Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (11 page)

Deng, the implementer, had always been more practical and realistic than Mao, the philosopher, poet, and dreamer, but Mao valued Deng and others like Lin Biao in part because they would freely express their views to him, while speaking little in public. Deng, like many other party loyalists, aware of Mao's unwillingness to tolerate dissent during the Great Leap Forward, restrained himself from criticizing Mao. Furthermore, he and others believed that Mao's decisions during the civil war and during the unification of the country had so often proved correct that they should suspend their doubts and just carry out his orders. Deng Xiaoping later told his daughter Deng Rong that he regretted not doing more to stop Mao from making such grievous errors.

The misguided Great Leap Forward caused devastation throughout China. Starvation was widespread. After peasants were organized in huge communes with mess halls so that more of them could work on large poorly planned construction projects or in the fields, they could see that those who performed no work were fed as well as the others and they lost any incentive to work, causing a great drop in the size of the harvests; many mess halls ran out of food.

Environmental degradation was also a problem. Local areas that were encouraged to build “backyard furnaces” deforested their own natural areas to find firewood and exhausted their own people in producing substandard metal. Large new construction sites also depleted supplies of cement, leaving little for better-planned projects, and local party secretaries, pressured to make unrealistic promises for grain production, later drained local storehouses to meet promises of grain delivery to higher levels, even though their own people were starving from lack of grain. Although it is impossible to measure the number of fatalities from famine over the three worst years, 1959 to 1961, statistics compiled by mainland officials estimate that about 16 to 17 million people died from unusual causes, and estimates by foreign analysts run as high as 45 million.
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Until 1959, Deng was an obedient official carrying out Mao's plans for the Great Leap Forward. As the disastrous effects of the utopian experiment became apparent, however, Deng had the unenviable task of containing the chaos and providing direction to local party officials trying to cope. Deng's daily work schedule generally included relaxing with his family in the evenings, but during the turmoil of the Great Leap Forward it was difficult to find time to rest. In the summer of 1959, a year after the launch of the Great Leap Forward, Deng slipped and broke his leg while playing billiards. Doctors testified that he would not be able to return to work for some months; some knowledgeable insiders believe Deng purposefully avoided the meetings because he knew he would be asked to support Mao's unrealistic efforts to keep the Great Leap alive and he wanted to avoid being put in such a position.

Deng's perspective had changed by the time his medical leave of absence began.
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After returning to work several months later, he continued to follow Mao's orders and declare his loyalty to Mao. But the disasters of the Great Leap Forward had widened the gap between the unreconstructed romantic visionary and the pragmatic implementer. Although complying with Mao's orders, Deng expanded his range of freedoms by not seeking Mao's direction as much as he had earlier. And in 1960–1961 Deng played an active role in making realistic adjustments in industry, agriculture, education, and other sectors to retrench from the excesses of the Great Leap. At the time, Mao did not criticize these realistic adjustments, but later he complained that when he was talking, Deng would sit in the back of the room and not listen. Mao grumbled that the officials under him were treating him like a departed ancestor, offering respect but not listening to what he said.

As much as the gaps between the revolutionary romantic and the pragmatic implementer over domestic issues caused strains in the early 1960s, Mao remained totally supportive of Deng in the strong role he then played in China's dispute with the Soviet Union. Deng led the Chinese delegation to the Soviet Union in August 1960 and again in October–November 1960, arguing for more freedom for China within the Communist movement. He also supervised preparations on the Chinese side for the exchange of nine nasty letters with the Soviet Union. In July 1963, Mao was so impressed with Deng's performance in the bitter exchange with Mikhail Suslov—an interaction so acrimonious that it weakened the international Communist movement—that he did Deng the rare honor of going to the Beijing airport to welcome him home. Indeed, Mao's confidence in Deng surrounding the anti-Soviet
dispute helped keep their relationship strong despite the awkwardness of their differences on domestic policy.
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After Nikita Khrushchev was overthrown in a coup by his colleagues in October 1964, Mao, already concerned about underlings who did not wholeheartedly follow his wishes, talked more about cultivating successors and became even more insistent in his demands for total personal loyalty. In February 1965 Mao sent his wife Jiang Qing to stir up criticism of party officials not fully supporting Mao's revolutionary views, and in mid-May 1966 he launched the Cultural Revolution attack on “those in authority pursuing the capitalist road.” For Mao a “capitalist roader” was someone who was thinking and acting independently, not fully following his leadership. Mao mobilized the Red Guards and older rebels to attack those in positions of authority. By skillfully splitting high officials from one another and relying on Lin Biao to control the army, Mao was able to remove vast numbers of senior officials from positions of leadership and to send them away for physical labor and reeducation.

Fueling much of Mao's anger was public dissension over his pursuit of the Great Leap Forward. He was furious, for instance, that Liu Shaoqi in the 1962 meeting of seven thousand officials had blamed Mao for the failures of the Great Leap and had refused to accept full responsibility for his own initial support; consequently Mao was determined to remove him from office. Mao was also upset that after that meeting, Deng continued to work closely with Liu Shaoqi. Therefore in 1966 when Mao attacked Liu Shaoqi, he targeted Deng, too, as the “number-two person in authority pursuing the capitalist road.”
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Mao's attack was vindictive and fierce. Beginning in late 1966, day after day for months, the media blasted out criticisms of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. Liu Shaoqi, who had been vice chairman of the party and Mao's designated successor, died under house arrest in Kaifeng without needed medical care and away from his family while his wife languished in prison.

In 1967, Mao had Deng and his wife placed under house arrest in their home in Zhongnanhai (the compound next to Tiananmen where the top party officials lived and worked). After their children were sent away that same year, they had no contact with the outside world and for two years had no news of their children. They spent their time reading newspapers and books and listening to the radio; they swept the front walk every day. Their situation was far better than many officials being criticized. In Zhongnanhai they were protected from assaults by the Red Guards, they were allowed to
keep their cook and an orderly, and they could withdraw funds from their salaries to buy necessities. Mao was teaching Deng a lesson about personal loyalty but he was keeping open the option of using him at a later time.

Deng's children were not similarly protected. They were assaulted by Red Guards and pressed to give information about the crimes of their father. Lin, the oldest daughter, was under attack at her art academy while Pufang and Nan were subjected to attacks at Peking University, where they were studying physics. In 1967, the two younger children, Rong and Zhifang (and Deng's stepmother Xia Bogen) were sent away to live in ordinary crowded workers' housing in Beijing and allowed no contact with their parents. There Red Guards would sometimes barge unannounced into their home, forcing them to stand with heads bowed while the Red Guards grilled them for information about the crimes of their father, shouted at them, pasted slogans on their walls, and occasionally smashed things. Later, the three sisters and Zhifang were all sent off to perform labor in the countryside.

In 1968 a “special case team” was established to investigate the “crimes” of Deng Xiaoping. The team questioned those who knew Deng and investigated his desertion from the Seventh Red Corps; his continuing good relations with Peng Dehuai, whom Mao had criticized; and other crimes. As part of the investigation, Deng was made to write his history since age eight, listing all his personal connections. He was fortunate that early on he had learned to leave no notes and that his work had never brought him into close contact with Guomindang officials. At the 9th Party Congress in 1969, Jiang Qing demanded that Deng be expelled, but Mao refused and continued to protect him from the radicals.

In 1969, after the first military clash with the Soviet Union, Mao directed that a number of high-level leaders be sent to the countryside so that if the Soviets were to invade, they could organize local resistance. Accordingly, Zhu De and Dong Biwu were sent to Guangdong; Ye Jianying to Hunan; Nie Rongzhen and Chen Yi to Henan; and Chen Yun, Wang Zhen, and Deng Xiaoping to different parts of Jiangxi. In fact, when they arrived in the countryside, they did not play any role in organizing local defense preparations. Some astute Beijing observers believe that Lin Biao, worried about possible rivals, used the danger of Soviet attack to persuade Mao to exile other high-level officials in Beijing who might have threatened his power. Indeed, after Lin Biao died in 1971, the leaders in the regions were allowed to return to Beijing.

By the time Deng left for Jiangxi, he was already convinced that China's problems resulted not only from Mao's errors but also from deep flaws in the
system that had produced Mao and had led to the disastrous Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. In 1949 when the Communists took over, Deng, who had been a revolutionary, became a builder, helping to establish a new political system and a socialist structure. By the time he left for Jiangxi, he was already beginning to think about what kind of reforms China needed. By then he had accumulated an extraordinary depth of experience at the highest levels in the military, the government, and the party, spanning all major domestic and foreign policy issues, on which to base his ruminations about how China should proceed with reforms.

On October 26, 1969, Deng Xiaoping, along with his wife, Zhuo Lin, and his stepmother, Xia Bogen, left Zhongnanhai, where they had lived for more than a decade. They were taken by special plane to Nanchang in Jiangxi province where Deng was to engage in physical labor and be reeducated in Mao Zedong Thought. They were allowed to take along personal belongings and several cases of books. Deng's request to see Mao before leaving was not granted, but he was told he could write letters to Wang Dongxing, head of the party's General Office, and it was reasonable to expect that Wang Dongxing would show the letters to Mao. As he boarded the plane, Deng had no way of knowing how long he would remain in Jiangxi.

In Jiangxi, Deng was not allowed to see classified materials or to have contact with officials other than specially designated local officials, but he was permitted to remain a party member, which gave him hope that Mao would someday allow him to return to work. In April 1969, shortly before he left Beijing, after he completed his self-criticism, Deng and his family were no longer treated as class enemies, even though Mao still insisted that Deng needed reeducation. A conversation with Wang Dongxing on the eve of Deng's departure from Beijing offered another ray of hope: Wang Dongxing told Deng that he and his wife could eventually return to their original home in Zhongnanhai, which would remain vacant during their absence. All of this must have offered him hope, for when he arrived in Nanchang, Deng told the local representatives of the special team investigating his case: “I'll be coming out eventually. I can still work for the party for another ten years.”
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As it happened, when Deng returned to Beijing he served the party for almost twenty more years.

Before Deng was sent to Jiangxi, Zhou Enlai phoned local Jiangxi officials with directions for preparing Deng's living arrangements. To ensure security against attacks by radicals, the Deng family was to be located in a military compound. The home was to be near the city of Nanchang, where they could have quick access to transport if necessary. There was to be a factory nearby where Deng and Zhuo Lin could engage in manual labor. Local officials chose the two-story house previously occupied by the superintendent of the Nanchang Infantry School. Deng was to live on the second floor with his family, while security and other officials lived on the first floor. By the standards of the day, the house was appropriate for a high official: modest, but comfortable and adequate. As it turned out, the house was only several miles from the site of the much celebrated Nanchang Uprising, the birthplace of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), where on August 1, 1927, the Communists (including Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, Chen Yi, Liu Bocheng, He Long, and many other later leaders) had engaged in their first armed resistance against the Guomindang.

Once settled in their home in Jiangxi, each day Deng and Zhuo Lin rose at 6:30 a.m. In his military years, Deng had begun each day by dumping a bucket of cold water over his head. In Jiangxi, Deng doused a small hand towel in icy water, then washed his head and face with it, believing this would help build resistance to the cold weather. As part of their reeducation program, Deng and Zhuo Lin then engaged in an hour of supervised compulsory reading of the works of Chairman Mao. Deng did not discuss politics with local officials except during their instructions on Mao Zedong Thought.