Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (82 page)

Although the readjustment policy ended with the 12th Party Congress in September 1982, one important policy that had jelled as part of the retrenchment effort still remained: birth control. Chen Yun had long believed that China's population was too large for its resource base. A party document of December 1978 acknowledged that grain consumption per capita was slightly less than it had been in 1957, and that the average annual per capita rural income was 60 yuan (at the exchange rate at the time, about US$39). Roughly 12 percent of the funds then used to pay for imports was used for grain.
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When Mao was alive, despite some educational programs and the
supplying of birth control devices, birth control made little headway. On December 20, 1980, however, as part of the overall readjustment policy, Li Xiannian sent a key document on implementing the birth control program to the State Planning Commission headed by Yao Yilin. On January 4, 1981, the resulting Document No. 1 ordered that officials “use legal, administrative, and economic measures to encourage couples to have but one [child].”
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The one-child policy was implemented in the urban areas without qualification, but because the Chinese government lacked funds to provide benefits for the elderly in the countryside, officials allowed rural families whose first child was a girl to have a second child in the hope that it would be a son who could look after his parents in their old age.

No other society in the world has enforced such a stringent birth control policy. Paradoxically, the strong neighborhood associations in the city and countryside, which had been established by Mao, became the vehicle to enforce the new birth control policy, which Mao would have vehemently opposed. Once the one-child policy was introduced in the urban areas, most urban families chose to have only one child and few rural families had more than two.

On March 23, 1979, Deng had declared his strong support for the birth control policy, which Li Xiannian and others had helped put in place. In presenting the program to the public, as customary, Deng began with the broad picture, saying the policy was necessary to reduce grain imports and expand imports of foreign technology, and to attain a high average per capita income by the end of the century.
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Deng reiterated the same message in several speeches that followed.
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As he did with other controversial issues, Deng carefully avoided going out on a limb by advocating specific measures. Instead, he referred to the work of well-known scientists and statisticians, along with authoritative-sounding scientific analyses, that laid out the need for birth control. The policy introduced at the time of the readjustment policy was to continue not only for the rest of Deng's era, but in the decades after he stepped down.

Wan Li and Rural Reform

In 1978 China still did not have enough grain to feed its population. Collectivized agriculture, introduced in 1955 and later pushed to higher levels, had led to advances in irrigation, but it had also brought massive starvation. The downsizing of the scale of the collectives after the Great Leap and the increased
supply of chemical fertilizer led to production increases, but grain shortages remained severe.

At the time of the Third Plenum, some officials were already advocating a further decrease in the size of the agricultural units, but the atmosphere among top leaders at the time firmly supported the continuation of collective agriculture: officials then pushed for improved management, better seeds, more fertilizer, and more farm machinery. At the Third Plenum, it was specifically forbidden for rural areas to contract agricultural production down to the household. Party officials in the collectives had a vested interest in retaining the collectives, so they were not willing to admit that collectivization had not been successful. Some party leaders even feared that if private land ownership were allowed, poor farmers would end up becoming tenants, landlords would return to exploit the tenants, and the pre-1949 rural problems would reappear. Some believed that the rural party organization would also be seriously weakened.

In 1962, before going to Mao with a proposal to assign the individual rural household responsibility for grain production, Chen Yun had asked Deng privately whether he would support such a proposal; Deng told him he would. But if Deng had advocated such a proposal in 1978, he would have been vulnerable to the same accusations leveled against him during the Cultural Revolution: “pursuing the capitalist road.” So how did Deng find a way to permit experimentation with household farming while managing the political opposition? The breakthrough came under Wan Li in Anhui province.

In June 1977, at about the same time that Deng was allowed to return to work, Wan Li was appointed by Hua Guofeng as first party secretary of Anhui province.
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Wan Li's predecessor in Anhui had stuck close to the Maoist vision of supporting large collectives; starvation was still widespread.
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Anhui, an overwhelmingly rural province, was one of the poorest in the country: an estimated three to four million had starved to death during the Great Leap Forward.

In the first few weeks after his arrival in Anhui in August 1977, Wan Li visited all the major rural areas of the province and observed and talked with local officials.
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He was shocked to see the extensive poverty. The towns were filled with emaciated people who lacked warm clothing and adequate housing. In some places, there were only crude structures made of mud instead of wooden tables. As Wan Li told his children, he could not help but ask why, so many years after the Communists had taken power, conditions could still be so bad.
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Even before Wan Li arrived in Anhui, the party had directed its Rural Policy Research Office to survey several counties in Anhui's Chu prefecture, where people were still dying of starvation, and to formulate recommendations for dealing with the food shortages. Wan Li, on the basis of their several months of study and his personal visits to the area, had guided the drafting of the “Provincial Party Committee Six-Point Proposal” for dealing with the rural problems in Anhui. The proposal recommended (1) that the production teams, depending on the circumstances and as long as production responsibilities were met, allow certain tasks in the fields to be assigned to a small work group or even to an individual, (2) that the autonomy of the production teams in making decisions be respected by higher levels, (3) that the quotas assigned to the production teams and individual members be reduced, (4) that the produce be distributed to members according to their work, not according to their need, (5) that decisions on the allocation of grain reflect the interests of the nation, the collective, and the individual, and (6) that team members be permitted to work on their own private plots and to sell the produce at local markets.
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The document did not directly attack the almost sacred Dazhai collective model; it simply did not mention it. Wan Li knew that Chen Yonggui, the Dazhai hero who was still officially in charge of agriculture, would regard the six points as bourgeois.
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At the time of Wan Li's six-point proposal, national policy explicitly prohibited contracting down to the household and Wan Li could not oppose national policy. But when Deng saw the Anhui Party Committee's six-point proposal, produced under Wan Li's leadership, he, like a number of other officials, immediately affirmed the value of the experiment.
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Deng said that where there is serious starvation in poor mountain areas, peasants should be allowed to find their own ways to avoid starvation. Leftists realized that Deng was giving permission to decentralize agricultural production down to the household in the poor mountain areas, but it was hard to argue against peasants' finding ways to avoid starvation.

In November 1977, Wan Li addressed an assembly of Anhui county party secretaries to discuss implementation of the six-point proposal. The assembly was large and official enough to reassure Anhui officials who were frightened that if they followed Wan Li and the political line were to change, they would be attacked for pursuing capitalism. Wan Li, standing firm, simply declared that “any methods or policies that interfere with the advancement of production are wrong.” Instead, officials should rely on practice to determine which ways worked best, to give full play to creativity, and not to worry about making
errors. Wan Li's conviction and his willingness to take personal responsibility, qualities he had displayed when ending the railway stoppages in Xuzhou in 1975, gave the officials a measure of confidence to move ahead.
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Despite some lingering concerns, the policy was implemented, and in early 1978 Wan Li allowed local areas to continue to decrease the size of the agricultural units. In some places such as Fengyang county, where starvation remained widespread, production responsibility was contracted down to the household.
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A few weeks later, on February 1, 1978, the day after Deng arrived in Sichuan on his way from Myanmar to Nepal, Deng told Sichuan Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang about Wan Li's success in Anhui with the six-point proposal.
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In fact, Zhao Ziyang had already begun permitting production teams to decentralize rural work to smaller units (
baochan dao zu
), although this step had not been fully reported to Beijing. Deng encouraged Zhao to allow bold experiments similar to those of Wan Li, and Zhao complied, quickly developing a twelve-point program for decentralizing responsibility for agricultural production.
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He declared that the basic accounting unit could be a small group, but he did not go as far as Wan Li; he did not allow the responsibility to be passed down to the household.
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By the fall of 1978, officials in Anhui, cheered by the successful midyear harvests produced by the smaller work groups, reported their successes, setting off arguments with those who supported large-scale cooperatives. At a meeting of the National Agricultural Economic Association held in Suzhou in the fall of 1978, an official from the Anhui Agricultural Policy Research Office had the courage to say that one should not blindly follow the Dazhai model and that the government should not launch so many political movements that interfered with local economic initiatives.
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But on the other side, Chen Yonggui, still vice premier in charge of agricultural affairs, accused Wan Li of secretly promoting individual household farming. Newspaper articles, too, denounced Wan Li for opposing Dazhai and for restoring capitalism. But Wan Li had gained confidence from the successful harvests in the areas that had tried decentralized work assignments and he was rapidly winning support within the party. In November 1978, when criticized by Chen Yonggui, Wan Li, living up to his reputation for bravery, replied: “You say you are speaking from the Dazhai experience; I say Dazhai is an ultra-leftist model. . . . You go your way and I'll go mine. . . . Don't impose your views on me and I won't impose mine on you. As for who is right and who is wrong, let's see which way works best.”
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Until he fell from power, Hua Guofeng continued to support the Dazhai model and to advocate improving agricultural production by introducing new seeds, more chemical fertilizers, as well as water pumps, tractors, and other machinery. His goal was within five years to have a large tractor in every brigade and a small tractor in every production team.
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The eighteen large-scale fertilizer plants that had been approved in 1975 (when Deng was at the helm) were in full production by 1978. Hua continued building large chemical fertilizer factories, and by 1982 twice as much chemical fertilizer was available throughout the country as in 1978. Electric power in the countryside doubled between 1978 and 1982 as well. But Hua's expectations about these initiatives' positive effects on agriculture proved wildly optimistic. And although Deng did not object to Hua's efforts to introduce more and better industrial products to help agriculture, he also believed that a successful Chinese agricultural system would require spurring the enthusiasm of peasants by decentralizing rural production.

The Third Plenum in December 1978 continued to support the Dazhai model, creating concern among Anhui officials that they might be vulnerable to later attack.
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Although Chen Yonggui was replaced as vice premier in charge of agriculture shortly after the Third Plenum, his replacement Wang Zhenzhong still supported the Dazhai model, and in the spring of 1979 the new vice premier for agriculture wrote a letter to Hu Jiwei, editor of the
People's Daily
, asking him to help put a stop to the decentralization of production teams. A series of articles was published that opposed further decentralization and most members of the Politburo were still too cautious to take a different stance.
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In this atmosphere, Wan Li had serious doubts about whether his tolerance for further decentralization would be supported at higher levels. At a meeting on June 18, 1979, Wan Li took Chen Yun aside and asked his views. Chen said to Wan privately, “I support you with both hands.” Wan Li also asked Deng his views. Deng, not yet ready to support him publicly, replied, “You don't need to engage in debates, just go ahead, that's all. Just seek the truth from facts.”
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As the debate heated up, Wan Li was buoyed by the quiet support from Deng and Chen Yun. At a meeting in Beijing, when a vice minister of agriculture attacked the practice of contracting down to the household, Wan Li shot back: “You are a
feitou da er
” (fat head and big ears—in other words, like a pig). “You have plenty to eat. The peasants are thin because they do not have enough to eat. How can you tell the peasants they can't find a way to have enough to eat?”
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