Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (44 page)

The Central Party Work Conference was called by Chairman Hua Guofeng, who in his initial presentations gave little indication that he understood what was in store for him. When he opened the meeting on November 10, he said that the meeting would focus on agriculture and the national development plan for 1979–1980, and would serve as a follow-up to the Forum on Principles to Guide the Four Modernizations. His plan for the conference was fully consistent with what Deng had advocated the previous year at the PLA conference in Guangdong: they should end the criticism of the Gang of Four and concentrate on the four modernizations. Yet two days after its opening, Hua's plans for the conference were derailed by broader political discussions.

Neither Hua Guofeng nor Deng Xiaoping had anticipated how completely and how rapidly the political climate would change. A few weeks earlier Deng had outlined his speech for the conference and had tasked Hu Qiaomu and Yu Guangyuan to help to flesh it out.
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But after Deng returned from Southeast Asia on November 14 and heard reports of the changed atmosphere in Beijing, he asked his speechwriters to draft an entirely different speech for him.
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Marshal Ye, who quickly realized how much the changed atmosphere had weakened the support for Hua Guofeng, advised Hua on November 11 to begin preparing a speech showing that he, too, accepted the changes. The crucial drama took place between November 11 and November 25. By the time Deng joined the conference on November 15, its focus had already shifted from economics to politics, and the political winds were blowing against Hua and his “two whatevers.” Some senior party leaders would later remark that just as the Zunyi conference had been the decisive turning point in Mao's rise to the chairmanship, so this work conference proved the decisive event in the rise of Deng.
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The work conference brought together 210 top party officials. Attendees
included many who held important party, military, and government positions, including the heads of all major branches of party work, two top party leaders from each provincial-level unit, and respected senior officials no longer on the front line. It also included other party members who could help provide a broad theoretical perspective. In his opening presentation, Chairman Hua Guofeng announced that they had originally planned to meet for twenty days, but more time might be needed. In the end, the meeting lasted for thirty-six days. Attendees closeted themselves in the Jingxi [Capital West] Hotel, within walking distance of Zhongnanhai, so that discussions could continue in the evenings and on weekends, in and out of the formal sessions.
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The format of the meetings—which included both plenary and small group sessions—and the closeting of the participants in the Jingxi Hotel were identical to the setup and procedures used at the Central Party Work Conference of March 1977, but twenty months later the political climate was totally different.

The format of the meeting encouraged participation by all those present. Except for the four plenary sessions, the participants were divided in six regional small groups (North, Northeast, East, Central-South, Southwest, and Northwest), in which each participant was expected to express his views. Each day a written summary report of the small group meetings was passed on to all participants; when a group wanted to express its views for the report, members voted with a show of hands.
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Although Deng, like other Politburo Standing Committee members, did not take part in the small group meetings, he followed the daily reports very closely.
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By the beginning of the conference, Hua realized that many participants were dissatisfied with the “two whatevers,” with the harsh criticism of those who had taken part in the April 5 demonstrations, and by his unwillingness to reverse the verdicts on more senior officials who had been criticized during the Cultural Revolution.
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The April 5 demonstrations were a particularly touchy issue, and Hua had still not gone far enough to satisfy many of the participants. As early as March 1977 at the earlier Central Party Work Conference, Hua had acknowledged that most of those who had gone to Tiananmen Square on April 5 had done so to praise Zhou Enlai, but even so, the demonstration was still labeled a “counter-revolutionary incident.” Most conference participants in November 1978 found these injustices upsetting.
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Hua repeated that Deng had not been involved in the April 5, 1976 incident, but many senior officials believed that Deng had been improperly removed and replaced by Hua as a result of those events. The evaluation of the incident
to some extent was an evaluation of Deng, and many were insisting that there be a new evaluation of the incident in which it would be labeled a “revolutionary movement.”
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By focusing in his initial speeches on the four modernizations, Hua hoped to sidestep the political differences and talk about economic issues, for which there was a high level of consensus. Hua's opening speech was carefully crafted to go a considerable distance toward accommodating his critics. While not saying explicitly that he was abandoning the “two whatevers,” he did not even mention the “two whatevers.” Instead, after outlining the agenda for the conference, Hua made clear he was ready to accept foreign loans, foreign technology, and foreign goods as part of an economic plan, none of which Mao had authorized. He did not directly say he was rejecting political campaigns, but he said that he had carefully considered whether to initiate a campaign to mobilize people from the top to the bottom of society; he said he had concluded that this would take time and energy that would be better spent working on the pressing issues that the country faced. In addition, Hua told the conference that he had directed that people should not be paraded through the streets in mass criticism sessions.
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Even many of the attendees who sought more reform and a more rapid return of the senior officials acknowledged that Hua, although not directly criticizing the Cultural Revolution and the class struggle, was making a serious effort to end some of its worst excesses. Deng Xiaoping would have found it difficult to disagree with the main thrust of Hua's comments.

Hua managed to keep control through the second plenary session on the afternoon of November 13, when Vice Premier Ji Dengkui made his presentation on agriculture. Most attendees had at some time been responsible for the rural areas at the basic levels; they had seen firsthand the starvation after the Great Leap Forward. Although the Communists had risen to power with the support of peasants, they were keenly aware that tens of millions of peasants had starved to death under their mistaken policies, that serious food shortages continued to exist, and that scarce foreign currency was being used to import grain. The leaders assembled had been forced to deal with the results of these disasters, facing starving peasants and distraught lower-level officials. The party could not escape responsibility for having implemented these bad decisions, even though the main responsibility for the painful mistakes was placed on Lin Biao and the Gang of Four. Officials were increasingly willing to say privately what they did not yet say publicly: that some of the responsibility should be placed on Mao.
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Against this backdrop, Ji Dengkui's speech offered attendees a sense that honesty and openness were returning to agricultural policy-making. Steering away from the inflated, optimistic, empty rhetoric of the Mao era, Ji made a frank and comprehensive statement stressing the seriousness of the problems. He acknowledged that China's agricultural policies had changed too often and too unpredictably and often did not conform to local conditions. Participants knew the party had to resolve the food shortages that still existed, and Ji Dengkui proposed that the agricultural problems be resolved by increasing investment, improving the supply of seeds and chemical fertilizer, doubling the loans available to farmers, and increasing the purchase price of grain by 30 percent.
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But Ji's openness and Hua's gestures of conciliation were not enough for what was rapidly becoming a frank discussion reflecting deep convictions that had not yet been aired at large party meetings. And one of those convictions was that Hua was no longer able to provide the top leadership the party needed. Not long after the sessions began, participants in the Central-South small group, for example, declared unanimously that they supported “Practice Is the Sole Criterion for Judging Truth.”
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And by November 11, the second day of the work conference and the first day of small group discussions, many of the participants were in revolt against the efforts of Hua Guofeng and Wang Dongxing to block the further reversal of verdicts; they wanted to clear the names of respected departed officials and to bring back their former colleagues.

On November 11, three highly respected officials, Chen Zaidao, Li Chang, and Lu Zhengcao, spoke out in their small groups on the need to reverse more verdicts. The atmosphere was so electric by the end of the day that Marshal Ye advised Hua Guofeng either to accept the changed mood or prepare to be left behind.
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All the participants, including Hua, knew well how, in 1964, Khrushchev had been pushed out of the Soviet leadership in a coup led by Brezhnev and other officials.

On November 12, nine other people spoke out in their small groups on the need to reverse the verdicts that Hua and Wang Dongxing had refused to change. Chen Yun was the most influential of those and some accounts of the conference mistakenly credit his speech, which Hu Qiaomu had helped polish, for changing the atmosphere, but in fact the atmosphere had already changed before his speech; others had made the point in their small group meetings before he did. Chen Yun's speech, however, did offer comprehensive up-to-date data by drawing on personnel records. Because of Chen Yun's
leadership in personnel work dating back almost four decades, his speech carried more weight. As he addressed the Northeast small group, Chen Yun rejected Hua Guofeng's effort to focus on economic issues, countering that to engage the enthusiasm of officials and to succeed in economic work, the party had to first deal with unresolved political controversies. In particular, they must clear the names of five groups of people who had been criticized unfairly:

1. The sixty-one members of a “renegade group,” led by Bo Yibo, who had been criticized during the Cultural Revolution.
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2. Those accused of voluntarily surrendering to the enemy to secure their release from prison in 1940; they deserved to have their party membership restored.

3. Tao Zhu, Wang Heshou, and others who had been imprisoned in 1937 and were without basis criticized for revealing, under pressure, information about their colleagues.

4. Marshal Peng Dehuai, already deceased, who should be treated with honor and whose remains should be buried in the Babaoshan Cemetery for Revolutionary Heroes.

5. Those involved in the April 5, 1976, Tiananmen incident, which should be treated as a popular mass movement.

Chen Yun added that Kang Sheng, who during the Cultural Revolution had attacked and destroyed the careers and lives of many outstanding party leaders, though deceased, should be held responsible for his crimes.
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It is not difficult to imagine that Chen Yun spoke with some passion: his grievances ran deep. In particular, Hua Guofeng had not restored him to a high position and Wang Dongxing had refused to print his speech at the March 1977 Central Party Work Conference arguing that Deng Xiaoping should be allowed to return to work. But his was not the only speech infused with strong emotion: a torrent of previously suppressed anger was released by speakers in all of the groups against officials like Hua Guofeng and Wang Dongxing who had blocked the return of good officials unjustly accused. Those who spoke out could identify with those who were not yet being allowed to return, for many knew what it was to suffer humiliation and physical abuse. In each of the six small groups, speaker after speaker demanded the rehabilitation of officials unjustly accused and the posthumous condemnation of Kang Sheng, who had been responsible for so many deaths and whose
former secretary, Li Xin, was even at that moment assisting Wang Dongxing in preventing the reversal of verdicts. It was this passion that fueled the dissatisfaction with Hua and Wang Dongxing.

While the Central Party Work Conference was still in its opening days, the atmosphere at the conference was reflected in actions taken by the Beijing Party Committee, which was responsible for preserving security in the city of Beijing. On October 9, Lin Hujia had become first party secretary of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee, replacing Wu De, who had supervised the arrests on April 5, 1976. As soon as he was appointed, Lin and the Beijing Party Committee began considering when and how to free those still not exonerated for their role in the April 5 demonstrations; even before the work conference they had begun preparing drafts of possible announcements.

Lin Hujia was also a participant at the Central Party Work Conference and head of the North China small group. On November 13, fully aware of the changed atmosphere following Marshal Ye's meeting with Hua and Chen Yun's speech, Lin called an enlarged meeting of the Beijing Party Committee; after the meeting, on behalf of the Beijing Party Committee, he released an announcement that went well beyond Hua's concession that the April 5 demonstrations were not counter-revolutionary. It read: “On the spring grave-sweeping festival [Qingming] of 1976, the masses of people gathered at Tiananmen Square to mourn our beloved Zhou. . . . They were gripped by a deep hatred of the crimes of the ‘Gang of Four’ who brought calamity to the country. This action . . . is entirely a revolutionary action. All the comrades persecuted for their involvement shall be rehabilitated and have their reputations restored.”
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