On China (59 page)

In this atmosphere Deng, in early 1992, emerged from retirement for his last great public gesture. He chose the medium of an “inspection tour” through southern China to urge continued economic liberalization and build public support for Jiang’s reform leadership. With reform efforts stagnating and his protégés losing ground to traditionalists in the Party hierarchy, the eighty-seven-year-old Deng set out with his daughter Deng Nan and several close associates on a tour through economic hubs in southern China, including Shenzhen and Zhuhai, two of the Special Economic Zones established under the 1980s reform program. It was a crusade for reform on behalf of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which meant a role for free markets, scope for foreign investment, and appeal to individual initiative.

Deng, at this point, had no official title or formal function. Nevertheless, like an itinerant preacher, he turned up at schools, hightechnology facilities, model businesses, and other symbols of his vision of Chinese reform, challenging his countrymen to redouble their efforts and setting far-reaching goals for China’s economic and intellectual development. The national press (which was, at the time, controlled by conservative elements) initially ignored the speeches. But accounts in the Hong Kong press eventually filtered back to mainland China.

In time, Deng’s “Southern Tour” would take on an almost mythical significance, and his speeches would serve as the blueprint for another two decades of Chinese political and economic policy. Even today, billboards in China portray images and quotations from Deng’s Southern Tour, including his famous dictum that “development is the absolute principle.”

Deng set out to vindicate the program of reform against the charge that it was betraying China’s socialist heritage. Economic reform and development, he argued, were fundamentally “revolutionary” acts. Abandoning reform, Deng warned, would lead China down a “blind alley.” To “win the trust and support of the people,” the program of economic liberalization must continue for “a hundred years.” Reform and opening up, Deng insisted, had allowed the People’s Republic to avoid civil war in 1989. He reiterated his condemnation of the Cultural Revolution, describing it as beyond failure, a kind of civil war.
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The heir of Mao’s China was advocating market principles, risk taking, private initiative, and the importance of productivity and entrepreneurship. The profit principle, according to Deng, reflected not an alternative theory to Marxism but an observation of human nature. Government would lose popular support if it punished entrepreneurs for their success. Deng’s advice was that China should “be bolder,” that it should redouble its efforts and “dare to experiment”: “We must not act like women with bound feet. Once we are sure that something should be done, we should dare to experiment and break a new path. . . . Who dares claim that he is 100 percent sure of success and that he is taking no risks?”
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Deng dismissed criticism that his reforms were leading China down the “capitalist road.” Rejecting decades of Maoist indoctrination, he invoked his familiar maxim that what mattered was the result, not the doctrine under which it was achieved. Nor should China be afraid of foreign investment:

In the end, Deng attacked the “left” of the Communist Party, which was in a sense part of his own early history, when he had been Mao’s “enforcer” in creating agricultural communes: “At present, we are being affected by both Right and ‘Left’ tendencies. But it is the ‘Left’ tendencies that have the deepest roots. . . . In the history of the Party, those tendencies have led to dire consequences. Some fine things were destroyed overnight.”
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Prodding his countrymen by appealing to their national pride, Deng challenged China to match the growth rates of neighboring countries. In a sign of how far China has come in less than twenty years since the Southern Tour, Deng, in 1992, extolled the “four big items” it was essential to make available to consumers in the countryside: a bicycle, a sewing machine, a radio, and a wristwatch. China’s economy could “reach a new stage every few years,” he declared, and China would succeed if the Chinese dared to “emancipate our minds and act freely” in responding to challenges as they arose.
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Science and technology were the key. Echoing his pathbreaking speeches from the 1970s, Deng insisted that “intellectuals are part of the working class”; in other words, they were eligible for Communist Party membership. In an overture to Tiananmen supporters, Deng urged intellectuals who were in exile to return to China. If they possessed specialized knowledge and skills, they would be welcomed regardless of their previous attitudes: “They should be told that if they want to make their contributions, it would be better for them to come home. I hope that concerted efforts will be made to accelerate progress in China’s scientific, technological and educational undertakings. . . . We should all love our country and help to develop it.”
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What an extraordinary reversal in the convictions of the octogenarian revolutionary who had helped build, often ruthlessly, the economic system he was now dismantling. When serving in Yan’an with Mao during the civil war, Deng gave no indication that he would, fifty years later, be traveling around his country, urging reform of the very revolution he had enforced. Until he ran afoul of the Cultural Revolution, he had been one of Mao’s principal aides, distinguished by his single-mindedness.

Over the decades, a gradual shift had taken place. Deng had come to redefine the criteria of good governance in terms of the well-being and development of the ordinary person. A considerable amount of nationalism was also involved in this dedication to rapid development, even if that required adopting methods prevalent in the previously reviled capitalist world. As one of Deng’s children later told the American scholar and head of the National Committee on United States–China Relations David Lampton:

In the service of this vision, Deng was advocating many American economic and social principles as part of his reform program. But what he called socialist democracy was vastly different from pluralistic democracy. He remained convinced that, in China, Western political principles would produce chaos and thwart development.

Yet even as he espoused the need for an authoritarian government, Deng saw his ultimate mission as passing on power to another generation, which, if his development plan succeeded, was bound to develop its own conception of political order. Deng hoped that the success of his reform program would remove the incentive for a democratic evolution. But he must have understood that the change he was bringing about was bound eventually to lead to political consequences of as yet unpredictable dimensions. These are the challenges now facing his successors.

For the immediate future, Deng, in 1992, stated relatively modest goals:

That would have been in 2049. In fact, China has done much better—by a generation.

Over a decade after Mao’s death, his vision of continuous revolution was reappearing. But it was a different kind of continuous revolution based on personal initiative, not ideological exaltation; connection with the outside world, not autarky. And it was to change China as fundamentally as the Great Helmsman sought, albeit in a direction opposite of what he had conceived. This is why, at the end of the Southern Tour, Deng sketched his hope for the emergence of a new generation of leaders with their own new viewpoints. The existing leadership of the Communist Party, he said, was too old. Now over sixty, they were better suited for conversation than for decisions. People of his age needed to stand aside—a painful confession for someone who had been such an activist.

For all the matter-of-factness of Deng’s prescriptions, there was about them the melancholy of old age, conscious that he would miss the fruition of what he was advocating and planning. He had seen—and, at times, generated—so much turmoil that he needed his legacy to be a period of stability. For all his show of assurance, a new generation was needed to enable him, in his words, “to sleep soundly.”

The Southern Tour was Deng’s last public service. The implementation of its principles became the responsibility of Jiang Zemin and his associates. Afterward Deng retired into increasing inaccessibility. He died in 1997, and by then Jiang had solidified his position. Aided by the extraordinary Premier Zhu Rongji, Jiang carried out the legacy of Deng’s Southern Tour with such skill that, by the end of his term in office in 2002, the debate was no longer over whether this was the proper course but rather over the impact of an emerging, dynamic China on world order and the global economy.

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N THE WAKE of Tiananmen, Sino-U.S. relations found themselves practically back to their starting point. In 1971–72, the United States had sought rapprochement with China, then in the final phases of the Cultural Revolution, convinced that relations with China were central to the establishment of a peaceful international order and transcended America’s reservations about China’s radical governance. Now the United States had imposed sanctions, and the dissident Fang Lizhi was in the sanctuary of the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. And with liberal democratic institutions being embraced across the world, reform of China’s domestic structure was turning into a major American policy goal.

I had met Jiang Zemin when he served as Mayor of Shanghai. I would not have expected him to emerge as the leader who would—as he did—guide his country from disaster to the stunning explosion of energy and creativity that has marked China’s rise. Though initially doubted, he oversaw one of the greatest per capita GDP increases in human history, consummated the peaceful return of Hong Kong, reconstituted China’s relations with the United States and the rest of the world, and launched China on the road to becoming a global economic powerhouse.

Shortly after Jiang’s elevation, in November 1989, Deng was at pains to emphasize to me his high regard for the new General Secretary:

Few outside observers imagined that Jiang would succeed. As Shanghai’s Party Secretary, he had won praise for his measured handling of his city’s protests: he had closed an influential liberal newspaper early in the crisis but declined to impose martial law, and Shanghai’s demonstrations were quelled without bloodshed. But as General Secretary he was widely assumed to be a transitional figure—and may well have been a compromise candidate halfway between the relatively liberal element (including the Party ideologist, Li Ruihuan) and the conservative group (such as Li Peng, the Premier). He lacked a significant power base of his own, and, in contrast to his predecessors, he did not radiate an aura of command. He was the first Chinese Communist leader without revolutionary or military credentials. His leadership, like that of his successors, arose from bureaucratic and economic performance. It was not absolute and required a measure of consensus in the Politburo. He did not, for example, establish his dominance in foreign policy until 1997, eight years after he became General Secretary.
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Previous Chinese Party leaders had conducted themselves with the aloof aura appropriate to the priesthood of a mixture of the new Marxist materialism and vestiges of China’s Confucian tradition. Jiang set a different pattern. Unlike Mao the philosopher-king, Zhou the mandarin, or Deng the battle-hardened guardian of the national interest, Jiang behaved more like an affable family member. He was warm and informal. Mao would deal with his interlocutors from Olympian heights, as if they were graduate students undergoing an examination into the adequacy of their philosophical insights. Zhou conducted conversations with the effortless grace and superior intelligence of the Confucian sage. Deng cut through discussions to their practical aspects, treating digressions as a waste of time.

Jiang made no claim to philosophical preeminence. He smiled, laughed, told anecdotes, and touched his interlocutors in order to establish a bond. He took pride, sometimes exuberantly so, in his talent for foreign languages and knowledge of Western music. With non-Chinese visitors, he regularly incorporated English or Russian or even Romanian expressions into his presentations to emphasize a point—shifting without warning between a rich store of Chinese classical idioms and such American colloquialisms as “It takes two to tango.” When the occasion allowed it, he might punctuate social meetings—and occasionally official ones—by bursting into song, either to deflect an uncomfortable point or to emphasize camaraderie.