Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (8 page)

Many Chinese complained about the cancellation of meetings of the Chinese Communist Party. Not Deng. In the reports filed with the Soviet Communist Party at Sun Yat-sen University, Deng was praised for his strong sense of discipline, for acknowledging the need to obey the leaders. He had followed the leadership of Ren, but when Ren had been removed, he followed the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party. On November 5, near the end of his stay, the party evaluated Deng Xiaoping: “As someone who is both disciplined and consistent, as well as capable in his studies, he has accumulated a lot of experience from his organizational work in the Communist Youth League Bureau and greatly matured. He takes an active part in political work. He acts like a comrade in his relations with others. He is among the best students.”
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In Moscow, Deng attended classes eight hours a day, six days a week. He took a full schedule of courses that included study of works by Marx, Engels, and Lenin, as well as classes on historical materialism, economic geography, the history of the Soviet Communist Party, and the history of the Chinese revolutionary movement. The Comintern, which hoped to develop good relations with potential leaders of the Chinese Communist movement, provided far better living conditions for the Chinese students than ordinary Russians enjoyed.

While Deng was studying in Moscow, the Soviet Union had not yet built its socialist structure. The Soviet Union was still under the National Economic Policy (NEP). Under the NEP, independent farmers, small businesspeople, and even larger businesses were encouraged to prosper while the socialist economy was beginning to develop heavy industry. Foreigners, too, were invited to invest in the Soviet Union. Deng believed, as did others at
that time, that such an economic structure—whereby private enterprise was allowed and foreign investment was encouraged, all under Communist Party leadership—promoted faster economic growth than could be achieved in capitalist economies.
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The fundamentals of the NEP, a market economy under Communist leadership, were similar to those of the economic policies that Deng would carry out when he was in charge of China's Southwest Bureau in 1949–1952 and those that he would reintroduce in the 1980s.

Some ideas Deng espoused in Moscow, at age twenty-two, were unusually developed for someone so young, and remained unchanged throughout his life. To take just one example, in an August 12, 1926, class composition, he wrote: “Centralized power flows from the top down. It is absolutely necessary to obey the directions from above. How much democracy can be permitted depends on the changes in the surrounding environment.”
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Resisting the Guomindang, 1927–1930

Although the training at Sun Yat-sen University was designed to last two years, on January 12, 1927, after only one year, Deng, along with some twenty young Communist political instructors, was sent by the Comintern to take advantage of an opportunity provided by the warlord Feng Yuxiang, whose base was in the Yellow River valley in Shanxi. As the split within the Guomindang between the Communists and the Guomindang right wing was growing more intense, the Communists, weak militarily compared to their right-wing Guomindang adversaries, sought military alliances to brace against a split that was beginning to seem inevitable. Feng Yuxiang, who had visited Moscow's Sun Yat-sen University while his three children were studying in Moscow, offered just such a relationship. Feng believed that Communist political instructors could help instill a purpose in his troops, and he used promising leaders like Deng to help give them a sense of what they were fighting for. When the Guomindang and the Communists split in April 1927, Feng Yuxiang, who enjoyed good relations with Deng and his Communist colleagues, realized that the Guomindang had far more military power than the tiny band of Communists and concluded he had no choice but to ally with the Guomindang. Feng bade Deng and his comrades a cordial goodbye and sent them on their way.

From Shanxi, Deng, following party orders, reported to the Communist Party headquarters in Shanghai to take part in underground work. Chiang Kai-shek, aware of the growing gulf with the Communists and fearing an attack
by them, had moved first, in April 1927, to destroy the Communists, immediately killing many of their leaders. In Shanghai, the Communist Central Committee, in constant danger of exposure by former allies who were now deadly enemies, carried on underground activities. To avoid being discovered, Deng took on various disguises and honed skills that would remain with him his entire life: he never passed on clues of Communist activities to outsiders and never left a paper trail that might implicate other party members. Indeed, from this time on, he always kept the names and locations of key members in his head, not on paper.

Deng went to Shanghai with his new wife, whom he had first met as a fellow student in the Soviet Union. Soviet supervisors had observed then that Deng was fond of a young woman named Zhang Xiyuan, but unlike most of his peers who were constantly pestering women students, Deng had not made advances; instead he concentrated on his studies and party work.
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It wasn't until Deng returned to China and met Zhang Xiyuan again at a meeting in Wuhan that the two began a brief courtship and were married. In Shanghai Deng and Zhang Xiyuan lived next door to Zhou Enlai and his wife, Deng Yingchao, with whom they shared their underground work.

On August 7, 1927, twenty-one Communist Party leaders assembled for an emergency meeting in Wuhan to respond to the widespread slaughter of Communists by the Guomindang. The twenty-two-year-old Deng, who was not a regular member of the group, served as note-taker and processed the documents. (In later Communist history, Deng was given the august title of “head of the secretariat” for his modest role of taking notes for this small band of Communists.) At that meeting he first met the tall, confident, and forceful Mao Zedong, who had not yet risen to the position of supreme leader.

In 1929, the party dispatched Deng from Shanghai to Guangxi, a poor province west of Guangdong where, at age twenty-five, he was to lead an alliance with some small local warlords and establish a Communist base. Deng's selection for this task reflected the high regard that party leaders had for his commitment to the revolution and for his ability to manage complex relations with warlords, local people, and the party center in a rapidly shifting political environment. After the party's split with the Guomindang, the party Central Committee, under orders from the Comintern, had directed local Communists to lead urban insurrections.

The small number of Communists working with Deng in their South China Bureau in Hong Kong and in Guangxi built a base of cooperation
with some small local military officials in Guangxi (Li Mingrui and Yu Zuoyu) who had broken with Chiang Kai-shek and the larger, more powerful Guangxi warlords who had joined the “northern march” by which Chiang hoped to unify China. In Guangxi, Deng played an essential—if behind-the-scenes—role in achieving some short-term success. Deng and his allies managed to take over two localities, Baise and Longzhou, in western Guangxi, near the Yunnan border.

These developments are celebrated in Communist history as Communist uprisings. But when Guangxi warlord Li Zongren left the northern march and returned to the province, his far more powerful forces quickly overran Deng's forces in Baise and Longzhou. Many of Deng's allies were killed, and the rest, several hundred men of the Seventh Red Army, fled—first to the north with the help of Zhuang minority allies, and then eastward along hundreds of miles of mountains of northern Guangxi and Guangdong. In their retreat they were almost completely devastated in a series of battles with regional military forces. After one of the battles in which he was separated from his troops, Deng left the Seventh Red Army and returned to the party center in Shanghai. Upon his arrival, Deng submitted a written self-criticism of his failures in Guangxi. In it, he explained why he had left his military post, writing that the leaders of the Seventh Red Army had agreed that he should report to the party center in Shanghai, and that it was officially permissible to do so. Yet he confessed that he had exercised poor political judgment in leaving his troops while they were still in trouble. During the Cultural Revolution, he was accused of having deserted the Seventh Red Army to return to Shanghai.

In Guangxi, while in his mid-twenties, Deng received his initial military training not at a military academy like a number of his comrades, but through sharing battles with comrades who had military training and fighting experience. In his year in Guangxi, Deng had been given an enormous range of important responsibilities—building military alliances, getting provisions to the troops, escaping from better-armed warlords, and cooperating with local Zhuang minority leaders. But like all Communist urban insurrections of the time, including the far more famous Communist-led Nanchang and Guangzhou uprisings, the Guangxi uprising ended in total failure. Most leaders who cooperated with Deng were killed, either in battle or as part of internal purges within the Communist movement, whose own leadership became suspicious that they had cooperated with the enemy.

After Deng left the Seventh Red Army and returned to Shanghai, he visited
his wife in a Shanghai hospital as she prepared to give birth. It was one of their last times together. Conditions in the hospital were poor; during the birth she contracted puerperal fever and she died several days later. Shortly thereafter, the infant also died. Deng was reported to have been deeply saddened by these deaths, but he returned to work immediately. Within a year of the tragedy, in Shanghai where he awaited reassignment after Guangxi, he began pairing up with a bright, free-thinking Shanghai revolutionary, Ah Jin (Jin Weiying).
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Jiangxi, the Long March, and the Northwest Base, 1930–1937

In Shanghai the Central Committee was slow in giving Deng a new assignment, but after some months it agreed to his request to go to the Central Soviet in Jiangxi. There, beyond the mountains, the military under Mao had captured several counties and had set up a haven, a Soviet base area with its own local government where they were carrying out land reforms. They hoped to build up their forces until they were strong enough to assault the Guomindang and the warlords. The Central Soviet stretched several hundred miles, from the beautiful but inhospitable Jinggang Mountains in the northwest region of the province to the flat farmland in the southeast. Deng was assigned to report to Ruijin county, in the southeast, where Deng and his second wife, Ah Jin, arrived in August 1931.

Within weeks after his arrival in Ruijin, Deng's immediate superiors in Jiangxi decided to make Deng the party secretary in charge of Ruijin county. He began the job at a time when the Guomindang was trying to kill off Communists and each side attempted to have spies in the other's camp. After the 1927 split with the Guomindang, Communist officials were terrified that some party members were secretly providing information to the enemy, and in fact, before Deng arrived in Ruijin, several hundred Communists in Ruijin were suspected of spying and had been jailed or executed. But Deng, who began his work after several weeks of careful investigation of the situation, concluded that the suspects had been wrongly accused. Consequently, those in prison were freed and the leader who had persecuted the local party members was himself executed. Deng's decision was very popular among the local Communists, and enabled him to maintain their strong support throughout his year in Ruijin.

In Jiangxi, Deng developed an enormous admiration for Mao Zedong, who led a small band of followers as they fled from warlords in his native
Hunan eastward across the mountainous area into the neighboring province of Jiangxi. As someone who had struggled to build and maintain a Communist base in Guangxi and failed, Deng understood the scope of Mao's achievement in building a base. Not only did Mao need to find adequate provisions, he also had to keep the enemy at bay and win the support of the local population.

While Deng was the party secretary of Ruijin, central party officials decided to establish the national capital there. Before the capital was established, a large congress of representatives from the Communist bases throughout China was held in the county. Although Deng was not one of the 610 delegates to the congress, he played a key role in laying the groundwork for the meeting and for establishing the new capital on the outskirts of the county. After a year in Ruijin, Deng was transferred to become acting head of Hui-chang county, south of Ruijin; there he was also responsible for Communist activities in Xunfu and Anfu counties.

Like Mao, Deng believed the Communists had to build up a rural base until they were strong enough to challenge their opponents. But central party officials accused Deng of following the defeatist policy of Luo Ming (a Fujian official), and of not being aggressive enough in attacking enemy troops. In what would later be called “Deng's first fall,” he was removed from his post as head of Hui-chang county, and, along with three other officials (Mao's brother, Mao Zetan, and Gu Bo), subjected to severe criticism, then sent away for punishment. Indeed Deng was bitterly attacked for being the leader of a “Mao faction.” Moreover, Deng's second wife, Ah Jin, joined in the attack, left Deng, and married one of his accusers, Li Weihan, whom Deng had known in France. Fortunately, another acquaintance from France, Li Fuchun, then Jiangxi provincial party secretary, brought Deng back from his several months of punishment to work as the head of Jiangxi province's propaganda department.

Deng Rong reports that friends of her father regarded him as a cheerful, fun-loving extrovert before the heavy blows of 1930–1931: the death of his first wife and child, serious criticism and demotion in the party, and divorce by his second wife. After the string of tragedies and setbacks, he became more subdued, less talkative. He couldn't know then that in the long run, being attacked and punished as the head of a “Mao faction” would prove to be a blessing for his career, because it gave Mao lasting confidence in Deng's loyalty. Even when Mao directed the radicals to attack Deng in later years, he never allowed Deng to be expelled from the party.