Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (131 page)

Indeed, considerable time is spent mentoring officials at every level. A mentor's role is to suggest to younger, lower-level officials how they should enhance their performance and skills. The most promising young officials are allowed to accompany their superiors to various high-level meetings and to take part in informal gatherings at party retreats. They are also permitted to attend classes at the party schools, with those judged with the most potential for national leadership positions taking courses at the Central Party School in Beijing, and those considered likely nominees for provincial or urban official positions taking leadership courses at the party schools in their respective regions. Not all party members, who numbered 37 million when Deng ascended the stage, shared the camaraderie that developed among those selected to attend retreats with higher officials and to become students at the party
schools. Those who attended party schools not only got to know each other as well as those who attended the party school before and after, but also became acquainted with those higher-level officials who would visit the party schools and, with the help of evaluations by party school officials, make recommendations about their future positions. Although officials in the Organization Department kept personnel files and could make recommendations, the members of the party leadership team at each level made the final decisions about who should be promoted in their jurisdiction.

There is a danger in allowing local leaders so much freedom. The system that Deng founded, which endures today, emphasizes results more than following rules and helps nurture officials who have a broad vision in evaluating issues, who are entrepreneurial, and who support rapid growth. Without tight supervision from above, however, many of these officials have found ways not only to enrich China, but also to enrich themselves and their friends while alienating others in their locality.

Deng Xiaoping did not introduce the system of party leadership teams, but he stabilized it, professionalized the work the teams did, and changed the key criteria for judging officials from contributions to political campaigns to contributions to economic growth. This basic structure has been continued by his successors.

The Modern Meritocracy

By the time Deng stepped down, young party officials had to prove their ability by first passing examinations to the better high schools and better universities. Deng's focus on meritocracy has deep roots in China, which was the first country in the world to select officials on the basis of their performance on examinations. Beginning in 605 c.e., during the Sui dynasty, China had used written examinations as the chief criterion for determining which aspiring candidates were qualified to become government officials. But from the time when the imperial examinations ended, in the year after Deng was born, until Deng ascended the stage, China had not had the combination of stability and leaders' political determination to reestablish a national meritocratic basis for selecting officials. When Mao was alive it was impossible to use educational achievement as the major criterion for selecting officials. Many of those who had made contributions to the Communist cause and emerged in high positions simply had not had any opportunity for university training during the chaotic war and revolution years of the 1930s and 1940s. Furthermore,
Mao considered political commitment (“redness”) a more important qualification than expertise, and he favored peasants and workers over candidates from the “bad classes” (landlord and capitalist families), who were generally better educated. For this reason, examinations were not the main criterion for selecting and promoting officials. Indeed, many of the officials after 1949 were veterans from the Communist armies or guerrilla forces who were barely literate. If examinations had been held, they and their children would not have outperformed the children from the “wrong social classes” who had received better formal training. After Mao's death, Deng boldly dismissed a “good class background” as a criterion for selecting officials; instead he strictly relied on qualifications as measured by entrance examinations. Under new guidelines that Deng introduced in 1977, many children and grandchildren of those once labeled as belonging to the “bad classes” passed examinations, gained admission to the best universities, and became officials.

In fact, Deng established a system of highly competitive meritocratic examinations at each level, from elementary school through university to officialdom. His goal was not to produce social equality but to sift out the ablest and provide them with the best education possible. Examinations were given for entrance to elementary school, junior middle school (the equivalent of grades seven to nine in the United States), senior middle school (grades ten to twelve), and college, and those who made it into the most competitive schools were given the best teachers and facilities.

The unified examination system that Deng introduced in 1977 for universities was not only specifically for future officials. It was a system for selecting the ablest young people for large organizations in all walks of life. But all those selected as officials had first proved themselves in examinations at each educational level. Even among those who became officials, the ablest from the best universities would get jobs in the central government, whereas those who had gone to less competitive universities would start out at lower levels in the bureaucracy. As the number of university graduates rapidly increased in the late 1980s and beyond, additional exams became important for selecting government servants from among university graduates. Once selected as an official, however, one rose through the system not primarily by taking further examinations but on the basis of work performance. This system has been continued under Deng's successors.

In the mid-1980s, many ambitious and energetic young people sought success by “jumping into the rough waters”
(xia hai)
of business. Yet despite these attractive career alternatives, the position of “official” remains highly
valued, not only for the power and the economic security it provides, but also because of the deep respect Chinese have for those judged to have great ability and a commitment to public service. Deng thus left his successors with a meritocratic system for choosing officials that accords with the same principle of selection by examination as in imperial times. But the system he left his successors is completely different in content and structure from imperial times. Furthermore, Deng's system extends the principle of meritocratic selection to include not only the identification of promising officials, but also the selection and training of talented people in many walks of life.

An Open, Urban, National Society

From the dawn of Chinese history until the 1990s, China was predominantly a rural society with strong regional differences in dialect and culture. Before 1949, China's poor transportation systems meant that most goods were produced and consumed within walking distance from a local market town and many people spent most of their lives within that area.
⁶
Mao's tight controls over population movement slowed the modest amount of migration that occurred before 1949. At his death in 1976 the population remained more than 80 percent rural, and life in the countryside was dominated by the local village, family, and collective, with little contact with the outside world. In the Mao period, even large urban work units
(danwei)
—such as government offices, factories, schools, universities, and military bases—were located within relatively self-sufficient compounds, many of which were gated so that any visitors would have to report to the gatekeeper before entering. These closed communities supplied the basic needs of the employees and their families: housing, food, care and education of children, medical care, and welfare. It was difficult for residents to obtain any of these services outside their work units; like rural dwellers, most of these residents lacked opportunities to find alternative work and had little choice but to heed the authorities of their respective units. The limited mobility, the dependence on authorities within the village or urban work unit, and the limited communications with the outside world led to stagnation. Mao trumpeted a revolutionary ideology, but the controls on movement that he imposed further solidified a closed, “feudal” society.

By the time Deng retired, the new economic opportunities created by economic growth and the mobility that he had allowed had put China well on its way to becoming an urban rather than a rural society. During the Deng
era, an estimated 200 million people migrated to towns and cities, movement that has since continued at a rapid pace. It is estimated that by 2015, scarcely two decades after Deng's retirement, an estimated 700 million people, more than half the population, will be urban. By the time Deng stepped down, more than 90 percent of households owned television sets, which instantly brought urban culture to the countryside. Youth returning from coastal areas to visit their families in the villages also brought with them the latest fashions, utensils, electric appliances, and food they had come to know in the cities.
⁷
In short, even rural areas had begun to become urban in culture.

After the reforms began in 1978, urban leaders of Chinese cities, fearing that a torrent of rural migrants could overwhelm urban services and food supplies, still preserved the urban household registration system that had long restricted access to urban services such as housing, employment, and schooling for children. In the early 1980s when grain and edible oil rations were at barely more than subsistence level, there was not enough food to support those people from the countryside who had entered the cities and were trying to live surreptitiously there with relatives or friends. After 1983, however, as food supplies grew, the government began allowing people to move to the cities even without an urban household registration. By then, too, the export industries on the coast could absorb vast numbers of rural youth who were migrating to the area to find a better life. Throughout Chinese history, as a result of wars and famines, millions of people had relocated, but never before on a scale like that which took place in the decades after 1978.

Even during Mao's days, despite the lack of mobility, the entire population had come to share a deep layer of common national culture. By the late 1960s many urban households owned radios, and those that lacked radios, both in the countryside and the cities, could listen to loudspeakers that broadcast national news and music. More of the population could see movies, which brought a shared national culture, and the entire population learned the same slogans and songs from the political campaigns. Elementary schools grew rapidly in number, so that by the time Mao died, roughly 80 percent of the young adults could be considered literate.

The continuing expansion of the educational system under Deng enabled most youth in the 1980s to complete not only elementary school but also junior high school. The rapid diffusion of television in the late 1980s, and the introduction of national channels that broadcast standard news in Mandarin, greatly expanded the public's common base of information. By the time Deng stepped down, the widespread use of standard Mandarin, not only
in schools and public offices, but also in state enterprises, stores, and educational institutions, made it possible for a substantial majority of Chinese to communicate with one another using the standard Mandarin pronunciation
(putonghua).
The spread of transportation systems during the Deng era also made it possible to distribute industrial goods to a larger geographical area and therefore to increase the scale of production for domestic as well as foreign markets. Before the 1980s, there were few brand names in China, but by the time Deng retired, manufactured goods with national and international brand recognition were beginning to spread throughout the country.

With the opening of the closed urban living compounds and the mixing of populations from different areas, local differences declined and were replaced by more shared national culture. Before 1978, people ate local dishes as a matter of course. Just as in the Western world in the late twentieth century when certain dishes that had once been national dishes—like pizza, donuts, bagels, and sushi—became international dishes, so too in China during the 1980s and 1990s did many regional dishes become popular nationwide. Southerners learned to eat steamed buns made from wheat, which had long been standard fare in northern cuisine; and northerners learned to eat rice, which had long been a staple of southern cuisine. Similarly, some of the best regional operas, which had previously been viewed mostly by local people, were now presented to national audiences. After Deng stepped down, the greater mobility of the Chinese population, and the diffusion of cell phones, computers, and the Internet, helped to spread this national culture. The Chinese, like people elsewhere, maintain loyalties to their own village, town, county, dialect group, or province. Members of minority groups have always identified with others of their group. But during the Deng period the growth of a truly national culture and greater awareness of foreign cultures greatly strengthened identification with the nation as a whole.

When Deng retired, a substantial number of youth who had spent several years working in the coastal areas returned to their hometowns, bringing with them not only new goods from the coast, but also new ideas and styles that enabled them to establish their own enterprises and to set new standards for the hinterland. This process further hastened the rapid spread of an urban national culture. Even though the inland residents had far less money to spend, they still acquired products not long after inhabitants of the coastal areas, often by creating less expensive imitations. Not surprisingly, then, more costly items like automobiles spread inland far more slowly than did smaller consumer products—but by the end of the Deng era, even they were beginning
to trickle into inner China. But when Deng stepped down in 1992, the construction of rural housing that met global standards of modest comfort had scarcely begun, and the quality of elementary schooling in rural areas still lagged far behind that in the better urban schools.