Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (21 page)

Deng tried to reduce the resistance to downsizing by strengthening the effort to find work for those who would be pushed to retire. Positions in local party or government units or state enterprises were sought for the retiring senior officers. Ordinary soldiers, meanwhile, were to be assigned primarily to the countryside as commune officials, with some transferred to factories.
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Government officials were assigned responsibility for finding jobs for veterans within their respective localities.

Deng used an enlarged CMC meeting—held June 24 to July 15, 1975 after a four-year postponement due to Lin Biao's defection—to seek support for his downsizing plan. Some officers made special appeals to avoid reductions in their sectors, but few changes were made.
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The meeting set the target of reducing military positions by 1.6 million, including by some 600,000 officers, within three years.
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Once the new organization tables had been drawn up, the military began selecting the leadership teams at each level. Deng set the tone for what this new leadership should look like, saying that the selected officers should be able to use new technologies to improve both their conventional equipment
and their advanced weapons, as well as to conduct scientific analyses to enhance their command and administrative skills. Additional training and maneuvers were needed to enhance the quality of officers and to help them develop strategies appropriate to future conditions. Able political officers who could respond to the personal concerns of their troops and improve relations with the public were also needed.
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Although China's weapons were badly outdated and few funds were available, Deng wanted to make the best use of the funds they had. From July 20 to August 4—that is, immediately after the enlarged CMC meeting—leading officials from more than four hundred major defense industry factories met to review their responsibilities in line with the new priorities for upgrading technologies.
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A few weeks after the enlarged CMC meeting, the new membership of the CMC was announced. Mao still allowed the radicals to dominate propaganda work. Zhang Chunqiao, the most experienced official among the Gang of Four, was head of the General Political Department of the PLA. But Deng remained chief of the General Staff, Marshal Ye retained leadership of the CMC, and most of the Standing Committee members of the CMC were experienced military officials who could work with Deng and Ye: Nie Rongzhen, Su Yu, Chen Xilian, and Liang Biye.

Deng and his allies were effective in controlling the radicals. During the enlarged CMC meeting, the highest-ranking radicals, Wang Hongwen and Zhang Chunqiao, made no public presentations. The Gang of Four tried but failed to gain control of personnel appointments and to obtain dossiers they could later use to attack their opponents. Zhang Chunqiao had leverage over propaganda, but he never controlled the personnel decisions. And Deng and Marshal Ye, who enjoyed far more support in the military than Zhang, determined the agenda and played the major role in guiding appointments at the lower levels.
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Deng also revived military training programs. Most of the 101 training institutions that existed in 1966 had been closed down during the Cultural Revolution. Some were in such bad shape that they were not fit to reopen. At others, however, the faculty, although no longer teaching, had remained living in the school compounds. Now experienced faculty members still able to teach were invited to revise their teaching materials and reopen their classrooms.

Compared to the schools, the high-level military technology research centers had been protected during the Cultural Revolution. (Even some civilian
research centers had been protected by being placed under the National Defense Technology Commission.) But without support from universities and new graduates, without civilian research centers to provide related support, and without access to foreign technology, Chinese military technologies had fallen farther behind those used by their potential adversaries. The research centers needed revamping, and by 1975 Marshal Ye had persuaded Zhang Aiping, an able high general experienced in organizing military research, to return from the sidelines and help in this effort.

In two research and development centers, factionalism was so serious as to require special attention—the No. 2 Ministry of Machine Building, which focused on nuclear development, and the No. 7 Ministry of Machine Building, which was devoted to ballistic missile technologies. In 1974, three attempts to fire intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) had all failed. The failures made it easy to win political support to criticize the current leadership of those ministries, but support for the radicals was not dead.
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Followers of the Gang of Four, still active in a factory under one of these ministries, put up posters denouncing Zhang Aiping for his emphasis on production.

On May 19, the day after Deng returned from his state visit to France, Deng joined Nie Rongzhen, China's leading official concerned with military technology (and one of Deng's comrades since their days in France in the 1920s), at a meeting at the No. 7 Ministry of Machine Building. In his speech, Deng, with steely resolve, said that the government would no longer tolerate factionalism. Leaders had until June 30 to eliminate all factions; by July 1 everyone should be working together. If not, the government would not be polite: punishments would be meted out.

With approval from Mao and Zhou Enlai, Deng and Marshal Ye saw that the two troubled ministries carried out consolidation, eliminating workers still taking part in factions and setting up a new leadership team to organize research.
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During the last quarter of 1975 and into 1976, as part of the downsizing, some 464,000 positions were officially removed from the organization tables. No one was surprised when some people in those positions found ways to continue working in their jobs. But Marshal Ye and Deng did all they could to see that their plans for downsizing were implemented and that new leadership teams were selected that would be able, when the time came, to incorporate modern technologies into their departments and groups.
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In short, Deng and Marshal Ye, with the support of Chairman Mao and a solid majority on the CMC, were able in 1975 to make considerable progress
in restoring discipline, downsizing, and paving the way for improving the education and technical levels of their troops.

Strategic Civilian Consolidation: Xuzhou Railway Center

For his civilian breakthrough in consolidation, Deng chose to focus on a project that would quickly both increase production and inspire others. Ever since his guerrilla days, he had believed in fighting small battles that he was sure to win, as a way of encouraging his troops as they prepared for larger battles. In 1975, many of the factories criticized for failing to meet production targets complained that they lacked adequate supplies. Transportation was an obvious bottleneck. Could a success in transportation provide an early victory that would both increase production and demonstrate possibilities for success in other areas?

In the mid-1970s, China lacked a modern highway system, so goods overwhelmingly were transported by rail. In his quest to improve transportation, then, Deng chose to focus his attention on Xuzhou, a railway junction in northwest Jiangsu, where a major east-west railway, the Long-Hai, crossed a major north-south railway, the Jin-Pu. During the twenty-one months prior to March 1975, the Xuzhou Railway Bureau had never once met its quota for loading or dispatching railway cars. Since January 1967, there had been almost continuous fighting there between rebel factions.

The situation in 1975 looked both ugly and entrenched. Gu Binghua, a rebel leader who headed the Xuzhou Railway Bureau, had access to arms and stubbornly resisted outside attempts at control. Since 1966 Gu and the rebels occupied the Materials Bureau building next to the railway station, which they treated as their personal storehouse for materials and supplies. When Public Security Bureau officials arrested some workers, Gu's allies forcefully detained the officials. Gu's allies were even brazen enough to take over the Xuzhou municipal party offices and detain city party officials.
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Mao strongly supported Deng's efforts to bring order to the railways, in part because he had personally experienced a railway delay due to the turmoil. On February 3, 1975, Mao was supposed to travel from Changsha to Hangzhou by special train, but security officials could not ensure its safety, so the trip was put off until February 8.
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Wang Hongwen, former rebel leader, was now ready to put down the rebels. He supported a crackdown at Xuzhou: as deputy head of the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee, he knew that Shanghai needed supplies by rail.

The support of Mao and Wang allowed Deng to move quickly and forcefully in Xuzhou. By this time Wan Li (see Key People in the Deng Era, p. 736) was on board as minister of railways. One of Deng's first steps, which he took even before his new position began in January 1975, was to recommend that Wan Li, who had a great reputation for breaking through bottlenecks, be appointed minister of railways. Mao had earlier praised Wan Li for the excellent job he did in overcoming obstacles when he was in charge of the construction projects around Tiananmen Square, including the Great Hall of the People, the Museum of Chinese History, and the Museum of the Chinese Revolution.
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Indeed, the characters for Wan Li's name mean 10,000
li
(one
li
is half a kilometer), and Mao had joked that Wan Li was a man who could run 10,000
li
. When Mao and Zhou met in Changsha in December 1974, they had quickly approved his appointment.

When Wan Li took up his new post in January 1975, Deng told him to improve the situation in the railways “as fast as possible by the most effective means.”
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Deng asked Wan Li, as new minister of railways, to prepare a report immediately on the Xuzhou problem, and ten days after he became vice premier, Deng received Wan Li to hear it. Wan Li reported that the key problem was factionalism and that the issues were so complex that they would take six months to resolve. Deng responded that the situation was too serious to wait that long.

Several weeks later, on February 6, Deng summoned Ji Dengkui and Wang Zhen to hear Wan Li's plans to resolve the Xuzhou issue more quickly. At this meeting, General Wang Zhen, rough, ready, and loyal to Deng, offered to send in troops. Wan Li reported that many officials in Xuzhou, worried that an oral directive might soon be reversed, had requested a written order from the central government granting him the authority to crack down on the revolutionary rebels who controlled the Xuzhou railway junction. Deng ordered that such a document be drawn up immediately.

From February 25 until March 5 the party secretaries in charge of industry and transport from all twenty-nine provincial-level governments (including the autonomous regions and the cities directly under the central government) were gathered together in Beijing to respond to Deng's call to draw up a written document to prepare to break through the railway bottlenecks. The participants agreed that the Xuzhou problems were the most serious and should be dealt with first. They hoped that by the second quarter of the year freight traffic on the railways would be flowing smoothly.
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Immediately after the meeting and drawing on these discussions, Central Party Document No. 9
(that is, the ninth of the important documents promulgated that year), was issued, titled “The Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on Improving Railway Work.”
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This document, approved by Mao, provided a systematic analysis of the problems and outlined the solution. Above all, it showed that the leadership in Beijing, including Chairman Mao, fully backed Wan Li's efforts in Xuzhou.

Document No. 9 resolved the nightmare of overlapping jurisdictions by centralizing all political and military authority for Xuzhou in the hands of Wan Li and the Ministry of Railways. Until this point, operation of the Xuzhou railway junction, in the northwest corner of Jiangsu close to the borders of Shandong, Anhui, and Henan provinces, had involved officials from all four provinces, who handled various parts of the operation, from security to railway management and railway maintenance.

Document No. 9 further decreed that factions were to be abolished and that railway ministry officials would be held responsible for any accidents. Anyone found to be opposing these measures (those engaged in factional activities, work stoppages, or destruction of property) was to be punished immediately. Deng captured the ideological high ground by declaring that anyone who resisted the leadership of the Ministry of Railways—even those who had joined radical groups—was to be labeled “bourgeois” for pursuing an individualistic path of resisting organizational discipline. In addition, anyone who destroyed railway property was to be labeled a “counter-revolutionary” and punished severely and quickly.
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Deng Xiaoping's speech at the end of the conference of provincial secretaries
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was brief and to the point. It showed his firmness of purpose and was presented in a way that made it difficult for Mao to disagree even though Deng was constraining some revolutionaries. He quoted Mao by saying it was necessary “to make revolution, promote production, and other work and to ensure preparedness in the event of war.” If there were a war, transportation would be essential and at present the system did not function properly. To reassure those leaders who feared that they would continue to be attacked for paying too much attention to the economy, as they had been during the Cultural Revolution, Deng said, “Some comrades nowadays only dare to make revolution but not to promote production. They say that the former is safe but the latter is dangerous. This is utterly wrong.” He made it clear that Mao now supported the focus on the economy: “How can we give a boost to the economy? Analysis shows that the weak link at the moment is the railways.”
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