Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (23 page)

Hua tried to put off a decision on Deng’s rehabilitation as long as he could, but more and more members of the old guard were returning to political life, and they stepped up the pressure for their comrade’s return. In 1976, Hua sent emissaries to Deng who were supposed to sound out his positions and request that Deng publicly embrace the Cultural Revolution. Deng refused. He declined to offer any apologies for his past or to offer any guarantees about the future. He would return to power on his own terms—and, unlike Hua, he would not allow himself to be tied to Mao’s policy mistakes. Hua was soon forced to concede the point. The first the Chinese saw of Deng after his post-Tiananmen downfall was at the famous soccer match in
July 1977, when the cameras lingered over the diminutive former leader as he sat in the stands. The spectators in the stadium gave him a big ovation.

In the ensuing months Deng spent his time quietly cementing his position, nudging his allies forward into key posts, and pushing hard for the rehabilitation of still more high-ranking victims of Maoist extremism. Deng was calling in a lifetime’s worth of chits. Hua, relatively obscure until Mao had singled him out for the top job, had little in the way of comparable leverage. His only hope was to marshal the support of others like himself, those who had benefited from the rapid turnover of the Cultural Revolution.

The party leadership revealed few signs of conflict to the outside world. The Whateverists maintained an orthodox Maoist tone in the media, which was to be expected, considering that Cultural Revolutionaries still occupied many of the key positions. Yet a great deal was going on behind the placid facade. Those who wanted to roll back the legacy of ultra-Maoism were poising themselves for a challenge.

A totalitarian system like Mao’s China offered little opportunity for the overt display of competing political agendas. Rival groups within the leading circles tended to advance their agendas with the help of subtle signals, floating trial balloons, marshaling bureaucratic support, or smoking out enemies. Impending feuds or major policy shifts could be signaled through recondite slogans or obscure cultural debates. (For example, Mao’s acolytes had launched the Cultural Revolution by attacking a play,
Hai Rui Dismissed from Office
, that they declared to be an assault on Mao and the revolutionary principles he embodied.) To outsiders, the distinctions involved in such maneuverings could be utterly bewildering, if not absurd. But, as the Chinese knew only too well from personal experience, even the most arcane debates could have profound, if not lethal, effects.

And so it was that many took note when, in May 1978, the prominent national newspaper
Guangming Daily
published an article with the innocuous title “Practice Is the Sole Criterion for Judging Truth.” The piece was quickly picked up by a series of other publications, including the leading army newspaper. The title sounds dull enough, but it went off like a bomb. The article, collectively authored by a team of academics working under the direction of rising party reformer Hu Yaobang, argued that Communist ideology was not the only yardstick for determining what was true. If Marxism was indeed a scientific theory, as it claimed to be, its findings ought to be tested through experiment: apply them to reality and see if they worked. Marx had said that the social and political prescriptions derived from his theory had to be subjected to constant empirical testing to make sure that they coincided
with the dictates of historical materialism. And just to be sure that everyone got the point, the authors of the article undergirded their argument with a slogan from Mao himself—the one they used as the article’s title.
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They were, in short, using Mao’s own words to undermine the central Maoist postulate of the Cultural Revolution, namely, the idea that the imperative of “revolution” overrode all else, including professional expertise, scientific knowledge, or economic efficiency. To many Chinese, the article’s paean to pragmatism sounded like a healthy dose of common sense after years of hysteria. Yet this was exactly what the Whateverists did not want to allow. After all, during the Cultural Revolution, Mao and his adepts had followed a rather different principle: for them it was revolutionary zeal, directed against the entrenched establishment, that had become the decisive litmus test for the correctness of policy. It was this same mind-set that had led to the persecution of countless engineers, managers, scholars, and scientists on the grounds of insufficient “class consciousness”—with devastating consequences for the Chinese economy.

Prioritizing “practice,” as the authors of the new article demanded, thus represented an implicit challenge to those who considered themselves to be the keepers of the chairman’s flame. If this new argument won the day, unwavering loyalty to Maoist slogans would no longer be the deciding factor in career advancement or political struggle. Professional skill, managerial competence, or scholarly acumen would come to the forefront.

Deng, who does not appear to have been directly involved in the publication of that article, was quick to see its uses in his reckoning with Hua. Since his return to the center of party life, Deng had already been putting a different Mao quote at the center of his speeches: “Seek truth from facts.” This, of course, was a dig at Hua and his adherents, who continued to stress that truth was whatever Mao had said it was. Among the things that Deng had learned from his long years of involvement in party intrigues was the importance of defining the terms of debate.
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He now set out to deploy his “good,” pragmatic Mao against the “bad,” doctrinaire one of the Cultural Revolutionaries. Would the party cling to the Mao celebrated by the Gang of Four, inflexible, rigid, and dogmatic? Or would Chinese Communists reach back to the earlier version of Mao that was now held up high by Deng and his friends—a Mao who had (allegedly) celebrated the virtues of practicality and sober realism?

In truth, of course, the rather abstruse debate now under way between the Whateverists and the reformers who became known as the “Practice Faction” was less about philosophical semantics than about power. The pragmatists around Deng did
not want to discard Mao altogether. Many of them still believed in the revolution that had brought them to power, if not its more recent excesses. They were haunted by the example of Khrushchev, who had (as they saw it) fatally undermined the Soviet Communist Party by discarding Stalin. They concluded that rejecting Mao completely was out of the question: even those whose criticisms of his policies ran deep feared the destabilizing effects of an all-too-hasty reckoning with the recent past. Most members of the Practice Faction wanted to retain Mao’s image as the father of the revolution, the ultimate, quasi-divine source of party legitimacy, while discarding the more radical side of his thought that stood in the way of a prosperous and productive China. These two new slogans—”Seek truth from facts” and “Practice is the sole criterion for judging truth”—became the rallying cry of those who, like Deng, wanted to see China prosperous and productive rather than pure and poor.
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As Deng traveled about the country, speaking to local party gatherings and hobnobbing with old associates, he made it clear that China could not hope to move forward unless it put economics before ideology. While the party should continue to treat Mao with the respect due his real achievements, it was time to drop the “key link” of class struggle and to focus on raising living standards. China could not become strong as long as it was backward.

T
his, then, was how things stood in late 1978 as the delegates to the Central Party Work Conference crowded into the gloomy conference rooms of the Jingxi Hotel. Everyone there was aware of the stakes. Some of the conference participants had benefited from the Cultural Revolution, rising to take the places of the purged. Others had been on the receiving end of the same turmoil, forced to wear dunce caps as they were paraded through the streets before jeering mobs or banished to the far ends of the country, beaten, or tortured. Some of them had only recently been rehabilitated. It was hard to imagine how the experiences of both groups could be reconciled within the same party.

The delegates in attendance also faced pressing problems within wider Chinese society. Mao’s death, the arrest of the Gang of Four, and the effective end of the Cultural Revolution had released enormous pent-up tensions in the country at large. To begin with, there were the students. Mao had come to regard traditional institutions of learning as a major source of the traditionalism he wanted to destroy, and in the early years of the Cultural Revolution he had shut down the universities. Many of the students joined the militant Red Guards, in which capacity they tormented those deemed to be “counterrevolutionary.” A few years later, in an effort to counter the spreading anarchy, Mao had many of the Red Guard units disbanded and
dispatched their members to the countryside. Some, caught up in the utopian fervor of the moment, had even gone willingly. This was only logical. The Red Guards had celebrated heroes of militant ignorance, like the schoolboy who handed in an empty exam paper rather than submit to the bourgeois testing standards of his reactionary teachers. For ten years Chinese higher education had ground to a halt.

But by 1977 and 1978, hungry and disillusioned, the students—of whom seventeen million had been dispatched to the countryside—were beginning to return to the cities. One of Deng’s first tasks after reassuming his post under Hua was to jump-start China’s entire university system. In the fall of 1977 the government announced that university entrance examinations would be held once again. Young Chinese thrilled to the news. Deng managed to revive entrance examinations, push would-be students through, and reopen the universities and institutes that very fall (although with delays). It was a remarkable feat. Even so, the fact remained that there were simply not enough places for all of them. Some of the rusticated students were too old and no longer saw the point. They demanded work. But there were no jobs to give them. Some economists have estimated that effective unemployment in the years following Mao’s death approached 25 percent.

Some of these frustrated youths turned, predictably enough, to delinquency. The Cultural Revolution had imbued the younger generation with a spirit of violent rebellion that proved hard to stamp out entirely. Meanwhile, millions of prisoners were being released from concentration camps and rural exile. Not all of them had been punished for political reasons; many of those freed were genuine criminals. Crime rates soared. Discontented workers, frustrated by low living standards and chaotic management, staged strikes or expressed passive resistance through shoddy work. The army and police were constantly on the move, stamping out brush fires of discontent.

Most of these malcontents were incapable of articulating their demands. But someone was prepared to do it for them. In September 1978, the editors of a magazine called
China Youth
, which had been prohibited from publishing during the Cultural Revolution, decided to relaunch it. They decided to mark its return in style by publishing some poems commemorating the Tiananmen Incident of 1976. Party censors intervened and thwarted the editors from going ahead with their plans. The frustrated literati refused to give up, so they resorted to a time-honored technique of Chinese mass communication: the
dazibao
, or “big-character poster.” They decided to print the poems in poster form and paste them up in a public place. They needed a venue where a big audience was ensured, so they opted for a spot that other unrecognized writers had been using for a few months. This was a long
stretch of brick wall under a row of leafless sycamore trees next to a bus depot in Xidan, a spot in downtown Beijing, just a few blocks from the Jingxi Hotel, that tens of thousands of commuters passed through every day.
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China Youth’s
decision to use the site dramatically boosted its notoriety. Crowds of readers quickly formed. To everyone’s surprise, the authorities declined to interfere. Posters proliferated. Soon people were coming from all over China to take a look. Crowds gathered, eager to experience the heady atmosphere of a place where a myriad of views competed for attention.

This was Xidan Democracy Wall. Young Chinese described it as their version of Speaker’s Corner in London’s Hyde Park. For a few weeks in the winter of 1978–1979, it would become a key strategic asset in the battle for China’s soul.

At some point in late November, a poster appeared on the wall criticizing Mao by name. No one could recall such a thing ever happening before. The author of the poster, who called himself Work Permit Number 0538 (and gave the address of the motor repair shop where he worked), wrote: “In 1976 after the Tiananmen Incident, the Gang of Four made use of the prestige and power of Chairman Mao’s mistaken judgment on class struggle and launched an all-out attack on the cause of revolution in China.” During the Cultural Revolution, one man had been sentenced to fifteen years in a labor camp for absentmindedly scratching his back with a copy of the
Little Red Book
during a mass meeting. Now everyone waited to see what would happen to the author of this shocking text. Would he be shot? Surely, at least, the poster itself would be torn down. But two days later it was still there.
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The posters that followed pushed the boundaries even further. One wondered how the all-knowing Mao had failed to notice that his own wife, Jiang Qing, was actually a “traitor.” Another called on the party leadership to observe the rule of law. Another demanded the rehabilitation of party leaders who had been purged by Mao in the early 1960s. Not all of the provocations were political. “Why can’t the national economy catch up with the one in Taiwan?” one poster asked. “How can the United States, a capitalist country only 200 years old, be the most developed in the world?”
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