Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (31 page)

Chinese officials had not expected much from the Ford visit. They had regarded Nixon as a well-informed reliable leader in the face of Soviet pressure, and now Ford, still recovering from Watergate, was weak and new to the position. Nixon had vowed to normalize relations with China in 1976, and they knew before the visit that Ford would not go ahead with normalization plans. Ford was less experienced than Nixon in foreign affairs. Indeed, in pressing the United States to take stronger action against the Soviet Union, Deng said to Ford in their first long session, “I hope I will not offend you, but in the dealings with the Soviet Union, perhaps we are a little more experienced than you.”
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He pressed his views about the Soviet Union as he had done with Kissinger six weeks earlier. China, he said, was prepared to go it alone in defending against the Soviet Union; even though it was a poor country without technology it was prepared to “dig tunnels and prepare millet” to feed the troops. While complaining about U.S. weakness in responding to the Soviets,
Deng gave no indication that China would be prepared to increase its own military budget.

Yet Deng and Mao were more cordial to President Ford than they had been to Kissinger six weeks earlier. Deng told Ford: “We believe in having deep exchanges.... It does not matter if we have different views or even if we quarrel sometimes.” In addition to pressing the United States on Soviet questions, Deng was his charming but feisty self in pushing the United States on U.S.-China relations, trade, cultural exchanges, and U.S. policy toward Taiwan.
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Deng also found President Ford far more knowledgeable about world affairs and far firmer in his anti-Soviet attitudes than he had expected. He told George Bush a week later that the results of his visit with Ford were also far greater than expected.
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The criticism sessions against Deng resumed immediately after Ford returned to the United States, yet still no one on the U.S. side was aware that Deng was then being criticized. A week after the Ford visit, when Deng gave a farewell luncheon for George H. W. Bush, who was completing his work as head of the U.S. Liaison Office and returning to the United States, Bush described the luncheon meeting as “relaxed and convivial.”
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Mao's meeting with President Ford on December 2, 1975, was the last time that Deng was invited by Mao to join him in meeting a foreign guest. It was also the last time that Deng saw Mao. Deng was allowed to meet President Nixon's daughter Julie and her husband David Eisenhower on January 1, and on the next day to host a U.S. Congressional delegation led by Margaret Heckler.
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But Zhou Enlai died less than a week later and this was the last time Deng would meet foreign guests until his return in 1977.

Deng's Initiatives Placed in Cold Storage

Once Mao's nephew, Mao Yuanxin, conveyed his uncle's criticism of Deng to the Politburo on October 25, 1975, all forward movement on party building, science, education, and culture came to a halt. The lower-level units did not learn of Mao's criticism of Deng immediately, but as the weeks passed, they sensed that their efforts to get approval for changes were being stymied at higher levels. By January 1976 Deng was no longer around to support them.

Deng's efforts from May through October 1975 to look forward, to lay the groundwork for long-term progress in party building, economics, science, technology, and culture, were frozen but they were not dead. The economic
plans drawn up under Deng in 1975 remained the basis for the 1976–1980 Fifth Five-Year Plan. The Gang of Four printed out the three “three poisonous weeds” and conducted a campaign to criticize them. Those who read them could not publicly express their appreciation for them, but in 1977 they were dusted off and became known as the “three fragrant flowers,” serving as the basis for the programs in the years ahead. The plans to establish an independent academy of social sciences, for example, were stopped in late 1975, but implemented in 1977 when the academy was established. The Political Research Office by late 1975 was moribund, but many of the writers it had assembled played a role in writing the documents for the Third Plenum of 1978 and for the reforms that followed.

In the military, the campaign to criticize Deng never gained real traction: outside the Political Work Department of the PLA, the Gang of Four found very little support. Within the military, the most noticeable effect was a slowing of the recall of senior officials who had been criticized during the Cultural Revolution and a delay in the reopening of military schools. In 1977 officials were again being recalled and military schools were being reopened.
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Deng's fall had a dramatic short-term impact on higher education. Plans to raise educational standards and reduce political education were halted. Momentum for rebuilding the CAS was lost, and boundaries for acceptable activity in literature and art were narrowed. A chill once again came over writers, musicians, and artists.

In the political realm, too, activity in reversing the verdicts on senior party officials slowed. Some of Deng's closest supporters, particularly Hu Yaobang and Hu Qiaomu, were attacked and removed from office, and lower-level officials who served under them also lost their jobs.

In 1975, Mao had been willing to bend to bring order, stability, and economic growth, but in the end Deng pushed further than Mao could tolerate. In his last months of life, Mao had the power to yank the leash, to remove Deng and have him criticized. Yet Mao no longer had the strength or the support to control the thinking of officials below him. In the short run, Deng was out. But his firmness in refusing to renounce what he had supported in late 1975 stood him in good stead beginning in 1977, when he returned and took out of cold storage the people and programs that he had created and encouraged in 1975.

Within a single year, between December 1975 and September 1976, four senior Chinese leaders passed away. First Kang Sheng, the master internal spy who had done the dirty work for Mao in arranging the killing of hundreds of officials accused of betraying the revolution, died in December 1975. Then Premier Zhou Enlai passed away during the morning of January 8, 1976. Zhu De, founder of the Red Army and an early military leader, died in July 1976. And Chairman Mao, who towered above all others, expired in September 1976. With their deaths and the arrest of the Gang of Four in October 1976, the era when a godlike revolutionary could shake an entire nation came to an end.

The Death of Zhou Enlai

When Zhou passed away before Mao, it allowed Mao to shape the nature of Zhou's funeral arrangements—and he used the occasion to try to dampen the public memory of Zhou, offering what was by party standards only minimal recognition of Zhou's service. But Mao's tactic backfired. Instead of being placated, many Chinese people were upset that Zhou, who had earned their respect and admiration, was not given the posthumous recognition they felt he deserved.

The afternoon of the day Zhou died, the Politburo met to plan arrangements for the funeral, and at 6:30 p.m., Deng, still officially vice premier, sent to Mao the draft of the announcement of Zhou's death, prepared by the Politburo, along with a message asking for his approval. Early the next morning
Mao approved the draft announcement and did not object to the selection of 107 people for the funeral committee, headed by Mao, Wang Hongwen, Ye Jianying, Deng Xiaoping, and Zhu De.
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Mao even permitted Deng to present the eulogy, and Zhou was to be cremated at Babaoshan, the cemetery for revolutionary heroes.

But Mao did not attend the funeral service. Three days before the service was to be held at the Great Hall of the People, Mao scoffed to his bodyguard Wang Dongxing, “Why do I have to go to the service?” He instructed his personal assistant Zhang Yufeng to explain simply that he was unable to be there (even though, just a few weeks later, Mao was well enough to meet former president Nixon for a full hour and forty minutes).
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Mao did send a memorial wreath for Zhou, but he did not take part in any other expression of grief.

During Zhou's last months, Mao had been similarly distant. By September 1975 Zhou's weight had dropped from his usual 143 pounds to a mere 88 pounds.
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Deng, Ye Jianying, and other close associates frequently visited Zhou in his hospital suite, even when Zhou was not able to talk. On January 5, Deng, Li Xiannian, and several other leaders went to be with Zhou during his final operation.
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Mao, though far more mobile than Zhou, never once visited him in the hospital. Mao also tried to dampen foreigners' celebration of Zhou. Deng, at 4:00 p.m. on the day of Zhou's death, reported to Mao that many representatives of foreign countries were asking to pay their respects. When Deng met the Albanian ambassador later that day, he announced, in accord with Mao's direction, that foreign ambassadors in Beijing could take part in expressing their condolences and that leaders of various countries could express their condolences to the Chinese embassy in their own country, but no foreign delegations were to be sent to Beijing.
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By contrast, and in spite of Mao's coolness, among the general public the announcement of Zhou's death on radios and loudspeakers precipitated a huge national expression of grief. In the public eye, Zhou had suffered from unfair treatment since 1973. The spontaneous outpouring was comparable to that in the United States in 1945 when Franklin Roosevelt died and in 1963, when Jack Kennedy was shot. The Chinese people, aware of how emaciated Zhou had appeared at the National People's Congress the year before, were not surprised, but they were frightened that no one else could defend the country against the madness that Mao and the Gang of Four had perpetrated. Some leaders who had suffered during the Cultural Revolution remained
deeply upset that Zhou had been so willing to collaborate with Mao, but in the public eye, Zhou had saved them from Mao's excesses.
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Many feared what might follow now that Zhou was no longer around to defend them.

On January 11, Beijing residents, who had heard only by word of mouth that Zhou's funeral procession would take place that day, gathered at Tiananmen Square to pay their respects. Late in the afternoon, a hearse with Zhou's body, followed by one hundred black limousines, passed through the square on the way to Babaoshan, the cemetery for revolutionary heroes in the Western Hills where his body was to be cremated. Despite the freezing weather, an estimated one to two million people lined the streets.
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Anxious mourners, upset at the rumor that the Politburo had ordered Zhou's cremation against his will, blocked the procession of vehicles until Zhou's widow Deng Yingchao assured them that Zhou himself had asked to be cremated.
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On January 12, the
People's Daily
carried a photograph of Zhou draped in the party flag, indicating that mourning was permitted.
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Hundreds of thousands of people went to the Imperial City's Hall of the Ancestors to visit the wooden casket that contained Zhou's cremated remains. The wearing of black armbands was prohibited, but supplies of black cloth used to make armbands and white silk paper to make chrysanthemums for mourning sold out in Beijing.
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By January 12 an estimated two million people had taken wreaths and eulogies to the Monument to the People's Heroes in Tiananmen Square.
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At the Politburo meeting on January 12, Zhang Chunqiao suggested that Marshal Ye Jianying present the eulogy that the Politburo was preparing for the January 15 memorial service. Only a month earlier, Marshal Ye had presented the eulogy for Kang Sheng, but he chose to give to Deng the opportunity to deliver Zhou's eulogy, even though Deng was being subjected to severe criticism at the time, and the other Politburo members agreed.
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Mao had the power to stop Deng from delivering the eulogy, but it would have been awkward to reject the Politburo's decision. He chose instead to allow Deng to present the eulogy, formally prepared under the Politburo's direction.

At the memorial ceremony, Deng, speaking on behalf of the Central Committee, gave the eulogy before five thousand carefully selected attendees. Ji Chaozhu, who often interpreted for Deng as well as for Zhou, recalled that while Deng rarely displayed any emotion, “when Deng began by saying, ‘our premier,’ his voice broke. Everyone was sobbing.”
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Deng's life had been
closely intertwined with Zhou's for half a century, and both of them had suffered under Mao whom they had served with dedication for many decades. This would be Deng's last public appearance until the spring of 1977.

The eulogy read by Deng praised Zhou, but the content prepared under the Politburo's direction would be difficult for Mao or the Gang of Four to disagree with. According to the eulogy, Zhou had contributed to the Communist Party, to the undefeated PLA, to the victory of the New Democratic Revolution, to the creation of the new socialist China, and to the great unity of workers, peasants, and minority groups. He had made indelible contributions to the dictatorship of the proletariat and in foreign relations had carried out the revolutionary foreign policy line of Chairman Mao. Throughout his life, Comrade Zhou had been loyal to Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought. He always saw the big picture, he respected party discipline, and he was good at uniting with the great majority of officials. He was modest, prudent, and unassuming, setting an example by his hardworking conduct and plain living. In addition, Deng concluded, he had waged a heroic revolutionary struggle against his illness.
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