Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (139 page)

In December 1964, Mao, disgusted with the usual cautious balancers who guided planning work, made Yu Qiuli deputy head and secretary general of the State Planning Commission, despite protests by Yu and, even more, by his cautious planner critics who complained that Yu had little background in overall planning work. Mao responded, “Is he only a fierce and daring general
(mengjiang)?
The Ministry of the Petroleum Industry also does planning.”
⁴³
Yu was also put in charge of the “Little State Planning Commission,” an inner leading group within the State Planning Commission. There Yu guided the development of the Third Five-Year Plan, even though the cautious planners did not share Mao's high regard for Yu. In 1965, with the outbreak of the Vietnam War, Mao directed that the plan focus on national defense needs, including moving defense-related industries farther inland. Yu Qiuli and his project managers relocated these “third front” factories under adverse circumstances. When Yu was attacked by Red Guards, Zhou Enlai arranged for him to be brought to live in Zhongnanhai, safe from the Red Guards but away from his family. In 1970 he was promoted again, to be director of the State Planning Commission.

After Lin Biao's death in September 1971, because of the high regard for Yu in the Rear Services Department of the PLA, he was brought back to the military to ensure that those in the rear services who had been close to Lin Biao were removed. In 1972, when prospects for importing new technologies appeared to be more promising, Yu Qiuli played a role in arranging for China to acquire them. In 1975 Yu visited Japan to lay the groundwork for importing Japanese steel technology. And when Deng was elevated to first vice premier in January 1975, he worked closely with Yu, who not only continued on as director of the State Planning Commission but also became a
vice premier. In August 1977 when Deng returned to work, Yu Qiuli was elevated to Politburo membership. Although Chen Yun and the cautious planners used the collapse of an oil platform in the Gulf of Bohai as an excuse for removing Yu from head of the State Planning Commission, Deng arranged for Yu to return to the military as head of the Political Department of the PLA.

Zhao Ziyang

In 1989 Zhao Ziyang became known to the world for his willingness to be punished rather than to send in troops to end the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.
⁴⁴
In 1986 Zhao had supervised the high-level study of political reform, but before 1989 he was not known as a strong advocate of freedom and democracy. Foreign leaders knew Zhao as someone with an excellent grasp of international economic issues. And Deng wanted him as premier because he was a brilliant, committed reformer and an experienced official with keen analytic abilities who was able to guide the introduction of Deng's bold economic reforms. In 1980, whereas central government officials were accustomed to operating within the existing framework and had not yet introduced reforms, Zhao was a proven provincial leader who had already begun to experiment with new approaches. In Sichuan, with Beijing's permission, he had experimented with granting more autonomy to industrial enterprises and allowing the rural collectives to divide work responsibilities among smaller-sized groups. No other provincial leader could then compare with Zhao Ziyang in these respects.

After the Communists took over the country in 1949, Deng never worked directly with Zhao, but he had long known of his reputation as a proven provincial leader. Deng first met Zhao in 1946 when Zhao, then twenty-seven, was party secretary in Hua county, Henan province, and district party secretary for several of the surrounding counties. Hua county was then under the jurisdiction of the Jin-Ji-Lu-Yu (Shanxi, Hebei, Shandong, and Henan) Border Region that Deng headed. After Deng went to Beijing in 1952, he became familiar with the role that Zhao, then in his early thirties, was playing as vice provincial party secretary in Guangdong province, and he followed Zhao's progress as he rose to be provincial secretary of Guangdong in 1965. In 1975 Deng chose Zhao to be first party secretary of Sichuan, the most populous province and a region close to Deng's heart: it was Deng's home province, and Deng had been responsible for the area in 1949–1952.

When Deng returned to work in 1977 and began thinking seriously of the next generation of Chinese leaders, he supported including Zhao as an alternate member of the Politburo, which at that time had seventeen regular members. This position would entitle Zhao to attend Politburo meetings and to become familiar with affairs at the party center. But Zhao needed some convincing to take on the job. In January 1978, in a stopover in Sichuan on the way to Nepal, Deng had an opportunity to talk with Zhao about their visions of reform. Zhao explained that it was exciting to
“ride the tiger” close to the center of power, but it was also risky. He knew many officials had been destroyed in the process—Lin Biao, Liu Shaoqi, and also Tao Zhu, Zhao's longtime mentor and supporter in Guangdong. Tao had been brought to Beijing by Mao on the eve of the Cultural Revolution to be fourth in command, but then, caught in the currents of the Cultural Revolution, had been attacked and incarcerated: in 1969 he died without receiving proper medical attention. Deng, however, pushed Zhao to go to Beijing to take part in the new reform era, and at the beginning of 1980, Zhao finally agreed.

Born in Henan in 1919 into a rich landlord family, Zhao Ziyang was a natural leader. He was an inspired visionary who always displayed confidence and an easy charm. He attended Kaifeng No. 1 Junior Middle School and Wuhan Senior Middle School. Had he been in United States at the time, he might have attended an American prep school and an Ivy League college (a route that two of his grandchildren later took), where, without effort, he would have been an excellent student and a student leader. By 1938, Zhao was already Communist Party secretary in his native Hua county in Henan. After the civil war ended, Zhao, at age thirty-two, was selected by Tao Zhu, the newly appointed first party secretary in Guangdong, to be his right-hand man. Thus in 1951, while Hu Yaobang, one of the promising young officials in the Southwest, was guiding land reform in northern Sichuan, Zhao Ziyang was guiding land reform in northern Guangdong.

From 1951 to 1965 Tao Zhu gave Zhao a variety of leadership responsibilities and by 1965, when Tao was busy as first party secretary of the Central-South Bureau, Zhao in Guangdong became the youngest provincial first party secretary in the country. He was one of the officials who, after criticism in the Cultural Revolution, returned relatively early: in 1972 he became secretary of the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region Revolutionary Committee, and in 1974 he returned as first party secretary of Guangdong. Ambitious local leaders commonly cultivated good relations with higher-ups (
la guanxi)
to make their way up the hierarchy. Zhao, however, who was fully backed by Tao Zhu, rose without having to engage in political maneuvering and never became a political wheeler dealer. If Hu Yaobang was moved by his heart and his conscience, Zhao Ziyang was cerebral, with a great ability to grasp foreign practices and to conceive new programs.

Though not as effusive as Hu, Zhao also became a complete favorite of his underlings because of his informality and his easy give-and-take, his readiness to listen to ideas without regard to the status of the speaker, and his quick grasp of a strategy's implications. Although not a political infighter, he displayed a sense of noblesse oblige to the nation as a whole. He was personally privileged but he worked hard to look after the interests of the poor, the students, and the intellectuals. During the Great Leap Forward, for instance, he stretched national policy to deal with the food shortages.
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When U.S. ambassador Leonard Woodcock, a former union leader representing the great capitalist nation, first met Zhao, who was representing the proletariat
class in Communist China, Woodcock said to an aide after the meeting, “Did you see his hands? That guy has never worked a day in his life.”
⁴⁶

Though Zhao was pleasant and cordial, some fellow officials considered him somewhat aloof and ready to look out for himself. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, subordinates who were told by Zhao to resist the Red Guards were upset that Zhao himself quickly handed over to the Red Guards the keys to his office.

In the 1950s, all provincial leaders were deeply involved in rural issues, and Mao recognized in Zhao someone very knowledgeable about agriculture. But even more relevant to Zhao's later work in the reform era was his early experience guiding Communist organizations that operated in the market economy of Hong Kong—including the Bank of China, China Resources (which managed work in Hong Kong for the Chinese economic ministries), New China News Agency (Xinhua), department stores, “patriotic” schools, and labor unions. These organizations reported to Beijing, but they also reported to Guangdong, so through his work with them, Zhao became familiar with the market climate in Hong Kong. Beginning in 1957, too, Guangdong hosted a semiannual trade fair that attracted foreign businesspeople, which gave Zhao a far deeper understanding of the foreign business world than was possible for party secretaries in other provinces.

In 1980 Zhao arrived in Beijing as a well-respected provincial leader, not as a member of the Beijing old-boy club. He had become more familiar with Beijing affairs as an alternate member of the Politburo in August 1977 but he did not become a full member until September 1979. Unlike most officials, who had worked together in Beijing for many years, he did not have established friendships among those working in the Zhongnanhai offices or courtyards. Nor had he taken an active role in Beijing politics and maneuvering. His children, who had lived in the provinces, did not know the children of other high officials through school and social activities. His family suffered not only during the decade of the Cultural Revolution, but also after 1989, when on the eve of the Tiananmen tragedy Zhao was purged and put under house arrest, with no gestures of support offered from Beijing's top political families.

After becoming premier in 1980, Zhao, in addition to guiding the daily work of all branches of government and meeting foreign officials, was responsible for changes in government policy and organization. Earlier, Zhou Enlai had brilliantly managed the work of the government, mastering massive amounts of detailed information, but in his day, policies came from Mao and he did not have to guide a fundamental reorientation of the government. Zhao Ziyang, by contrast, spent much of his time working with think tanks and people then outside of the regular bureaucracy—such as the Economic System Reform Commission and the Research Center for Rural Development—to determine which foreign ideas and practices could be grafted onto existing Chinese institutions. Zhao's responsibility for conceiving new structures worried some bureaucrats who feared Zhao might be reorganizing them out of a job.

8th Party Congress, Sept. 15–27, 1956

First plenum: Sept. 28, 1956

Second plenum: Nov. 10–15, 1956

Third plenum: Sept. 20–Oct. 9, 1957

Fourth plenum: May 3, 1958

8th Party Congress, 2nd Session, May 5–23, 1958

Fifth plenum: May 25, 1958

Sixth plenum: Nov. 28–Dec. 10, 1958

Seventh plenum: Apr. 2–5, 1959

Eighth plenum: Aug. 2–16, 1959

Ninth plenum: Jan. 14–18, 1961

Tenth plenum: Sept. 24–27, 1962

Eleventh plenum: Aug. 1–12, 1966

Twelfth plenum: Oct. 13–31, 1968

9th Party Congress, Apr. 1–14, 1969

First plenum: Apr. 28, 1969

Second plenum: Aug. 23–Sept. 6, 1970

10th Party Congress, Aug. 24–28, 1973

First plenum: Aug. 30, 1973

Second plenum: Jan. 8–10, 1975

Third plenum: July 16–21, 1977

11th Party Congress, Aug. 12–18, 1977

First plenum: Aug. 19, 1977

Second plenum: Feb. 18–23, 1978

Third plenum: Dec. 18–22, 1978

Fourth plenum: Sept. 25–28, 1979

Fifth plenum: Feb. 23–29, 1980

Sixth plenum: June 27–29, 1981

Seventh plenum: Aug. 6, 1982

12th Party Congress, Sept. 1–11, 1982

First plenum: Sept. 12–13, 1982

Second plenum: Oct. 11–12, 1983

Third plenum: Oct. 20, 1984

Fourth plenum: Sept. 16, 1985

National Party Representatives Conference: Sept. 18–23, 1985