Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (47 page)

The person who gained most at the Third Plenum was Chen Yun. Prior to the plenum, he was not even on the Politburo, but at the plenum he became a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo and vice chairman of the Central Committee. At its last plenary session, the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection was formally established, to which Chen Yun was named first secretary. Chen, rather than Wang Dongxing, was empowered to give final approval on any cases considered for a reversal of verdicts. It was understood that many cases of senior officials would be reversed in the months and years ahead, enabling them to return to work.

Ordinarily the highest official at a plenum presents a thematic report, but with Hua as the titular head and Deng as the preeminent leader, it was not easy to decide who should give it. Plenum organizers resolved the awkward situation by eliminating such a report, but in fact they treated Deng's speech, given earlier at the work conference, as the work that set the tone for the direction of the party. Although Hua presided at the final session, participants focused on the two real powers sitting next to each other in front of the assembled Central Committee who would lead China in the years ahead—Deng and Chen Yun. Ren Zhongyi, co-head of the Northeast small group, said that just as the Zunyi conference represented the triumph of Mao Zedong Thought over dogmatism, so the Third Plenum represented the triumph of the good tradition of party democratic discussion over the “two whatevers.”
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In his closing speech, Chen Yun made a different parallel, commenting that just as the rectification campaign in Yan'an had provided unity enabling the party to lead the country after 1949, so the work conference had
provided the unity needed to lead the country to achieve the four modernizations.
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Succession without Coronation

In the annals of world political history, it would be difficult to find another case where a person became top leader of a major nation without formal public recognition of the succession. Before the work conference, Deng was vice chairman of the party, vice premier, and vice chairman of the CMC. After he became the preeminent leader at the Third Plenum, he was still vice chairman of the party, vice premier, and vice chairman of the CMC. Not only was Deng not given a coronation or an inauguration, there was not even a public announcement that he had risen to the top position. What peculiar combination of circumstances had created such an unusual situation and what were the consequences?

At the time of the Third Plenum, Chinese leaders wanted to avoid giving the impression to the Chinese public and to the rest of the world that China was undergoing a power struggle. Hua Guofeng had just come to power in 1976, and the top leaders feared that an abrupt change of leadership could lead to domestic instability and hamper China's efforts to attract foreign capital and technologies. Over the next thirty months, Deng did in fact push Hua Guofeng aside and become the unrivaled top leader, but he did so step by step, in a relatively orderly process that did not upset the Chinese public and the world at large.

High-level officials who chose not to give Deng any new titles were also concerned about the dangers of concentrating the nation's power in the hands of one person. They believed that the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution had resulted from the arbitrary exercise of such unchecked power by Mao, who had held all formal positions. Had Hua Guofeng remained leader, this would not have been a worry. While Hua was in charge, Marshal Ye and others had been concerned not that he had too much power, but that he had too little power to govern effectively. With Deng Xiaoping, however, there was reason to be concerned. He was so confident, so decisive, so sure-footed that they worried he might become too much like his mentor, Mao Zedong. They decided, then, not to give him all the titles and to balance his power with that of an equal, Chen Yun. The strange arrangement of giving Deng authority without formal recognition worked because
everyone knew what was going on, and because Deng himself was more interested in real power than in any formal job title. He readily accepted his responsibilities on an informal basis, without demanding public display.

From the Third Plenum in December 1978 until December 1979, when Deng began to push aside Hua Guofeng for the good of the party and the country, Deng and Hua spoke respectfully of each other in public. They both wanted to modernize and strengthen the country and they both were prepared to be pragmatic and flexible. Yet during 1979, when Hua was still chairman and Deng was wielding his informal authority, the relationship between the two men was especially awkward. In a showdown, Deng's informal authority would trump Hua's formal authority, but Deng, like his colleagues, tried to avoid any public dissension. Hua continued to chair meetings; he represented the party and the government in public meetings; and not only was he a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, but also several of his allies were members as well. Hua also enjoyed the support of two senior counselors, Marshal Ye and Li Xiannian, who wanted a collective leadership and feared a dictatorship. In 1979 Hua was, in Western terms, a weak chairman of the board who could not dominate, but who still had allies and whose views could not be ignored. Deng did not then tower above Hua as the preeminent leader, and he had not yet put in place his personal team and his own governing structure. But Deng had the power, the leverage, and the political skill to weaken Hua's power base. By mid-1979, Deng, who sought tighter control and a more effective governing structure, began to move step by step to weaken Hua and then push him aside.

While the Third Plenum was elevating Deng, within a few hundred yards of Zhongnanhai demonstrators were putting up wall posters that both directly and indirectly supported Deng Xiaoping by criticizing Lin Biao and the Gang of Four; some even dared to criticize Mao himself. Before long, some wall posters were even criticizing the Communist Party and Deng Xiaoping. These wall posters were not just a thorn in Deng's side; they also forced him to deal with an issue that was to plague him throughout his years as the top leader: How much freedom should be allowed? Where and how should party and government set the limits on public expressions of dissent?

The Cultural Revolution was in fact an “anti-culture revolution” for it did more to attack the old culture than to create a new one. Red Guards used historical analogies and stories not only to attack present-day officials, but also to criticize virtually all novels, stories, plays, and essays. As the Cultural Revolution drew to a close with Mao's death and the arrest of the Gang of Four, many Chinese who had for years been silenced by terror passionately sought a chance to speak out. Some wanted to attack their tormenters, others strove to defend themselves, and still others wanted simply to give voice to the suffering that they and their families had endured.

A number of party leaders saw an opportunity to take advantage of this pent-up anger and direct it against their own enemies. Others with no political purpose wanted to express their personal feelings. Yet party leaders who thought about the whole system, including Deng Xiaoping, worried that if “too much” freedom were allowed and protestors could organize, the country might again fall into chaos as it had during the Cultural Revolution. Tens of millions had suffered or had relatives who had suffered from political campaigns or starvation. Hostility was strong not only against local leaders who oppressed the local people, but against higher-level officials who had been part of the system that had caused such suffering. In Deng's view, the society was so large, the population so diverse, the people so poor, the mutual hostilities so great, and the lack of common agreement about a code of behavior so pronounced that some measure of authority imposed from above was needed. How much could the boundaries of freedom be expanded without risking that Chinese society would devolve into chaos, as it had before 1949
and during the Cultural Revolution? This question remained a central and divisive one throughout Deng's years of rule.

Party leaders had no agreed-on way to judge when the tide of public criticism might threaten the breakdown of order. Consequently, they found it difficult to avoid disagreement among themselves about where to draw the line and how to maintain it. Officials responsible for science, higher education, youth affairs, and united front work, reflecting the views of the people with whom they worked, generally advocated more freedom of expression. Those responsible for maintaining public security remained cautious and advocated greater restrictions of freedom. And leaders in the propaganda apparatus were of two minds: some of them, well-educated in the humanities and social sciences, sought more freedom both for themselves as well as for others. But in carrying out their jobs, many became petty tyrants as they transmitted and enforced the limits.

Meanwhile, the people who dared to test the boundaries of acceptable public discussion generally did not have a landlord or bourgeois family background. Nonparty intellectuals from those “bad class backgrounds” who had been terrorized and intimidated for decades were also not at the forefront in complaining publicly. Instead, those who pushed the boundaries in the post-Mao era were usually bold youth, party members, veterans, or people who had friends or relatives in powerful positions who might protect them.

In principle, Deng supported the expansion of freedom and he was prepared to be pragmatic. Yet because he bore ultimate responsibility for maintaining public order, when he had serious doubts about whether order could be maintained, he moved swiftly to tighten control. After the Third Plenum, Deng, sensing the broad public support for ending the Cultural Revolution and for launching a new era of reform and opening, allowed two important discussions to take place that expanded freedom of expression for the Chinese people. One, open to the public, began spontaneously on a wall near Tiananmen Square that came to be known as “Xidan Democracy Wall,” and was then replicated in Chinese cities throughout the country. The other was a party-sponsored discussion closed to outsiders. It brought together some intellectuals and leading officials responsible for party policies in the cultural area to explore guidelines for their work in the new era.

Democracy Wall, November 1978–March 1979

For decades it had been a Chinese custom to post official notices and newspapers on bulletin boards in villages, towns, urban neighborhoods, and at
public gathering places such as bus stops. In Beijing, perhaps no space received more attention than the bulletin boards posted along a wall several hundred yards west of Tiananmen, at a place called Xidan. The huge, gray brick wall was about twelve feet high and two hundred yards long. Next to the wall was one of the busiest bus stops in the city, where many different bus lines dropped off and took on passengers. During the Cultural Revolution, Xidan Wall had been covered with posters denouncing those party leaders—including Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping—accused of following “the capitalist road.” And around the time of the April 5, 1976 demonstrations, the wall was filled with posters denouncing the Gang of Four, praising Zhou Enlai, and supporting Deng Xiaoping.

On November 19, 1978, scarcely a week after the Central Party Work Conference opened, and in the context of a new political atmosphere, an entire issue of the Communist Youth League journal, not yet available in newsstands, appeared page by page on the wall. The Communist Youth League, a training ground for possible Communist Party members, stood at the forefront of the public's effort to expand freedoms. A few months earlier its journal had been one of the first to receive permission to renew publication after having been closed down during the Cultural Revolution. With encouragement from Hu Yaobang, Youth League officials sent the first issue to the printers; it was scheduled to appear on September 11. But when Wang Dongxing, who was responsible for supervising propaganda, saw the planned publication, he immediately ordered it withdrawn. Wang Dongxing complained that the publication not only lacked any poems by Mao, but it even criticized the practice of worshipping Mao.

The staff members of the journal, however, were not easily deterred. On September 20, only a few days later, copies were distributed to the newsstands.
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As soon as they arrived on the newsstands, Wang Dongxing had all the copies collected, withdrawn from circulation, and banned from any further distribution. It was this first issue, which had been withdrawn from sale and distribution, that appeared on Xidan Wall on November 19, four days after the decision of the Beijing Party Committee to reverse the verdicts on the demonstrations of April 5, 1976.

The posters attracted enormous attention. Some of the articles posted from the Youth League journal passionately demanded a reversal of verdicts of young people who remained in prison as a result of the April 5 demonstrations. Other articles spoke against the “two whatevers” and raised questions not only about Lin Biao and the Gang of Four, but even about Mao. “Just ask yourself,” one article read, “Without Mao's support could Lin Biao have
achieved power? Just ask yourself: Didn't Chairman Mao know that Jiang Qing was a traitor? If Chairman Mao had not agreed, could the Gang of Four have achieved their aim of striking down Deng Xiaoping?”
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It is not difficult to see why Wang Dongxing, former bodyguard and loyal defender of Mao, was upset by these criticisms.

Following the posting of the Youth League journal, a few brave souls began posting other messages, many of which criticized the crackdown on April 5, 1976. At first, some who walked by the wall were afraid even to look at the postings, let alone put up new ones. But as days passed and no one was punished, and especially after rumors spread that Deng supported the freedom to put up posters, people became emboldened. After the decade of the Cultural Revolution when information had been tightly controlled, many people were simply curious. Others, knowing that in the past any “incorrect” view might lead to punishment, humiliation, or banishment to the countryside, remained terror-stricken. Nevertheless, there was a buzz of excitement around Xidan Wall as new postings continued to appear.