Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (22 page)

Such ideas were spreading even among the younger generation in the seminary town of Qom, where the radical cleric Khomeini gave his incendiary speeches against the shah in 1963. To be a religious scholar required fluency and Arabic, and since Iran had more than its share of religious scholars, there were plenty of qualified linguists to ensure that the Islamist debates now under way in the broader Muslim world entered the Iranian mental universe. So, for example, an eager young student named Ali Khamenei—later to achieve fame by succeeding Khomeini as the supreme leader of postrevolutionary Iran—translated two books by the influential Egyptian Islamist Sayyid Qutb from Arabic into Farsi.
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Still, few of these Sunni thinkers went quite as far as Shariati, who sometimes seemed uncertain whether he was a Marxist masquerading as a believer or a Muslim enthralled by revolution. (It’s worth noting that, throughout his life, Shariati hid behind fictional alter egos and literary labyrinths, and his teachings bristled with startling metaphors and nested enigmas.)

By the 1970s, members of the Iranian religious establishment were increasingly becoming engaged in the intense political debates that were now under way. Some clerics—including, but not exclusive to, the followers of Khomeini—had gone public with criticisms of the shah’s policies and were rewarded with lengthy prison terms. There they had plenty of time to engage in polemics with their Marxist cell mates, and the experience proved useful in the effort to fashion a more contemporary idiom for the cause of Islam.

Some younger members of the clergy, sensitive to the spread of leftist ideas, set out to establish Shiism’s revolutionary credentials in the minds of the younger generation. A key figure in this effort was a cleric and philosophy professor named Morteza Motahhari, a strong supporter of Khomeini. Seeing the need for a new kind of educational institution that would bring Islam into the lives of ordinary young Iranians who might otherwise be lost to the faith, he and a group of collaborators solicited funds from wealthy donors and established the Hosseiniye Ershad in 1963.
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They envisioned it as a place where scholars could give lectures to lay audiences about the contemporary relevance of Islam.

In the 1970s, Motahhari and his collaborators noticed that Shariati’s lectures at the University of Mashad—circulating in the form of bootleg cassettes or Xerox samizdat—were proving an unlikely hit among young Iranians, who were transfixed by his melding of revolution and Islam. So the sponsors of Ershad, knowing that Shariati had already encountered problems at his university because of the
controversial subject matter of his teachings, invited him to Tehran to speak at their institute. His presentations were mobbed.

Like quite a few other Muslim political theorists of the twentieth century, Shariati never offered much detail about how his Islamic revolution would look once it became a reality. He seems to have thought of Islam as a kind of “permanent revolution,” a never-ending process of spiritual challenge. In those cases where he explicitly addressed the character of a future “Islamic state,” the vision he outlined was emphatically egalitarian and collectivist. He did not trust democracy or elections and imagined that the future Islamic polity would be led by a caste of pious citizens who were qualified in the ways of government but free of the taint of personal ambition. He rejected theocracy. He was suspicious of the Shiite religious authorities, whom he denounced as
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, paragons of the ossified, institutional Islam that he regarded as a perversion of the true faith. This did not endear him to members of Iran’s religious establishment. But it was hard for them to reject Shariati out of hand. The motivating effect of his lectures—despite his contempt for punctuality, his clotted ambiguities, and his remarkable absentmindedness—was astonishing. Some of his listeners absorbed his teachings and headed straight off to the mountains to join the new breed of guerrillas who preached the violent overthrow of the shah in the name of “Islamic Marxism.” Shariati talked a lot about martyrdom. He frequently cited the example of Imam Hussein, the paragon martyr of Shiism, as the exemplar of the politically conscious Muslim who was prepared to sacrifice his life in the name of the revolutionary cause.

The shah’s secret police finally responded to his lecture-room provocations. Shariati was arrested in 1973 and endured several months of intensive SAVAK interrogation (though his leading biographer, Ali Rahnema, notes that there is no evidence that Shariati was subjected to physical torture).
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After his emergence from prison Shariati continued to publish his ideas, but the pressure from constant surveillance and intimidation by the secret police took its toll. In early 1977 he decided to quit Iran for Britain. A few months later, on June 22, 1977, Shariati died of a heart attack in Southampton. There were the usual theories about SAVAK involvement in his death, but it seems more likely that he was simply worn down by the stresses of his vocation.

There were many other intellectuals theorizing about radical change in the Iran of this period. Others were already debating the dialectic or ruminating about “Islamic economics” or looking for ways to reconcile constitutionalism with the demands of sharia. Some of these Islamist intellectuals—like Mehdi Bazargan, a former Mossadeq prime minister who went on to found the Iranian Freedom Party,
Sazegara’s political home—would serve in the early phase of the Islamic Republic and leave behind enormously influential legacies. But none of them had an impact comparable to Shariati’s. It was his specific achievement to combine intellectual fireworks and idealism with a persuasive and emotional call to political action. It was his lectures that inspired the guerrillas and the radicals who launched Iran’s Islamic Revolution. He had planted the seed. Others would nurture it and bring it to fruition.

W
inter comes early in Beijing. By mid-November 1978, freezing winds were already sweeping through the capital, the air thick with diesel exhaust, smoke from countless coal stoves, and yellow dust from the deserts of Mongolia and the Loess Plateau. In the gathering gloom, 219 top-ranking members of the Chinese Communist Party, all wearing identical round-collared Mao suits in gray or blue, converged on a spot just outside of the Forbidden City.
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Owned, operated, and closely guarded by the People’s Liberation Army, the Jingxi Hotel promised just the degree of seclusion necessary for a sensitive discussion about the fate of the world’s most populous country. It would be decades before ordinary Chinese, much less curious foreigners, learned the details of the meeting that took place there.

For years, party conferences had been occasions for the participants to compete in singing the praises of their hallowed leader, Chairman Mao Zedong. He was the unassailable lodestar of Chinese Communism, the man who had led the party since the Long March and crafted the strategy that brought it to victory in 1949. Lenin and Stalin rolled into one, he stood at the center of an elaborate cult of personality. To an extent, perhaps, this was justified, since he truly was a strategist without parallel, a gifted intriguer who always managed to end up on top. As a hardened survivor and the architect of years of pitiless struggle—on battlefields, in remote guerrilla camps, or in the warren of government buildings in central Beijing—he reacted swiftly to any sign of criticism or dissent. He had dispatched his foes, real
or imagined, by the millions. None of this was calculated to foster an atmosphere of lively debate.

Now, in his absence, the tone was about to change. The ostensible purpose of the 1978 Central Party Work Conference was to set a course for economic policy in the post-Mao era. Ostensibly, its participants were supposed to be doing routine organizational work, preparing the agenda for a subsequent meeting, the thrillingly entitled Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. Today it is the Third Plenum that is usually cited as the official turning point of China’s post-Maoist development. We now know, however, that it was actually the preliminary work conference, held in the seclusion of the Jingxi Hotel, where the crucial battles were fought. It was here that two political camps, whose latent differences had gradually emerged into the open in the years after Mao’s death, came to grips over competing visions of China’s future.

The conference began with Hua Guofeng ensconced as Chinese Communist Party chairman. In office for just two years after Mao’s departure, Hua had already accumulated an impressive array of titles and powers. In the last weeks of his life, Mao had personally designated Hua as his successor, and the leader’s blessing was a sure formula for success in a system where everything revolved around him.

Hua was a creature of the Cultural Revolution. In 1966, as it began, Hua had been a middle-ranking functionary. But as the purges gathered speed, and as many in the senior ranks of the party watched their careers and their lives fall apart, he had capitalized on the sudden opportunities for upward mobility, scrupulously negotiating every tortuous political switchback of the era, always managing to position himself as the most loyal of Maoists. Yet he also managed to avoid associating himself too closely with the Gang of Four—which weighed in his favor as the Cultural Revolution came to an end. Mao had chosen Hua both as a way of protecting his own political legacy (since Hua was unlikely to reverse his policies) and as a way of creating a counterbalance against his wife, Jiang Qing (whose push for power was becoming increasingly clear with each passing day). “With you in charge, I am at ease”—these were the words with which Mao had supposedly declared Hua to be his political heir in 1976.

In the wake of Mao’s death, the colorless Hua surprised everyone with a sudden show of initiative. Allying himself with two established party elders, Army Marshal Ye Jianying and veteran functionary Li Xiannian, Hua engineered the arrest of the Gang of Four. It was a startling gambit even by the Byzantine standards of twentieth-century Communist conspiracies. Hua had started by splitting off one of the Gang’s key allies, a man by the name of Wang Dongxing, who had risen with the
Gang’s help to become the head of the party’s Praetorian Guard, the 8341 Special Regiment, which provided for the security of top officials. Hua and Wang arranged for two of the Gang’s leaders to be called to a special session of the Politburo. They were arrested at gunpoint as they stepped into the room. Jiang Qing, Mao’s widow and the Gang’s leader, was taken into custody in her bedroom; one of her personal servants is said to have spat on her as she was led away. Under orders from Hua, the People’s Liberation Army quickly moved to disarm the heavily armed militias and the powerful media machine that Jiang’s faction had built up over the years. The Cultural Revolution was finally coming to an end.

Yet what was Hua offering in its place? This was not immediately clear. Hua certainly understood that the country could no longer afford permanent revolution. Adopting a strategy originally envisioned by Zhou Enlai, he declared that China should push ahead with “the Four Modernizations” (science and technology, industry, national defense, and agriculture). He moved to restore the economy’s animal spirits by ordering a huge surge of investment in industry and agriculture. Like Gierek in Poland, Hua seemed to believe that part of the solution involved taking big foreign loans for flagship projects; also like Gierek, he seemed to have few concrete ideas about how these loans would be paid back.

Hua’s program did result in tangible growth. But it also led to big budget deficits and scandalous waste, since it failed to tackle many of the serious problems of management and organization bequeathed by Maoist excess. Hua had the right idea, but he was still, in essence, relying on mobilization and slogans rather than substantive economic policy. Some of his critics belittled the program as another Great Leap Forward, a utopian exercise with little practical foundation. Hua, for example, urged a rapid increase in the output of steel, which duly materialized. But to what end? What, precisely, was the underlying economic strategy?

Hua had eliminated the Gang of Four. He tried to revive the economy. But he seemed hesitant to put an end to the broader legacy of the Cultural Revolution. In February 1977, a few months after Mao’s death, Hua’s supporters published a statement containing a conspicuous quote: “We will resolutely uphold whatever policy and decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave.” This credo came to be known as the “the two whatevers,” and its adherents, “the Whateverists.” Like many factional nicknames, this one contained a large grain of truth. Hua’s legitimacy stemmed from the fact that he was Mao’s chosen successor. That counted for a lot. But it also limited his freedom of maneuver. He could not chip away at the memory of the Great Helmsman without undermining himself.

As soon became clear, Hua’s position was not impregnable. Almost from the moment that he assumed office, party power brokers—including Ye and Li, the two men who had helped Hua best the Gang—began pushing for the return of their high-ranking comrades who had been purged in the years before Mao’s death. The most prominent survivor of this group, of course, was Deng Xiaoping.

Hua was aware of the potential challenge and moved quickly to forestall it. In March 1977, he admonished delegates at a key party meeting: “Criticizing Deng and attacking the rightist reversal of verdicts were decided by our Great Leader Chairman Mao Zedong. It is necessary to carry out these criticisms.” Just to make sure everyone got the point, he compared Deng with Khrushchev, the “arch-revisionist” whose attempts at cautious political liberalization in the USSR had made him a bogeyman among the Chinese.
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But Hua was not lucky in his choice of opponents. Deng, though still on the outside, was a man of considerable resources. His previous stint in power from 1974 to 1976 had been short, but he had still managed to put his administrative skills on ample display. In those two years he had implemented policies that healed some of the economic damage from the Cultural Revolution—in one case even ordering troops to seize a crucial railway terminal that was in the hands of a volatile faction of Red Guards.
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He had also commissioned a trio of noteworthy articles—dubbed “The Three Poisonous Weeds” by the Gang of Four—that argued unabashedly for the primacy of professional expertise over revolutionary enthusiasm. In doing so, Deng had deftly laid out the terms of debate for the next stage of the post-Mao era. And, perhaps most important of all, he still had many powerful friends. He stood for the party elders who had suffered in the Cultural Revolution. This was a large group of people, many of them with illustrious backgrounds, and all of them had axes to grind. Hua could not ignore them—especially when figures with the august status of Le and Yi insisted that he bring them back into the fold.