Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (5 page)

Throughout his career, Deng was responsible for implementation rather than for theory. His responsibilities had grown from leading a small county in the Jiangxi Soviet to leading the work of several counties in the Taihang Mountains as political commissar in World War II, to leading a border area where several provinces intersected after World War II, to leading the entire Southwest after 1949, to leading the country.

In the 1950s, Deng was responsible for guiding the Chinese Communist Party's relations with other Communist parties, at a time when China had few relations with the West. After he was allowed to return from the Cultural Revolution, Deng served as an apprentice to Zhou Enlai as he accepted responsibilities for leading China's work in foreign relations.

Some say Deng had little experience in economic affairs, but economic activities were always an important responsibility of party generalists. Furthermore, from 1953–1954 Deng had served for a year as finance minister at a crucial stage as China was building its socialist economic structure.

An important part of Communist activity was always propaganda. In France, Deng had been responsible for putting out a propaganda bulletin. In the Jiangxi Soviet, after undergoing criticism, he was put in charge of propaganda for the entire soviet area, and on the Long March he again had responsibilities in the area of propaganda. As a political commissar in the military, Deng found that he was most persuasive when he was direct and gave his
troops a broad perspective, connecting their efforts to the overall situation and mission.

In short, Deng had an enormous range of governing experiences at the local, regional, and national levels that he could draw on. For half a century he had been part of the broad strategic thinking of party leaders. He had held high positions in the party, in the government, and in the army. In the 1950s he had taken part in bringing in new industries and new technology from the Soviet Union, just as he would have responsibility for bringing in new industries from the West in the 1980s.

Deng was very bright, always at the top of his class. He was the youngest of eighty-four students to have passed the examinations to be sent from Sichuan to France in 1920. He had been good at one of the main tasks in his early Confucian training, learning to recite long passages of texts by memory. In the underground he had learned not to leave a paper trail, but to keep information in his mind. Deng could deliver well-thought-through and well-organized hour-long lectures without notes. Mao once called him a walking encyclopedia. Before important events, Deng liked to spend time thinking quietly by himself as he considered what to say so that when the time came, he could give clear and decisive presentations.

Deng had been hardened by seeing comrades die in battle and in intra-party purges. He had seen friends become enemies, and enemies become friends. Three times Deng had been purged, in the Jiangxi Soviet, in 1966 in the Cultural Revolution when he was subjected to blistering criticism, and in 1976. Deng had developed a steely determination. He had disciplined himself not to display raw anger and frustration and not to base his decisions on feelings but on careful analysis of what the party and country needed. Mao once described Deng as a needle inside a cotton ball, tough on the inside, soft on the outside, but many of Deng's colleagues rarely sensed a ball of cotton.
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His colleagues did not believe he was unfair: unlike Chairman Mao, Deng was not vindictive—though when he judged that it was in the interest of the party, he would remove even those who had dedicated themselves to him and his mission.

During difficulties, Deng was sustained partly by the warm and close relations with his wife and family and by a certain inner confidence that came from overcoming past hardships. But until 1976 he was also sustained by a special relationship with the dominant figure of China's revolution, Chairman Mao. Mao destroyed many of his comrades, but he had a special relationship with Deng from the 1930s after Deng's first purge for being a part of
the Mao faction. Mao twice purged Deng, but he never destroyed him. He set him aside for possible use later.

Deng's colleagues understood that he regarded ruling China as serious business, and although he could be witty, with colleagues he was usually formal. He did not take an interest in their personal lives. He was above petty concerns and instead focused on providing the firm leadership that most felt China needed, as well as a sense of direction for their shared cause. He was clear, logical, and predictable. He was known for thinking about the big issues, and for leaving details to others. He was not a micromanager.

With ordinary citizens, however, Deng was far more approachable than the godlike Chairman Mao; people spoke reverently of “Chairman Mao,” but they could call Deng by his first name, “Xiaoping.” Deng was also relaxed about his vices, of which, he told visitors, he had three—smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, and spitting into the spittoon that was placed on the floor beside him. And he enjoyed them all.

Deng was determined to do what was good for the party and the country, not what was good for his friends. After leaving his home at sixteen, Deng never again visited his parents or his hometown. He made it clear that he did not represent one locality, one faction, or one group of friends. His closest colleagues were comrades working for a common cause, not friends whose loyalty extended beyond the needs of the organization. Though he was unusually close to his wife and children, Deng kept to the code of party discipline: he never revealed high-level secrets to his family, even though his wife and four children were all party members. As a disciplined military officer, when given orders, Deng was known for charging boldly ahead, even when he knew that there would be heavy casualties.

Deng was not admired by all Chinese. Some considered him too autocratic, too ready to take charge and to disregard what others had to say. Intellectuals were unhappy with how he cracked down on outspoken people in the anti-rightist campaign of 1957. Some considered him too rash, too ready to charge ahead, too willing to impose discipline. Like any good military officer, he expected his subordinates to carry out orders. And although he welcomed what he considered constructive suggestions to resolve problems, he bristled when foreigners and political dissidents criticized the party. He vividly remembered the chaos of the civil war and the Cultural Revolution and believed that social order in China was fragile; when he judged that it was at risk, he would respond forcefully. As paramount leader, he was also prepared to undertake bold reforms and opening on his own timetable. In short, by
the time he emerged as the preeminent leader, Deng was a disciplined, experienced official determined to serve the needs of his party and his country.

The Mission: Making China Rich and Strong

For almost two centuries before 1978, other leaders of China, like Deng, had been trying to find a way to make China rich and powerful.
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The imperial system, which had been established at roughly the same time as the Roman Empire, had been extraordinarily successful. With some interruptions and modifications, it had not only enabled Chinese leaders to govern a larger population for a longer time than any other government on earth, but also produced a great civilization. In such a vast country, where it took a month to get from one end of the empire to the other, officials in the capital could not supervise closely how every town and village was implementing national laws and rules. The leaders had developed a remarkable system of selecting able officials by examination, training them, and providing some supervision while giving them great local autonomy.

By the end of the eighteenth century, rapid population growth, the expanded commercial developments in local areas, and the arrival of imperialist Western powers on the China coast were straining the imperial system. By then each of the roughly 1,500 counties had an average population of about 200,000 and was governed by a single small office. New advances in military, communications, manufacturing, and transportation technologies—gunpowder and ships, for example—gave rise to economic development and social forces that the thin layer of bureaucracy could not contain. In earlier centuries, rulers had limited the growth of local economies in an effort to keep them within the bounds of imperial control, but now rulers in Beijing struggled to adapt the imperial system to cope with the changes.

Complicating their efforts was the sheer size of China. At this point, China had the world's largest population, which had doubled in size in the previous two hundred years and was continuing to grow rapidly, and its geographical area had expanded in those years to the west and northeast. Along the coast and even along some of the land borders, the Chinese military could not stop the advance of foreigners, and civilian leaders could not halt the expanded commercial activities.

As the challenges to the system grew more severe, it remained difficult to convince the rulers in Beijing that their system, which had survived for almost two millennia, was under serious threat. Between 1861 and 1875, just at the time when Deng's frugal grandfather was saving to increase the size of
the family's landholdings, a group of officials under the Tongzhi Emperor was working to overcome growing social turmoil. Failing to realize the depth of change required to cope with the new social forces at home and with the foreigners at their gates, they endeavored to keep the past on its throne. While sending troops to quell the rebellions, they sought to reinvigorate the existing institutions—by strengthening the examination system and the teaching of Confucianism, and by spending lavishly on rebuilding the palace.

The Tongzhi Emperor's successors had their faith in the traditional system shaken, above all, by their shocking military defeat at the hands of their small island neighbor, Japan, in the sea battles of 1894–1895. In 1898, with the support of China's twenty-seven-year-old emperor, reform-minded officials rushed to introduce within one hundred days some forty edicts to create a new order. They opened modern schools and universities and prepared to send people abroad to learn modern Western subjects. But whereas the Japanese had spent decades studying the West and crafting their own new systems, China's 1898 reformers had not built a political or institutional base to support reform. The Empress Dowager, threatened by the changes, placed the emperor under house arrest and stopped the reforms. She later abolished the traditional examination system, tried to modernize the military, and prepared to write a new constitution. But she too failed to forge an effective system. Instead of putting money into building naval ships, she built a marble boat and an expensive summer palace. It was not easy to change the complex and intricate imperial system with its established customs and institutions.

By the time Deng Xiaoping was born in 1904, China's last dynasty, the Qing, was already irreparably weakened by its inability to respond effectively to both interior rebellions and intrusions of foreign powers along the coast. In 1911 a small group of rebels in Wuhan who took control of the office of a Qing governor-general and military commander set off a chain reaction, bringing the imperial institutions to an abrupt end. The events of 1911 are called the “1911 Revolution,” but it would be more accurate to describe them as a collapse. They were not the result of a well-organized revolutionary force but instead a response to the failure of the imperial system. Several brilliant Qing officials had thoughtfully analyzed the problems China confronted and had made creative proposals, but overall the rulers failed in their mission to adapt the imperial system to meet the challenges.

In 1911 China, unlike Japan which kept the emperor and Great Britain which kept the king, completely abolished the imperial system and created, on paper, a republic. In fact there was no effective governmental structure to replace imperial rule. Instead, after 1911, a series of leaders—Yuan Shikai,
Sun Yat-sen, Chiang Kai-shek, and Mao Zedong—all tried to build a new system to make the country rich and powerful.

Yuan Shikai, the most respected military leader at the time of the 1911 revolution, tried to unify the country militarily. But he was unable to win the support of civilian leaders and failed to overcome all the regional military leaders across the country who had taken up arms to bring order to their local areas as the imperial system had weakened.

Sun Yat-sen, who as a schoolboy had spent many years living with an elder brother in Hawaii, became a great publicist and fundraiser, first promoting the revolution and then trying to create a unified government. He has been called the father of the Chinese republic for his initial role in working with Yuan Shikai to establish a government after 1911, but he quickly lost out to Yuan Shikai. When Yuan Shikai's efforts failed, Sun in 1923 set up a government in Guangzhou that he hoped would become a national government. He formed a political party, the Guomindang (Nationalist Party) to provide political leadership, and on paper set up a national government with the outlines of a democratic structure. Sun attracted promising patriotic youth to Guangzhou, including those who later became Communist leaders—Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Ye Jianying, Lin Biao—who were then also members of the Guomindang. Sun helped strengthen the base of popular nationalism, encouraged young people to go abroad to study, and promoted the mass media. But he confronted a chaotic environment and lacked both the organizational skills and the base of support necessary to build an effective political system. He died in 1925 with his dreams unfulfilled.

Chiang Kai-shek, then a young military official trained in Japan, was brought to Guangzhou by Sun Yat-sen to be commander of the newly established Whampoa (Huangpu) Military Academy. There he was to train a new national military officers' corps that would lead the military unification of the country. Chiang inherited Sun's mantle in 1925, but he had difficulties controlling growing rivalries within the Guomindang between the Communists and the right wing of the party. The rivalry grew into enmity, and in April 1927 Chiang moved peremptorily to attack and kill those who would not give up communism and declare allegiance to the Guomindang. Chiang Kai-shek was a general of considerable talent, but to govern he needed to work with the power holders—big businessmen, landlords, and warlords—who had alienated the common people. He became head of the Chinese government with the support of a shaky coalition of warlords, but he lost support as he proved unable to contain the corruption and inflation that wracked
the country. He lost the ensuing civil war to the more unified Communists, who during the anti-Japanese war had built a strong party, army, and base of support by exploiting the fears of city dwellers panicked from rampant inflation and by appealing to the hopes of peasants expecting to receive their own land from redistributed landlord holdings.