Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (65 page)

In addition to touring the modern Ford and Boeing factories, oil-drilling facilities, and the Houston Space Center, Deng rode in sleek helicopters and hovercraft. By visiting modern industrial sites and the space center, Deng and his party reinforced their impressions from the visit to Japan about the scale of organizational and management changes that were needed to modernize China.
¹⁰⁰
Pictures of Deng, along with the tall buildings and huge lines of cars on the highways, were televised throughout China.

At the end of his tour, in Seattle, Deng said, “Our two countries are neighbors on opposite shores of an ocean. The Pacific, instead of being a barrier, should henceforth serve as a link.”
¹⁰¹
By the time Deng left Seattle for Tokyo, he had caught a cold. (As Woodcock recalled, “We were all exhilarated and exhausted.”) So Foreign Minister Huang Hua substituted for him at a final breakfast meeting with reporters and editors. Just before departing, at a brief meeting held inside an airport terminal because of the cold drizzle outside, Deng, sniffling and with a fever, said, “We came to the United States with a message of friendship from the Chinese people, and we are going back laden with the warm sentiments of the American people.”
¹⁰²

A Spark That Lit a Prairie Fire

In his personal diary, Jimmy Carter writes, “The Deng Xiaoping visit was one of the delightful experiences of my Presidency. To me, everything went right, and the Chinese leader seemed equally pleased.”
¹⁰³
Carter describes Deng as “smart, tough, intelligent, frank, courageous, personable, self-assured, friendly.”
¹⁰⁴
The president also appreciated that Deng was sensitive to American political realities and that he refrained from stressing the anti-Soviet basis of their relationship, comments that could have undone U.S. efforts to reach arms control agreements with the Soviet Union.
¹⁰⁵

The symbol of the trip—two nations joining hands to create a peaceful world—proved enormously appealing to both the Americans and the Chinese. To the extent that the trip's success depended on Deng's personal qualities, these included his genuine commitment to improving Chinese relations with the United States, his deep self-assurance, and his comfort with his special role. These qualities allowed him to give full play to his spontaneous
frankness and sharp wit, as well as to delight in finding an appreciative audience. Some observant Chinese have noted that Deng did not exert himself in ordinary times, but when challenged, he could become fully energized, as he did in the United States.

Deng was not as colorful, flamboyant, opinionated, or boisterous as Nikita Khrushchev had been when, twenty years earlier, as leader of the Soviet Union, he had stormed the United States for thirteen days. If anything, Khrushchev had attracted even more attention. Both he and Deng were attempting to launch a new era in relations with the United States. Deng was more restrained, stuck to his script, and did not try to change his plans.
¹⁰⁶
But Deng managed, through agreements establishing exchange programs and contacts with U.S. businesspeople, to lay deeper roots for a sustained U.S. China relationship than Khrushchev had been able to do for U.S.-Soviet relations. American businesspeople who had heard Deng speak in the various cities immediately began to prepare for trips to China to explore business opportunities. Many of the seventeen governors who met him in Atlanta planned delegations to China with local businesspeople. Secretary of Commerce Juanita Kreps, Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland, and Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger also prepared to lead delegations in the months ahead to expand relations in their respective areas. Members of Congress, even many who had complained about China in the past, vied to join these and other trips to China. Five years after his visit, Khrushchev was toppled, but Deng, who remained paramount leader for over a decade after his visit, was able to witness the fruits of the seeds he had planted while in America.

On January 31, 1979, during his visit, Deng and Fang Yi, director of the State Science and Technology Commission, signed agreements with the United States to speed up scientific exchanges.
¹⁰⁷
In early 1979, the first fifty Chinese students, promising but poorly prepared, arrived in the United States. In the year after Deng's visit, some 1,025 Chinese were in the United States on student visas, and by 1984, fourteen thousand, two-thirds of whom were studying the physical sciences, health sciences, and engineering, were attending American universities.
¹⁰⁸
Peking and Tsinghua universities, the top universities in China, became known informally as “prep schools” for students who went to the United States for advanced training. The year 1979 may have marked a reopening of connections that had been cut off for three decades, but within only a few years the scale and scope of the exchanges would far surpass those in the years before 1949.

Thoughtful State Department officials, although thoroughly convinced of
the value of restoring U.S.-China relations, expressed concern about the peaks in America's emotional response to China during Deng's visit. They worried that the U.S. administration and the U.S. media had oversold China to the American public, just as they had oversold Chiang Kai-shek during World War II, when the United States was allied with China and the American public had been unprepared for the corruption rampant within the Guomindang. After Deng's remarkable visit in 1979, enthusiastic Americans did not comprehend the continued authoritarianism of the Chinese Communist Party, the differences in national interest between their two countries, and the immense obstacles still impeding a resolution of the Taiwan issue.
¹⁰⁹

In China, the effect of Deng's trip was even greater than in the United States. Deng's visit changed the popular American images of China. But in China his visit helped set off a cascade of changes in the Chinese mindset and aspirations for the future. Even more than Deng's trips to Japan and Southeast Asia, the trip to America introduced the Chinese public to a modern way of life. The daily updates on Chinese television and the documentary movie that was made during Deng's visit presented a very favorable view of American life—not only of its factories, transportation, and communications, but also of families living in new housing with modern furniture and wearing fashionable clothing. A whole new way of living was presented to them, and they embraced it. Even barriers between the small number of Americans in Beijing and the Chinese broke down and suddenly visiting in each others' homes was no longer prohibited. Mao had talked of how a single spark could set off a prairie fire of revolution, but China after 1979 underwent a revolution far greater and longer lasting than the one Mao began. This massive revolution ignited from many sources, but no single spark spread more rapidly than the one resulting from Deng's visit to the United States.

Just as Americans overreacted to Deng, many Chinese also overreacted to his opening with America. Some Chinese wanted everything immediately, not realizing how much China had to change before they could enjoy the fruits of economic growth. Others rushed to embrace institutions and values that did not yet fit Chinese realities. It would not be easy to find an appropriate balance between Western and Chinese ways, but the opening brought a hybrid vitality and an intellectual renaissance that over time would remake China.

At the end of his trip to the United States in February 1979, Deng told one of his interpreters, Shi Yanhua, that with this trip, he had fulfilled his responsibility. At first, she did not understand what he meant. It was clear to
his Chinese companions as well as to foreigners whom he met that he enjoyed these trips—he seemed to relish the opportunity to see the world and to receive the adulation of the crowds. But that is not why he traveled. He traveled because he had a job to do for his country. He saw it as his responsibility to improve relations with neighboring countries and to open far wider the doors to Japan and the United States, both to curb the Soviet Union and to receive assistance for China's modernization. Now, having completed his mission and fulfilled his responsibility, he could move on to other important tasks. Deng had traveled abroad five times in just fifteen months. Although he lived another eighteen years, he never again traveled outside of China.
¹¹⁰

When Deng emerged as the preeminent Chinese leader in December 1978, he did not yet have in place his own leadership team nor had he yet formulated a coherent vision of China's future that the public could rally behind. The leadership was shared, for the moment, with Hua Guofeng, who still held the official positions of chairman of the party and premier, and with Hua's four allies on the Politburo. In December 1978, Deng had been moved to the top of a structure that he had not created.

Deng did not care as much about titles as he did about developing an effective team and an organization that he could work with to modernize China. It would take a year to gain firm control, select his key leaders, and put them and his program into place. In the meantime, he chose to weaken and then remove Hua and his allies and to replace them with his own team and gradually develop his own agenda. As he became the preeminent leader, Deng also had to find a way to cope with the larger-than-life image of Mao that still permeated the party. While forging a new path for his administration and for the Chinese people, Deng would have to minimize the alienation of those who still revered Mao and who stood ready to accuse Deng of being the Chinese Khrushchev, the one who brought “de-Maoization” and “revisionism” to China.

In the spring of 1979, Deng sought to get tighter control over some conservatives who were worried about the bold opening Deng might undertake. Many high military and civilian officials harbored doubts about the wisdom of his attack on Vietnam and worried publicly that Deng was betraying the party and leading the country down the road to capitalism. Deng's speech on
the four cardinal principles on March 30, 1979, was an important step in blunting the criticism of the conservatives. But he still needed some months to deal with the resistance before he could firmly establish his own team.

Deng had strong support, but the resistance was also palpable. On May 21, for example, there was a report in the PLA newspaper
Jiefangjun bao
that many army units were resisting carrying out the discussion of “Practice Is the Sole Criterion for Judging Truth,” and that some units had reported that as many as one-third of the troops were not supportive of the overall spirit of the Third Plenum. There were reports that many soldiers supported Hua Guofeng not because of his own accomplishments, but because Mao had selected him and because he was in their view supportive of Mao's agenda.
¹
Urban elites tended to be much more critical of Mao, but rural people were generally more willing to accept the Mao cult. In particular, soldiers from rural areas appreciated rural collectives that provided special support for their dependents in the villages, and many expected upon leaving the service to find employment in the collectives, a system they felt was under threat from Deng's initiatives.

To counter these conservative pressures, in the spring of 1979 Deng conducted a campaign to firm up support for “Practice Is the Sole Criterion for Judging Truth” and directed officials to conduct some “supplementary classes”
(bu ke)
to consolidate support for his reform agenda. When Deng appeared in public, he did not criticize Mao, but rather criticized Lin Biao and the Gang of Four for the problems of the era. To maintain the image of party unity, he took care not to take aim at Hua Guofeng directly but rather at the “two whatevers.”

Although Chairman Hua Guofeng's power had been weakening, on June 18 he presented the government work report at the opening of the Second Session of the 5th National People's Congress (NPC). Even though at the time the listeners were unaware, this would be one of Hua's last major presentations at a party or government meeting. Shortly after that talk, Deng felt ready to move ahead in reshaping the party.

Descent from Yellow Mountain and Party Building

On July 11, 1979, Deng set out on a month-long tour of north and central China. The tour began with a climb on Anhui province's Yellow Mountain (Huang Shan). Yellow Mountain is one of China's most famous peaks, long celebrated in Chinese literature and history. On July 13, Deng began the ascent,
and two days later he returned. For anyone about to turn age seventy-five, the journey was a formidable feat. The photo of a healthy-looking Deng pausing as he neared the end of his climb, with his pants rolled up and holding his walking stick, was widely circulated. When he returned to the base of the mountain, he was greeted by his ally Wan Li, first party secretary of Anhui, who had broken through the blockages on railway transport and was now paving a way to overcome the obstacles to rural reorganization. At the base of Yellow Mountain, Deng was also greeted by reporters. He told them: “As for the exam in mountain climbing, I completely passed.”
²

In Beijing, politically savvy officials understood: Deng's climb up Yellow Mountain, like Mao's famous swim in the Yangtze River, called attention to a healthy leader ready to make a vigorous push in domestic politics.
³
But Mao's July 1966 swim, orchestrated during a time of concern about the seventy-three-year-old Chairman's health, had been greatly overblown in the Chinese press: discerning readers found it difficult to believe that the elderly Mao could have achieved the world-record swimming pace that was claimed. Deng's climb, by contrast, was treated as it was, as an impressive accomplishment of an unusually healthy person ready to undertake some vigorous activities.