who in turn brought it to the attention of the Politburo.
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Following custom, a Central Party Work Conference was scheduled before the planned party congress to permit freer discussions and to create a consensus that those attending the party congress could unanimously support. The famous Central Party Work Conference held the next year, from November to December 1978, was the turning point that strengthened Deng's position and solidified support for the “reform and opening” agenda that would be approved at the Third Plenum in December 1978. At the March 10–22, 1977, Central Party Work Conference, in preparation for the 11th Party Congress to be held that August, opponents of the “two whatevers” spoke out.

In calling the work conference, held at the Jingxi Hotel, a few blocks from Zhongnanhai, Hua Guofeng announced that the agenda for the conference would be: (1) tackling the next steps in dealing with the Gang of Four, (2) mapping out the 1977 economic plan, and (3) planning the party's work for the second half of 1977, including the holding of the party congress.
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This conference became the first such broad discussion held among leading party officials since Mao's death just six months earlier. But in contrast to the later Central Party Work Conference of November 1978, the atmosphere
in March 1977 was constrained by those who felt that it was too soon to have a frank discussion of Mao's errors. Even so, there was widespread agreement on some issues: changing the main focus of party activity from the Cultural Revolution to the four modernizations, maintaining the leadership of the Communist Party, upholding the banners of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, and making increased use of foreign capital and technology.

But there remained a visceral divide between senior officials who had suffered humiliation and physical hardship during the Cultural Revolution and those who had benefited from the political upheavals. Many leaders who had risen in the Cultural Revolution by attacking others rallied behind the campaign against the “rightist reversal of verdicts” to avoid ceding power to those who had been attacked. Senior officials who had returned to work earlier were often more ready to work for the return of their friends who had still not been allowed to come back.

The balance between these two groups had increasingly tilted toward the senior officials ever since 1972 when Mao himself had begun to allow a reversal of verdicts. Already by January 1975 at the Fourth NPC, ten officials who had suffered severely during the Cultural Revolution assumed ministerial positions.
¹⁴
This trend continued. As many as 59 of the 174 full members of the Central Committee of the 10th Party Congress in 1973 who were still alive in August 1977 (many of whom had been beneficiaries of the Cultural Revolution) were not chosen to serve on the Central Committee of the 11th Party Congress. Of the 201 officials who were chosen to serve on the Central Committee of the 11th Party Congress in 1977, all but 19 were senior officials who had joined the party before 1949.
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By contrast, the situation on the Politburo changed more slowly. The Standing Committee of the Politburo was composed of the four people who had played the key role in the arrest of the Gang of Four, but on the issue of Deng's return only Marshal Ye and Li Xiannian supported it, whereas Hua Guofeng and Wang Dongxing dragged their feet.

In his lengthy address to the Central Party Work Conference in March 1977, Hua Guofeng said: “Criticizing Deng and attacking the rightist reversal of verdicts were decided by our Great Leader Chairman Mao Zedong. It is necessary to carry out these criticisms.”
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Implying that Deng would not have fully supported Chairman Mao, he added a cutting remark: “We should learn the lessons from Khrushchev.”
¹⁷
Everyone knew that Deng was often attacked as “China's Khrushchev,” the one who might imitate Khrushchev's all-out attack on Stalin. Hua, in an effort to further sustain Mao's legacy, and aware of
the negative reaction to the handling of the April 5 demonstrations, also told the conference participants not to discuss those demonstrations. But Hua did not have the commanding authority that Mao had: Chen Yun and Wang Zhen, both widely respected and with far more seniority and personal authority than Hua, still dared to express different views in their small groups at the conference that supported Deng's return.