Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (41 page)

After resuming his position as vice chairman of the CMC in July 1977, officially Deng ranked under Chairman Hua Guofeng, but as chief of the General Staff he exercised responsibility for guiding military planning.
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Moreover, with his long years of military leadership, he sought to maintain personal control over the military and not let it slip into Hua's hands. Like Mao, Deng expected strict obedience from his military leaders and he was prepared to be strict in enforcing compliance; the troops had no difficulty understanding that Deng had more power over the military than Hua.

“Practice” Challenges the “Two Whatevers”

When the Central Party School reopened in 1977, it quickly became a center for progressive party scholars and students. Scholars conducting research on party theory and history began work in March 1977, and the school opened to its first group of students in October. In the first class there were 807 students, including approximately a hundred middle-aged and older officials who had been selected by their ministries or provinces as especially promising and so were sent to study in an “advanced group” for six months.
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There was a special excitement among the first few groups of students, who expected to land important positions upon graduation. Most of the one hundred students in the advanced group had suffered during the Cultural Revolution and wanted both to analyze what had gone wrong during the previous two decades and to discuss their visions for China's future. To be sure, there were limits to what they could criticize and what they could propose. But within the limits, the students were open to a wide range of new
ideas, and their enthusiasm was shared by faculty and researchers, who also were eager to help define the theoretical and policy directions for the new era.
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The desire to explore new ideas was thoroughly supported by Hu Yaobang. Although Hua Guofeng was officially president of the Central Party School and Wang Dongxing was officially first vice president, Hu Yaobang, a vice president, came to the school more often than they and took a lively interest in the students, the staff, and their ideas. He encouraged fresh thinking, and the staff and students responded warmly to his encouragement. The Central Party School soon became a center for creative new thinking within the party, a place where senior officials could occasionally break away from their daily work to explore new ideas with the staff and students.

On July 15, even before the first group of students had arrived at the Central Party School, Hu Yaobang's staff began a series of papers called
Theoretical Trends (Lilun dongtai)
. Intended to be read by a small group of high officials, the series explored new ideas and interpretations in a format that gave it more freedom than other party publications: a brief, numbered paper on a given topic would be released every few days. The papers were not circulated outside the inner circle, but they attracted great interest because they expressed the cutting edge of new thinking acceptable to the party.

On May 10, 1978, paper 60, “Practice Is the Sole Criterion for Judging Truth,” appeared in
Theoretical Trends
.
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The article had been in gestation for several months and was based on drafts written by Hu Fuming, a young philosophy faculty member at Nanjing University; Sun Changjiang, of the Central Party School's Theory Research Office; and Yang Xiguang, a student at the Central Party School in the fall of 1977.
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In early 1978 Yang Xiguang became the editor of
Guangming Daily
and, always alert to ideas that would be new to his readers, on May 11, reprinted “Practice Is the Sole Criterion for Judging Truth,” with the protective byline “specially invited commentators.” On May 12,
People's Daily
and the PLA newspaper
Jiefangjun bao
reprinted it, and it was quickly picked up and reprinted in many regional papers as well.

The article argued that the only way to evaluate truth was by the broad social experience of the people. Marxism is not an unchanging body of thinking; instead Marxism must continually be reinterpreted as a result of experience. The basic principle of Marxism encompasses the combination of theory and practice. Under certain circumstances errors will be made in perceptions
of the truth, but if experience reveals errors, changes should be made: in this way new experiences and practices will bring about new theories. If the existing formulas of Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought are limited or cause disasters, they should be changed.
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After the article appeared, it immediately aroused great interest. Some readers were full of praise, but Wang Dongxing, the Politburo Standing Committee member responsible for overseeing propaganda work, and Wu Lengxi, former editor of the
People's Daily
, were furious. Wang Dongxing had exploded just a week earlier when an article entitled “Pay According to the Work Performed”
(anlao fenpei)
had appeared, demanding to know which Central Committee had authorized that article (only later did he find out that Deng Xiaoping and his staff had supported it).

Hu Yaobang and other liberal officials had taken advantage of an arrangement whereby papers from
Theoretical Trends
by “specially invited commentators” could be printed in newspapers without the usual surveillance by Wang Dongxing and his staff.
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Otherwise, Wang Dongxing and his conservative staff would have weeded out such an article before it was published in newspapers. Wang Dongxing and Wu Lengxi accurately perceived that the article encouraged questioning the orthodoxy of Mao Zedong that they believed in. If class struggle and continuing revolution caused disasters, it followed that they should be abandoned. Wang Dongxing and Wu Lengxi also correctly perceived that the article, by criticizing “ossified dogmatism” and “godlike worship,” was an attack on the “two whatevers” and implicitly on those responsible for it, Hua Guofeng and Wang Dongxing. Wang Dongxing argued that without a common creed, the party would not be able to maintain unity, and he phoned Hu Yaobang personally, complaining that he permitted the publication of such an article.
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Deng Xiaoping later told Hu Yaobang that when the article “Practice Is the Sole Criterion for Judging Truth” first came out, he did not notice it, but when the controversy became heated, he looked it up and read it. The article, he said, was a good one and it accorded with Marxism-Leninism. He praised the theoretical group that Hu Yaobang had assembled to work on
Theoretical Trends
and said it should continue its work. Deng reassured Hu, who sought to keep good relations with Hua Guofeng and other leaders, by saying that some struggle over the issue was unavoidable because of the other leaders' support for the “two whatevers.” Deng's support gave Hu Yaobang great encouragement at a critical time in the course of the debate. Without it, Hu and many others might have lost heart and yielded.
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The two articles, “Practice” (of May 1978) and the “two whatevers” (of February 1977), became two magnetic poles, attracting those with two different perspectives. The controversy between the two exposed and sharpened the divide between those who supported Hua Guofeng and feared the consequences of loosening the traditional orthodoxy and those who supported Deng in pushing away from what they saw as stultifying dogma. The argument was phrased in ideological terms, but the passion of the two sides stemmed from the underlying politics. In Chinese Communist circles, it is taboo to criticize a leader openly and directly. But beneficiaries of the Cultural Revolution generally supported Hua Guofeng, and targets of the Cultural Revolution generally supported Deng Xiaoping.

The article “Practice Is the Sole Criterion for Judging Truth” became a vehicle to rally the growing number of officials who believed that Hua Guofeng was not up to the task of leading China, but who dared not say so publicly. It also helped to draw military leaders to the side of Deng Xiaoping, including the secretary general of the CMC, Luo Ruiqing, one of the earliest targets of the Cultural Revolution and an unusually strong and able leader who had worked with Deng for many years.
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In the following months, as the debate heated up over the two articles, it increasingly became a political struggle between those who praised “Practice Is the Sole Criterion” and believed that Deng would be the best top leader, and those who upheld the “two whatevers” and supported Hua Guofeng. A showdown seemed inevitable.

In Japan, the historical turning point that set the nation on the road to modernization was the Iwakura Mission. From December 1871 to September 1873, fifty-one Meiji government leaders traveled by ship and rail to fifteen different countries. The mission was composed of officials from all major sectors—industry, agriculture, mining, finance, culture, education, the military, and the police—and was led by Iwakura Tomomi, a court noble who had become one of the top leaders of the Meiji government. When the group left home, Japan was essentially a closed country; the Japanese knew little about the outside world. But as the members of the mission visited other countries' factories, mines, museums, parks, stock exchanges, railways, farms, and shipyards, their eyes were opened to ways that Japan could remake itself, not only with new technologies, but also with new organizational strategies and ways of thinking. The trip created a shared awareness among the mission members of just how far behind Japan was from the advanced countries and a common perspective about how to introduce change. Rather than becoming discouraged by what they saw, the officials returned home energized, excited by future prospects for Japan and eager to send additional teams abroad to study in more detail.

In China no single group of officials traveled together for such a long period as the Iwakura Mission, but from 1977 to 1980 many separate study tours by senior officials had a similar influence on Chinese thinking. Deng's pioneering 1975 five-day visit to France, when he took along high-level officials in industry, transport, management, and science who made observations
in their respective fields, set a precedent. Deng returned from the trip a believer in study tours and began encouraging other groups to go abroad. He complained that other officials did not know how far behind China was and he was confident a trip would open their eyes. Hua Guofeng, who had led a delegation to visit Eastern Europe, also returned a supporter of trips abroad to observe modern countries.

For centuries, individual Chinese had gone to the West and returned with ideas for China. Wang Tao, for example, a nineteenth-century translator, returned from London and wrote avidly about what China could learn from the West about modernization.
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What was different in the late 1970s was that key officials in positions of responsibility traveled together and, with the firm support of Deng and Hua, were later in positions that enabled them to implement what they had learned on a large scale.

After Deng returned from France and Mao and Jiang Qing had died, officials who long suppressed their desires to travel abroad had a new opportunity. Officials who for decades had warned the public about the horrors of capitalism vied with one another to observe capitalist countries firsthand. Retired senior officials sought overseas trips to capitalist countries as rewards for their dedicated years of service to communism and their suffering during the Cultural Revolution. It took some months after Mao's death and the arrest of the Gang of Four to make arrangements for foreign travel, but by 1978, when such preparations had been completed, many high-level officials had their first opportunities to take part in foreign study tours. In that year, some thirteen officials of the rank of vice premier or its equivalent took some twenty trips abroad, visiting a total of fifty countries.
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Hundreds of ministers, governors, first party secretaries, and their staff took part as well. Like the Japanese officials on the Iwakura Mission, Chinese officials returned exhilarated by what they had seen, excited about new steps China could take, and ready to send additional teams abroad to study in more detail.

In late 1978, Deng, summarizing the effect of the trips, happily reported, “Recently our comrades had a look abroad. The more we see, the more we realize how backward we are.”
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Deng considered this recognition so essential for building support for reform that on December 2, 1978, he told those drafting his speech that would launch his reform and opening policy that “the basic point is: we must acknowledge that we are backward, that many of our ways of doing things are inappropriate, and that we need to change.”
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The study tours reinforced the growing conviction among many high officials that Deng's perception was correct: China must embark on a new path.

The highest-level delegations that China sent abroad in 1978 were four study tours organized in the spring of that year, one each to Eastern Europe, Hong Kong, Japan, and Western Europe. From March 9 to April 6, 1978, a study tour headed by Li Yimang, deputy head of the International Liaison Department of the Communist Party, with Qiao Shi and Yu Guangyuan as deputy heads, visited Yugoslavia and Romania.
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From their visits to factories, farms, and science and technology units, the group returned home with some concrete suggestions about what China might do.
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But more importantly, after the trip, Chinese leaders stopped calling Yugoslavia “revisionist,” the derogatory term Mao had used to criticize the departure of the socialist countries from the true path of socialism. Furthermore, the Chinese Communist Party reestablished relations with the Yugoslav Communist Party.
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These changes expanded the range of reforms China could consider; it was now possible to draw from the experiences of the Eastern European economic reformers without being accused of committing ideological impurities.