Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (66 page)

And what new work was Deng ready to take on? Party building—choosing high officials for key positions and selecting and training new party members. A few days after the climb, Deng gave a speech to an enlarged meeting of the Standing Committee of the Navy. The key issue facing the country, he told them, was preparing successors.
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Deng said that China had resolved the key political and ideological issues and now needed to focus on the organizational issues—selecting and training officials. The key political goal, the achievement of the four modernizations, had been confirmed at the Third Plenum. The ideological issue had been resolved in Deng's speech on the four cardinal principles on March 30 and by Deng's assertion of Mao's ideology as interpreted by Deng—to seek the true path from facts. Now it was time to establish the criteria for selecting and training those who would form the leadership teams, first at the top and then at the lower levels, on down to the grassroots. And they would recruit and cultivate new party members. In the weeks after this speech, Deng went on to visit Shanghai, Shandong, and Tianjin, where he held several meetings designed to encourage the party committees to lay plans for cultivating talent.

Deng's choice of timing for party building followed the usual historical pattern. Since the founding of the party, once one side won a dispute and
consolidated its power, its leaders would not only select high officials but also undertake a recruiting campaign to bring in those who would fit their criteria for new members. By the summer of 1979, most of the senior party officials had returned and occupied key positions, replacing the soldiers and radicals who had occupied key positions during the Cultural Revolution. Hua was sufficiently weakened by the summer of 1979 that he could no longer play a major role in party building. With Deng and his senior officials in charge, they could reach considerable agreement on the kind of officials they were seeking to cultivate.

Over the years, winners of inner-party struggles had various preferences for the kind of new members they sought—revolutionaries, soldiers, or radicals. Deng wanted for his team those who could contribute to the four modernizations. In particular, Deng was looking for officials capable of dealing with modern issues of foreign trade, finance, and technology and this in turn meant recruiting and promoting those with higher educational levels and with knowledge of science, technology, and management. As obvious as this may seem to leaders in many modern societies, in China at the time this represented a fundamental change. During Mao's era, being “red” had been more important than being “expert.” Since 1949, leadership positions had mostly gone to those who were “red,” those from worker and peasant backgrounds, while the educated experts from before 1949, whose families could afford their education, were labeled as coming from bourgeois and landlord classes. Deng declared that those old classes were gone, that he wanted people of ability, without regard to family background. To make way for new high-level leaders, Deng sought to remove Politburo members identified with conservative policies, beginning with four of Hua's key supporters—Wang Dongxing, Wu De, Chen Xilian, and Ji Dengkui—and he explained their removal and the selection of the new leaders in terms of what was needed to achieve modernization.

Although Deng did not announce his choices for the key positions in his administration until the end of 1979, he spent much of the year considering, consulting, and observing. Except for a handful of personal staff members and the military, Deng did not choose leaders primarily on the basis of their personal loyalty to him (see
Chapter 18
for the selection of his military team). Instead, he wanted the best person in each job and he felt confident that if the person was qualified and dedicated to the party, he could cooperate with them. Deng did not confide in the people whom he appointed, even those promoted to high positions; he dealt with them in a pleasant but businesslike and somewhat formal manner. They were comrades dedicated to the
same cause, not personal friends. For key positions, he selected people of great talent and energy—people committed to reform and opening—who had been tested step by step, not people who had suddenly risen from much lower levels.
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A good judge of people, Deng spent a great deal of time considering personnel appointments. As general secretary in the decade before the Cultural Revolution, he had become familiar with many mid-level party members who, by the 1980s, had become senior leaders of the party. But for key appointments, Deng also consulted privately with other high officials to obtain their frank assessments, especially of people with whom they would work closely, before making his decision.
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The two highest-level members of Deng's team, Chen Yun and Li Xiannian, were not selected by him. They had such high positions that it would have been difficult to push them aside even if he had wanted to. Deng, Chen Yun, and Li Xiannian were of the same generation (born in 1904, 1905, and 1907, respectively). They had known each other long before 1949; all three had worked in Beijing under Mao and Zhou Enlai in the 1950s and early 1960s. Chen Yun and Li Xiannian could not compare with Deng as public figures, but knowledgeable officials described the power structure in the 1980s as “two and a half”—meaning that within high-level party circles, Chen Yun was regarded roughly as Deng's equal, and Li Xiannian was half a step behind. Chen Yun, though a year younger than Deng, had for twenty years beginning in the mid-1930s held a position above Deng's, and no one could match his authority in guiding the economy or in dealing with the history of personnel issues. When Chen Yun was on the sidelines from 1962 to 1978, Li Xiannian had been responsible for leading the economy under Premier Zhou Enlai.

Almost no high officials one or two decades younger than Deng had an opportunity to attend university. Deng chose for high political leadership those who respected education and had worked to educate themselves. Deng selected for his team three officials whom he was comfortable with, people he believed could lead China's modernization: Hu Yaobang (born 1915), Zhao Ziyang (born 1919), and Wan Li (born 1916). Hu Yaobang had proved capable of leading scientists at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhao Ziyang had directed promising experiments in industrial reorganization in Sichuan province, and Wan Li had brought order to the railways. These three could in turn help develop young officials capable of understanding China's needs in the areas of modern science, technology, and engineering, and lead them in the implementation of innovative management techniques. Even though the
three would dedicate themselves to serving Deng, they, too, were comrades dedicated to a common cause, disciplined followers implementing party policy, rather than friends. Even Wan Li, though closer to Deng than Hu or Zhao, did not consider himself a friend, but a loyal subordinate. A sixth member of the Deng team, Deng Liqun (also born in 1915), did not hold an administrative position as high as the others, but he could exercise great influence as a speechwriter and writer of internal memoranda because he had strong convictions and enjoyed the support of Chen Yun and Wang Zhen. A seventh member of the team, Hu Qiaomu (born 1912), played a special role as the guardian of orthodoxy. In an era when institutions were in flux, the personal backgrounds, characteristics, inclinations, and operating styles of these seven were critical in shaping developments during the 1980s. They were all people of high intellectual ability and broad experience who for decades had held important positions in the party.

In the Deng administration from 1980 until 1987 when Hu was removed, to use Western terms, Deng was the chairman of the board and chief executive officer and under Deng, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang were the active presidents of the two separate divisions, the party and the government. The party set the overall policies and managed personnel and propaganda at all levels from the top to the grassroots, whereas the government carried out administration at all levels. High officials held both party and government positions, and the work often overlapped, but in principle Hu and Zhao guided activities in their respective spheres, prepared documents for Deng's approval, and guided the frontline implementation—the “daily work”—in the party and government. Despite all the difficulties at the time, many fellow officials later regarded the early 1980s as a golden age when high-level officials worked together to launch and implement China's “reform and opening.”

Deng was troubled by the fact that below this group of top leaders, because of the disruptions of the Cultural Revolution, there was not a well-trained next generation of experienced leaders. Deng compared the situation to the shortage of grain in late spring when the grain from the fall harvest had nearly run out and there was not yet ripe grain in the field, to meet the people's needs. China, he said, was lucky to have some senior officials who were still able to serve, but it was urgent to close the gap, to ripen the green grain on the stalks more quickly by training a successor generation from among those in their thirties and forties.

Deng asked the Party Organization Department to draw up a list of especially
promising younger officials who had the potential for rising to high positions. When the list was presented later in the year, Deng and Chen Yun were dismayed to see that only 31 of the 165 people on it were university graduates. Although he did not believe that educated young people should suddenly be catapulted to the top, Deng expected that, as they proved themselves at each level, they should rise quickly.

In July 1979 Deng directed that the organization departments throughout the country, with the active participation of the top leaders at each level, aim to cultivate new talent within two or three years.
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From September 5 to October 7, a national forum on organizational work held in Beijing was designed to follow up on Deng's efforts to cultivate talented successors. The major address at the forum was given by Hu Yaobang, who conveyed Deng's view that succession was the most pressing issue facing the country.

Deng, like other Chinese Communist leaders, talked frequently about “cultivating”
(peiyang)
successors, by which they meant, in addition to selecting and providing formal training, personal mentoring. High officials in any unit were expected to oversee the overall development of the younger people placed under them by encouraging them to read certain works, display their loyalty to the party, and accomplish something through their work.

Although key decisions on personnel would be made by the top leaders in the unit, the organization department of the party at each level played a critical role in assembling the files on each party member, carrying out training programs, and sending files on the appropriate pool of candidates to higher officials for their consideration.

While Deng was occupied with party building, he and his fellow leaders also had to confront the deep public alienation toward the party that had brought about the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Until late 1979, the party leaders had not acknowledged their responsibility for these disasters, making it impossible for the party to gain credibility when it talked of other issues. It was decided at the NPC meeting in June that Marshal Ye should attempt to deal with these issues in a major address on the eve of the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the Communist Chinese government.
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Marshal Ye's Thirtieth Anniversary Speech, October 1, 1979

Deng played a major role in shaping the speech that was to be delivered by Marshal Ye Jianying; he directed that the drafters should give an overall positive
assessment of Chinese history since 1949 but should also present a frank recognition of the errors during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which the Chinese people knew all too well from their own experience. It should offer a broad perspective on Chinese Communist Party history and provide a sense of new direction for the future. Hu Qiaomu and a staff of some twenty people helped to prepare it and it went through nine drafts that were vetted among high-level leaders, under Deng's watchful eye.
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Marshal Ye was the ideal person to deliver the speech. He was chairman of the NPC that was responsible for supervising government activities and the anniversary was a government occasion, not a party occasion. Further, he was widely respected, had no ambitions of own, and had managed to keep good relations with all sides including Deng and Hua Guofeng; he had never been severely criticized by Mao and was known to be close to the beloved Zhou Enlai; and he had good relations with the military. Marshal Ye was so weak physically, however, that he could only read the first few lines and the last few lines of his speech—someone else read the rest.
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Marshal Ye's speech, some sixteen thousand words in length, told the story of how the Chinese Communist Party had acted independently from the Soviet Union, in accord with China's own social and historical heritage, and how the Chinese Communist Party had achieved victory. Ye traced the growth of the Chinese economy and the expansion of public education. He proudly related how the party had overcome foreign aggression, but he also acknowledged that in 1957 the party had been wrong to attack so many “bourgeois rightists,” wrong to boast of its own accomplishments, and wrong to have stirred up a “Communist wind” that tried to achieve such a high stage of collectivization that it had departed from reality. He affirmed that the Cultural Revolution was a serious policy error that had allowed Lin Biao, the Gang of Four, and other conspirators to attack so many good people. Ye said party efforts to build an advanced socialist system had been immature, that the party had been severely chastened by its mistakes, and that it was now working to build a “modern powerful socialist country” that would bring a great future.
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In the speech, Ye also stressed the importance of a spiritual as well as material civilization, a theme that later would be developed more fully by Hu Yaobang.