Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (55 page)

Deng admired what Lee had accomplished in Singapore, and Lee admired how Deng was dealing with the problems in China. Before Deng's visit to Singapore, the Chinese press had referred to Singaporeans as the “running dogs of American imperialism.” A few weeks after Deng visited Singapore, however, this description of Singapore disappeared from the Chinese press. Instead, Singapore was described as a place worth studying for its initiatives in environmental preservation, public housing, and tourism.
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Lee and Deng would meet again, in 1980, 1985, and 1988.

Although Deng's purpose in going to Singapore had been to win support to stop the Vietnamese and Soviets in Southeast Asia, Singapore made a deep impression on Deng. When he visited New York, Paris, and Tokyo, he had not been surprised that they were all more modern than China. But Deng,
who had spent two days in Singapore on his way to France in 1920, marveled at the progress that had been made there in the intervening fifty-eight years, even as China's economy and society were still mired in poverty. Deng had not yet decided what policies to pursue in China, but Singapore helped strengthen Deng's conviction of the need for fundamental reforms. As Deng once sighed, “If I had only Shanghai, I too might be able to change Shanghai as quickly. But I have the whole of China.”
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Though Deng had read reports about Singapore, overwhelmingly his information had come from leftist sources in Singapore. To his surprise, then, he found that he was not greeted by enthusiastic throngs of ethnic Chinese and that the people had their own independent thinking and would not be subservient to China.
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Apparently, the local Communists in Singapore, like some of their counterparts on the mainland, were so eager to convey what Beijing wanted to hear that their reports were unreliable. But Deng wanted to see and hear what was really going on. Consequently, he saw firsthand a city-state that was far more advanced and more orderly than he had expected. A year later, when the fighting with Vietnam was over, Deng commented in a speech in China on some of the good points he had observed about the factories set up by foreigners in Singapore. They pay taxes to the government, they provide work opportunities, and laborers receive income for their work. Foreign capitalists, he said, need not be so frightening.
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Deng found orderly Singapore an appealing model for reform, and he was ready to send people there to learn about city planning, public management, and controlling corruption.

Courting the Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia

After returning to China, Deng continued working on the problem that had brought him to Southeast Asia, the Soviet-Vietnamese threat. But as a result of his visit, he took greater interest in the role of ethnic Chinese living outside China, both as contributors to the four modernizations in China and as good citizens who could help improve relations between China and their home countries. Deng and his colleagues began to give more attention to how ethnic Chinese abroad could supply funds and, in Deng's view even more importantly, knowledge of developments abroad to mainland China.

In the early 1950s many of those in China who had relatives living overseas lost their land, their businesses, and some had even lost their lives. Many who survived were again attacked during the Cultural Revolution. Some ethnic
Chinese living abroad could never forgive the Chinese Communists for their cruelties to relatives who had remained in China. Others whose relatives had not been treated so harshly, however, responded to opportunities to make contributions to their hometown Chinese villages, efforts that were rewarded with the naming of buildings and medical facilities in their honor. Some of the relatives living oversees saw business opportunities in China. In October 1978, a few weeks before Deng's trip, in a high-level effort to heal the old wounds, Liao Chengzhi launched a large-scale attack on the former “overseas Chinese policy” of the Gang of Four. It was still too early to acknowledge that the policies that led to those persecutions had originated with Mao, but Liao's attacks on the former bad policy allowed Deng and other officials to distance themselves from the horrors of the past as they endeavored to open a new chapter.

Deng also supported the efforts for China to make amends to those mainland relatives of the ethnic Chinese overseas who had been badly treated. Some living overseas were invited back to live in their previously confiscated family homes. When that was not possible, many received some compensation for lost jobs and lost property, often in the form of better jobs, better housing, and better educational opportunities for their children. Deng realized that suspicions would not quickly disappear, but he took a long view and the policies he adopted for overseas Chinese continued during and after his years at the top. Deng wanted to keep good relations both with ethnic Chinese living overseas and with the Southeast Asian governments in the countries where they lived. When conflicts between ethnic Chinese and their Southeast Asian governments were especially acute, as in Malaysia, it was difficult for China to stand up for the fair treatment of ethnic Chinese. But because China had poor relations with Vietnam, it complained loudly about the Vietnam government's rounding up of ethnic Chinese and sending them to detention centers or expelling them, acts that caused an estimated 160,000 to flee the country.
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Deng's visit to Southeast Asia helped strengthen China's determination to encourage ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia to be loyal to their country. Within two years after Deng's visit to Southeast Asia, support for the revolutionary broadcasts was ended. The Chinese Communist Party, as well as the Chinese government, endeavored to work with the Southeast Asian governments and parties in power. The change paralleled the Communists' transition at home from a revolutionary to a governing party. Even the term “overseas Chinese” fell into disfavor, for it implied that the ethnic Chinese living
abroad were, in the final analysis, Chinese. They were instead described officially as “Malaysians (or Thais or Singaporeans) of Chinese ancestry.”

The trip by Deng to Southeast Asia thus advanced efforts to improve relations with Southeast Asian governments; by 1990, when Indonesia and then Singapore normalized relations with China, China had thriving government, business, and cultural relationships with all of the countries of Southeast Asia. By then, all Southeast Asian countries could see the economic advantages of trade with mainland China and citizens of Chinese ancestry were regarded mainly in a positive way, as potential go-betweens bringing benefits both to China and the country where they lived.

Change through Problem-Solving

Deng's response to Vietnam's decision to invade Cambodia illustrates the process by which many changes occurred during the Deng era. Deng, the pragmatist, when confronted with a new problem first tried to understand the related issues, and only then did he decide what to do. When his actions created a new set of problems, he would tackle those one by one. Once Deng saw the threat of Soviet-Vietnamese expansionism, he decided to prepare China's military for a response, and then, when Chinese military deficiencies proved serious, he focused on improving China's military performance (see
Chapter 18
for an account of China's Vietnam war). In considering how to respond to the Soviet-Vietnamese threat, Deng realized that he urgently needed the cooperation of the nearby Southeast Asian countries and thus he arranged to visit these countries to strengthen relations. But once there, he realized that to win the cooperation of these countries, he had to both phase out Chinese support to local revolutionaries and encourage the ethnic Chinese to show their loyalty to the country where they lived. To respond to the ever-increasing Soviet-Vietnamese threat, as well as to obtain support for achieving the four modernizations, Deng would also seek to deepen China's relations with the two large powers that were capable of restraining the Soviet Union, Japan and the United States.

In his trip to Japan in October 1978, Deng sought Japanese cooperation in resisting Soviet-Vietnamese expansion. But he also knew that no country, with the possible exception of the United States, could be more helpful in its four modernizations. Japan had modern technology and effective management; it had lessons for China in how to accelerate growth, expand modern industry, and make the transition from a more regulated to a more open economy; it was located nearby; and many Japanese were prepared to be generous. Deng knew that for the relationship with Japan to work well, he would need to convince the Japanese that China was stable and prepared to be a responsible partner. Deng also knew that he had to overcome resistance from the Chinese people to working with the former enemy.

As Deng traveled to Japan, the Chinese film crews that accompanied him captured images that would help transform Chinese ideas about postwar Japan. The movies they created showed modern factories and trains as well as friendly, peaceful-looking Japanese people who welcomed their Chinese guests and proclaimed their readiness to help China. Deng knew that these images were critical for helping the Chinese public, who had learned to hate Japan, to accept the Japanese people as guests, employers, and teachers—and that this task would be at least as challenging as convincing the Japanese to supply funding, technology, and management skills. Japan had been the enemy ever since the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895, when Japan had taken away Taiwan and made it a Japanese colony. Some Chinese people who were over forty years old in 1978 could still recall the horrors from World War II—but all Chinese were aware, from the Chinese media or from speeches
blared for three decades from loudspeakers at schools and work units, of the savage actions of some of the Japanese troops during that conflict. No propaganda had been more effective in stirring up patriotism than the searing accounts of Japanese atrocities during World War II.

Deng, the diehard pragmatist, personally had no difficulty making a cool assessment of national interests and acting accordingly. As a young man, he had passionately denounced the Japanese and other foreign imperialists. But he had been seasoned as he rose to responsible positions and observed how national interests change. Deng harbored no illusions about the dogged determination of capitalists and capitalist countries in pursuing their own interests, and in working with them he stubbornly defended China's interests. But in 1978, both Japan and the United States, alarmed by Soviet expansion, were eager to draw China farther away from the Soviet Union, and this created a window of opportunity for Deng.

For Deng to tell passionate Chinese patriots they should learn from the Japanese took political courage and determination. Fortunately, just as President Nixon had the political base to open relations with a former enemy, Communist China, because he had proved he was a passionate anti-Communist, so Deng, as a soldier who fought the Japanese for eight years, had a strong political base to take the brave step of improving relations with Japan.

Before Deng visited Japan, he first had to negotiate a treaty with Japan to pave the way. After Mao and Prime Minister Tanaka Kakuei had rushed to normalize relations between the two countries in 1972, relations between the two countries had stagnated. Mao and Tanaka had not dealt with a host of legal issues needed to establish consulates, carry on commerce, and promote exchanges of people. Before traveling to Japan, Deng needed first to address these issues.

Sino-Japanese Treaty of Peace and Friendship

When Deng returned to work in mid-1977, negotiations on a treaty to underpin Sino-Japanese relations had been dragging on for years. The key holdup was Japan's unwillingness to accept a Chinese demand that the treaty include an anti-hegemony clause, which specified that both countries agreed not to seek to dominate the region and to resist any other country that did.
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Chinese negotiators, who wanted to draw Japan farther away from the Soviet Union, knew that the anti-hegemony clause would anger the Soviets. Japanese
relations with the USSR had deteriorated after September 1976 when a Soviet pilot had defected by flying his plane to Hokkaido; the Japanese, working with the Americans to analyze the plane's capacities, had refused to return the aircraft to the Soviets. But Japan, a trading nation which then had limited capabilities for fighting militarily outside its borders, sought to avoid overly antagonizing any country, especially one with ample oil reserves after the oil shock of 1973.

The Chinese had initially proposed that the two governments negotiate a peace treaty, but Japan answered that it had already signed a peace treaty with Chiang Kai-shek who was acting on behalf of the Chinese government, and that it remained in effect. The Chinese countered with a suggestion that the two nations sign a treaty of peace and friendship, as Japan had done with many other countries. But until 1977 this approach had not solved the problem. Despite the efforts of Prime Minister Miki Takeo, who succeeded Tanaka, and Prime Minister Fukuda Takeo, who succeeded Miki in December 1976, the right-wing nationalists of Japan refused to meet the determined Chinese halfway. Deng, uncomfortable with the slow democratic process both at home or abroad, wanted to move quickly to resolve problems, but he persevered in working with the Japanese in spite of their domestic political difficulties.

As the standoff continued, Deng hosted in September and October 1977 several visiting Japanese political leaders judged to be sympathetic to China, including Nikaido Susumu and Kono Yohei, to explore possibilities for concluding a treaty.
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Meanwhile in Japan, various business groups and local regional associations, eager for more contact with China, lobbied for greater flexibility in finding a way to conclude such a treaty.
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Fukuda, a bright former finance ministry bureaucrat, had already received praise from other Asian leaders for the “Fukuda Doctrine,” by which Japan was providing assistance to its Southeast Asian neighbors. When Fukuda reorganized his cabinet on November 28, 1977, he appointed as foreign minister Sonoda Sunao, who as an “old friend of China”
(lao pengyou)
was the official most likely to be able to conclude a treaty.
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Fukuda encouraged Sonoda to negotiate with Foreign Minister Huang Hua to resolve the issues impeding the treaty's completion.
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