On China (45 page)

On the basis of defending Maoist orthodoxy, Deng criticized Hua Guofeng’s Two Whatevers statement because it implied that Mao was infallible, which even the Great Helmsman had not claimed. (On the other hand, the fallibility of Mao was rarely asserted while he was living.) Deng invoked the formula by which Mao had judged Stalin—that he had been 70 percent correct and 30 percent wrong—suggesting that Mao himself might deserve a “70-30” rating (this would soon become official Party policy and remains so to this day). In the process, he managed to accuse the heir appointed by Mao, Hua Guofeng, of falsifying Mao’s legacy in his insistence on its literal application:

In short, there was no unchangeable orthodoxy. Chinese reform would be based to a large extent on what worked.

Deng sounded his basic themes with increasing urgency. In a May 1977 speech, he challenged China to “do better” than the Meiji Restoration, Japan’s dramatic modernization drive of the nineteenth century. Invoking Communist ideology to encourage what amounted to a market economy, Deng suggested that “as proletarians,” the Chinese would be able to exceed a program engineered by the “emerging Japanese bourgeoisie” (though one suspects that this was really an attempt to mobilize Chinese national pride). Unlike Mao, who appealed to his people by the vision of a transcendent, glorious future, Deng challenged them into a major commitment to overcome their backwardness:

As Deng consolidated power, these principles turned into the operational maxims of China’s efforts to become a world power. Mao had shown little interest in increasing China’s international trade or making its economy internationally competitive. On Mao’s death, America’s total trade with China amounted to $336 million, slightly lower than the level of America’s trade with Honduras and one-tenth of America’s trade with Taiwan, which had approximately 1.6 percent of China’s population.
¹³

China as the present-day economic superpower is the legacy of Deng Xiaoping. It is not that he designed specific programs to accomplish his ends. Rather, he fulfilled the ultimate task of a leader—of taking his society from where it is to where it has never been. Societies operate by standards of average performance. They sustain themselves by practicing the familiar. But they progress through leaders with a vision of the necessary and the courage to undertake a course whose benefits at first reside largely in their vision.

Deng’s political challenge was that, in the first thirty years of Communist rule, China had been governed by a dominating leader who propelled it toward unity and international respect but also toward unsustainable domestic and social goals. Mao had unified the country and, except for Taiwan and Mongolia, restored it to its historic limits. But he demanded of it efforts contrary to its historic distinctiveness. China had achieved greatness by developing a cultural model in rhythm with the pace its society could sustain. Mao’s continuous revolution had driven China to the limits of even its vast endurance. It had produced pride in the reemergence of a national identity taken seriously by the international community. But it had not discovered how China could progress other than through fits of ideological exaltation.

Mao had governed as a traditional emperor of a majestic and aweinspiring kind. He embodied the myth of the imperial ruler supplying the link between heaven and earth and closer to the divine than the terrestrial. Deng governed in the spirit of another Chinese tradition: basing omnipotence on the ubiquitousness but also the invisibility of the ruler.

Many cultures, and surely all Western ones, buttress the authority of the ruler by demonstrative contact of some kind with the ruled. This is why in Athens, Rome, and most Western pluralistic states, oratory was considered an asset in government. There is no general tradition of oratory in China (Mao was somewhat of an exception). Chinese leaders traditionally have not based their authority on rhetorical skills or physical contact with the masses. In the mandarin tradition, they operate essentially out of sight, legitimized by performance. Deng held no major office; he refused all honorific titles; he almost never appeared on television, and practiced politics almost entirely behind the scenes. He ruled not like an emperor but as the principal mandarin.
¹⁴

Mao had governed by counting on the endurance of the Chinese people to sustain the suffering his personal visions would impose on them. Deng governed by liberating the creativeness of the Chinese people to bring about their own vision of the future. Mao strove for economic advancement with mystical faith in the power of the Chinese “masses” to overcome any obstacle by sheer willpower and ideological purity. Deng was forthright about China’s poverty and the vast gaps that separated its standard of living from that of the developed world. Decreeing that “poverty is not socialism,” Deng proclaimed that China needed to obtain foreign technology, expertise, and capital to remedy its deficiencies.

Deng culminated his return at the December 1978 Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. The Plenum promulgated the slogan that would characterize all of Deng’s subsequent policies: “Reform and Opening Up.” Marking a break with Maoist orthodoxy, the Central Committee approved pragmatic “socialist modernization” policies echoing Zhou Enlai’s Four Modernizations. Private initiative in agriculture was again permitted. The verdict on the crowds mourning Zhou (which had earlier been deemed “counterrevolutionary”) was reversed, and the veteran military commander Peng Dehuai—who had commanded during the Korean War and was later purged by Mao for criticizing the Great Leap Forward—was posthumously rehabilitated. At the close of the conference, Deng issued a clarion call in a speech on “how to emancipate our minds, use our heads, seek truth from facts and unite as one in looking to the future.” After a decade in which Mao Zedong had prescribed the answer to virtually all of life’s questions, Deng stressed the need to loosen ideological constraints and encourage “thinking things out for yourself.”
¹⁵

Using Lin Biao as a metaphor for the Gang of Four and aspects of Mao, Deng condemned “intellectual taboos” and “bureaucratism.” Merit needed to replace ideological correctness; too many took the road of least resistance and fell in with the prevalent stagnation:

Independent creative thinking was to be the principal guideline of the future:

The break with Maoist orthodoxy, at the same time, revealed the reformer’s dilemma. The revolutionary’s dilemma is that most revolutions occur in opposition to what is perceived as abuse of power. But the more existing obligations are dismantled, the more force must be used to re-create a sense of obligation. Hence the frequent outcome of revolution is an increase in central power; the more sweeping the revolution, the more this is true.

The dilemma of reform is the opposite. The more the scope of choice is expanded, the harder it becomes to compartmentalize it. In pursuit of productivity, Deng stressed the importance of “thinking things out for yourself” and advocated the “complete” emancipation of minds. Yet what if those minds, once emancipated, demanded political pluralism? Deng’s vision called for “large numbers of pathbreakers who dare to think, explore new ways and generate new ideas,” but it assumed that these pathbreakers would limit themselves to exploring practical ways to build a prosperous China and stay away from exploration of ultimate political objectives. How did Deng envision reconciling emancipation of thought with the imperative for political stability? Was this a calculated risk, based on the assessment that China had no better alternative? Or did he, following Chinese tradition, reject the likelihood of any challenge to political stability, especially as Deng was making the Chinese people better off and considerably freer? Deng’s vision of economic liberalization and national revitalization did not include a significant move toward what would be recognized in the West as pluralistic democracy. Deng sought to preserve one-party rule not so much because he reveled in the perquisites of power (he famously abjured many of the luxuries of Mao and Jiang Qing), but because he believed the alternative was anarchy.

Deng was soon forced to confront these issues. In the 1970s, he had encouraged individuals to air their grievances about suffering during the Cultural Revolution. But when this newfound openness developed into nascent pluralism, Deng in 1979 found himself obliged to discuss in detail how he understood the nature of freedom as well as its limits:

That these incidents were not isolated or rare events was demonstrated by the catalogue of them presented by Deng. He described the China Human Rights Group, which had gone so far as to request that the President of the United States show concern for human rights in China: “Can we permit such an open call for intervention in China’s internal affairs?”
¹⁹
Deng’s catalogue included the Shanghai Democracy Forum, which, according to Deng, advocated a turn to capitalism. Some of these groups, according to Deng, had made clandestine contact with the Nationalist authorities in Taiwan, and others were talking of seeking political asylum abroad.

This was an astonishing admission of political challenge. Deng was clearer about its scope than about how to deal with it:

Though he was insistent on authoritarian conduct of politics, Deng abandoned the personality cult, declined to purge his predecessor Hua Guofeng (instead allowing him to fade into insignificance), and began planning for an orderly succession for himself. After consolidating power, Deng declined to occupy most of the top formal positions in the Party hierarchy.
²¹
As he explained to me in 1982, when I met with him in Beijing:

Deng broke with the precedent set by Mao by downplaying his own expertise rather than presenting himself as a genius in any particular field. He entrusted his subordinates to innovate, then endorsed what worked. As he explained, with typical directness, in a 1984 conference on foreign investment: “I am a layman in the field of economics. I have made a few remarks on the subject but all from a political point of view. For example, I proposed China’s economic policy of opening to the outside world, but as for the details or specifics of how to implement it, I know very little indeed.”
²²