On China (44 page)

Having grown accustomed to Mao’s philosophical disquisitions and indirect allusions and to Zhou’s elegant professionalism, I needed some time to adjust to Deng’s acerbic, no-nonsense style, his occasional sarcastic interjections, and his disdain of the philosophical in favor of the eminently practical. Compact and wiry, he entered a room as if propelled by some invisible force, ready for business. Deng rarely wasted time on pleasantries, nor did he feel it necessary to soften his remarks by swaddling them in parables as Mao was wont to do. He did not envelop one with solicitude as Zhou did, nor did he treat me, as Mao had, as a fellow philosopher from among whose ranks only a select few were worthy of his personal attention. Deng’s attitude was that we were both there to do our nations’ business and adult enough to handle the rough patches without taking them personally. Zhou understood English without translation and would occasionally speak it. Deng described himself to me as a “rustic person” and confessed, “Languages are hard. When I was a student in France, I never learned French.”

As time went on, I developed enormous regard for this doughty little man with the melancholy eyes who had maintained his convictions and sense of proportion in the face of extraordinary vicissitudes and who would, in time, renew his country. After 1974, out of the wreckage of the Cultural Revolution, Deng, at some personal risk since Mao was still in charge, began to fashion a modernization that during the twenty-first century was to turn China into an economic superpower.

In 1974, when Deng returned from his first exile, he conveyed little sense that he would be a figure of historic consequence. He articulated no grand philosophy; unlike Mao, he made no sweeping claims about the Chinese people’s unique destiny. His pronouncements seemed pedestrian, and many were concerned with practical details. Deng spoke on the importance of discipline in the military and the reform of the Ministry of Metallurgical Industry.
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He issued a call to increase the number of railway cars loaded per day, to bar conductors from drinking on the job, and to regularize their lunch breaks.
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These were technical, not transcendent, speeches.

In the wake of the Cultural Revolution and given the hovering presence of Mao and the Gang of Four, workaday pragmatism was a bold statement in itself. For a decade, Mao and the Gang of Four had advocated anarchy as a means of social organization, endless “struggle” as a means of national purification, and a sort of violent amateurism in economic and academic endeavors. The Cultural Revolution having elevated the pursuit of ideological fervor as a badge of authenticity, Deng’s call for a return to order, professionalism, and efficiency—almost boilerplate in the developed world—was a daring proposition. China had endured a decade of rampaging youth militias that had come close to destroying Deng’s career and family. His pragmatic, matter-of-fact style recalled China from the dream of cutting short history to a world where history is fulfilled by sweeping ambitions but in practical stages.

On September 26, 1975, in remarks entitled “Priority Should Be Given to Scientific Research,” Deng sounded several of the themes that would become his trademarks: the need to emphasize science and technology in Chinese economic development; the reprofessionalization of the Chinese workforce; and the encouragement of individual talent and initiative—precisely the qualities that had been paralyzed by political purges, the shuttering of the universities during the Cultural Revolution, and the promotion of incompetent individuals on ideological grounds.

Above all, Deng sought to end once and for all the debate about what, if anything, China could learn from foreigners that had been raging since the nineteenth century. Deng insisted that China emphasize professional competence above political correctness (even to the point of encouraging “eccentric” individuals’ professional pursuits) and to reward individuals for excelling in their chosen fields. This was a radical shift of emphasis for a society in which government officials and work units had dictated the most minute details of individuals’ educational, professional, and personal lives for decades. Where Mao took issues into the stratosphere of ideological parables, Deng subordinated ideological pursuits to professional competence:

Deng defined traditional Chinese priorities as “the need to achieve consolidation, stability and unity.”
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Though not in the position of supreme power with Mao still active and the Gang of Four remaining influential, Deng spoke bluntly about the need to overcome the prevailing chaos and “put things in order”:

What Mao was, in fact, approving when he had given his “approval” was left vague. If Deng was brought back to supply a more ideological alternative to Zhou, the opposite was the result. How Deng defined order and stability remained the subject of intense challenge from the Gang of Four.

Before Deng could fully launch his reform program, China’s power structure underwent an upheaval, and he himself was purged a second time.

On January 8, 1976, Zhou Enlai succumbed to his long battle with cancer. His death evoked an outpouring of public grief unprecedented in the history of the People’s Republic. Deng used the occasion of Zhou’s funeral on January 15 to eulogize him for his human qualities:

Almost all of these qualities—especially the devotion to unity and discipline—had been criticized at the Politburo meeting of December 1973, after which Zhou’s powers were removed (though he kept a title). Deng’s eulogy was thus an act of considerable courage. After the demonstrations in memory of Zhou, Deng was purged again from all his offices. He avoided being arrested only because the PLA protected him on military bases, first in Beijing, then in southern China.

Five months later, Mao died. His death was preceded by (and in the view of some Chinese, augured by) a catastrophic earthquake in the city of Tangshan.

With the downfall of Lin Biao and the passing of Zhou and Mao in such close succession, the future of the Party and the country was thrown wide open. After Mao, no other figure came close to commanding comparable authority.

As Mao came to distrust the ambitions and probably the suitability of the Gang of Four, he had engineered the rise of Hua Guofeng. Hua has remained something of a cipher; he was not in office long enough to stand for anything in particular except succeeding Mao. Mao first appointed Hua as Premier when Zhou died. And when Mao died shortly thereafter, Hua Guofeng inherited his positions as Chairman and head of the Central Military Commission, though not necessarily his authority. As he rose through the ranks of the Chinese leadership, Hua adopted Mao’s personality cult, but he exhibited little of his predecessor’s personal magnetism. Hua named his economic program the “Great Leap Outward,” in an unfortunate echo of Mao’s disastrous industrial and agricultural policy of the 1950s.

Hua’s chief contribution to post-Mao Chinese political theory was his February 1977 promulgation of what came to be known as the “Two Whatevers”: “We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave.”
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This was hardly the type of principle that inspired a rush to the ramparts.

I met Hua only twice—the first time in Beijing in April 1979, and the second in October 1979 when he was on a state visit to France. Both occasions revealed a considerable gap between Hua’s performance and the oblivion into which he eventually disappeared. The same must be said about the records of his conversations with Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor during the administration of Jimmy Carter. Hua conducted each conversation with the assurance that senior Chinese officials invariably display in meetings with foreigners. He was well briefed and confident, if less polished than Zhou and with none of the biting sarcasm of Mao. There was no reason to suppose that Hua would vanish as suddenly as he had emerged.

What Hua lacked was a political constituency. He had been projected into power because he belonged to neither of the principal contending factions, the Gang of Four or the Zhou/Deng moderate faction. But once Mao had disappeared, Hua fell over the supreme contradiction of attempting to combine uncritical adherence to Maoist precepts of collectivization and class struggle with Deng’s ideas of economic and technological modernization. The Gang of Four adherents opposed Hua for insufficient radicalism; Deng and his supporters would in time reject Hua, increasingly openly, for insufficient pragmatism. Outmaneuvered by Deng, he became increasingly irrelevant to the fate of the nation whose primary leadership posts he still technically held.

But before slipping from the pinnacle, Hua performed an act of transcendent consequence. Within a month of Mao’s death, Hua Guofeng allied himself with the moderates—and high-level victims of the Cultural Revolution—to arrest the Gang of Four.

In this highly fluid environment, Deng Xiaoping emerged from his second exile in 1977 and began to articulate a vision of Chinese modernity.

Deng started from a position that in a bureaucratic sense could not have been more disadvantageous. Hua held all the key offices, which he had inherited from Mao and Zhou: he was Chairman of the Communist Party, Premier, and Chairman of the Central Military Commission. He had the benefit of Mao’s explicit endorsement. (Mao had famously told Hua, “With you in charge, I’m at ease.”)
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Deng was restored to his former posts in the political and military establishment, but in every aspect of formal hierarchy he was Hua’s subordinate.

Their views on foreign policy were relatively parallel, but they were strikingly different in their visions of China’s future. In April 1979 on a visit to Beijing, I had separate meetings with the two leaders. Both put forward their ideas for economic reform. For the only time in my experience with Chinese leaders, philosophical and practical disagreements were made explicit. Hua described an economic program to spur production by traditional Soviet methods, emphasizing heavy industry, improvements in agricultural production based on communes, increased mechanization, and use of fertilizers within the framework of a ubiquitous Five-Year Plan.

Deng rejected all these orthodoxies. The people, he said, needed to be given a stake in what they produced. Consumer goods had to have priority over heavy industry, the ingenuity of Chinese farmers had to be liberated, the Communist Party needed to become less intrusive, and government would have to be decentralized. The conversation continued over a banquet, with a number of round tables. I was seated next to Deng. In what was essentially a dinner conversation, I raised the question of the balance between centralization and decentralization. Deng stressed the importance of decentralization in a vast country with a huge population and significant regional differences. But this was not the principal challenge, he said. Modern technology had to be introduced to China, tens of thousands of Chinese students would be sent abroad (“We have nothing to fear from Western education”), and the abuses of the Cultural Revolution would be ended once and for all. While Deng had not raised his voice, the tables around us had fallen silent. The other Chinese present were sitting at the edge of their seats, not even pretending not to be listening in on the old man as he outlined his vision of their future. “We have to get it right this time,” concluded Deng. “We have made too many mistakes already.” Soon after, Hua faded from the leadership. Over the course of the next decade, Deng implemented what he had described at the banquet in 1979.

Deng prevailed because he had over the decades built connections within the Party and especially in the PLA, and operated with far greater political dexterity than Hua. As a veteran of decades of internal Party struggles, he had learned how to make ideological arguments serve political purposes. Deng’s speeches during this period were masterpieces of ideological flexibility and political ambiguity. His main tactic was to elevate the concepts of “seeking truth from facts” and “integrating theory with practice” to “the fundamental principle of Mao Zedong Thought”—a proposition seldom advanced before Mao’s death.

Like every Chinese contender for power, Deng was careful to present his ideas as elaborations of statements by Mao, quoting liberally (if sometimes artfully out of context) from the Chairman’s speeches. Mao had not placed any particular emphasis on practical domestic precepts, at least since the mid-1960s. And he would in general have held that ideology overrode and could overwhelm practical experience. Marshaling disparate fragments of Maoist orthodoxy, Deng abandoned Mao’s continuous revolution. In Deng’s account, Mao emerged as a pragmatist: