Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (25 page)

Nonetheless, the speakers at the conference gathered up their courage and began to assail Wang by name. Virtually no one came to his defense. By the end of the session, the chastened vice chairman was forced to present a “self-criticism” acknowledging all of his past political sins. Wang’s foes would have to wait a few weeks more, until the Third Plenum, for his formal resignation. But it was at the Party Work Conference that they did the essential work of demolishing his standing.

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n short, a great deal had already happened by the time Deng finally arrived, four days after the start of the Central Party Work Conference, on November 14. He had kept track of the conference proceedings during his travels, so he was not entirely surprised by the changed political landscape that greeted him upon his arrival. The precipitous downturn in the fortunes of Hua and Wang transformed the balance of power in the upper ranks of the leadership. Marshal Ye, the man who had presided over this startling twist, greeted Deng by informing him that it was time for him to step into the breach by assuming the job as top leader. Deng accepted. Within the next few days he met with the members of the Politburo Standing Committee, the tiny group of senior party leaders who actually the ran the country, to sketch out his vision for the country’s future course. From now on, he told them, it was imperative that China pursue the goal of modernization. This could be done only by maintaining domestic stability, and that meant retaining Mao Zedong and his thought as the country’s unifying symbol. Deng made it clear to the other leaders he had no intention of repeating Khrushchev’s mistake of hasty political liberalization. But Deng also made it clear that many of Mao’s specific policies would need to be reversed. The other members of the Politburo signed off, enshrining Deng’s principles as the party line.

Deng did not tell his fellow Politburo members everything that he had in mind, however. For weeks before the Party Work Conference, he had been thinking about the remarks he was supposed to deliver at its end (as well as the public speech he was set to give during the more public plenum that followed). One of the men he asked for help was his confidant Yu Guangyuan, an experienced party ideology
expert who also attended the conference as a delegate.
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Yu’s notes on their preparatory sessions provide vivid insight into Deng’s thinking as he began to conceive of the policies that would launch China into the modern era.

Sometime earlier Deng had astonished Yu with the comment that “we must work in the spirit of Meiji Japan and Peter the Great.”
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It was in the Meiji period that the Japanese ruling class had made the strategic decision to embrace Western technology and know-how to catapult their country into the modern world—not unlike Peter the Greats decision to transform Russia into a great power by adopting European ways in the early eighteenth century. Deng’s ideological boldness in his choice of these two examples is striking. Mao and the Cultural Revolution radicals had violently disowned the notion that the People’s Republic of China had anything to learn from the outside world; any functionary in the 1960s who had cited positive lessons from the experiences of imperial Japan or czarist Russia would have opened himself to instant censure as a “revisionist.” (It also says something about his frank assessment of China’s development that he chose to cite eighteenth-century Russia and late-nineteenth-century Japan as relevant models.) Of course, Deng’s remarks in this case were not for public consumption. But his temerity was remarkable nonetheless.

Deng was also interested in more contemporary examples of successful modernization. As he told Yu, his travels to Japan and Singapore had made a powerful impression: “In Singapore, whoever has 1,500 Singaporean dollars is entitled to buy an apartment. A five-room apartment with a floor space of about 70 square meters costs a worker six months’ wages and can be bought on installments. In Japan, in the units giving fairly high bonuses, bonuses are equivalent to six months of a worker’s wages and are enough to buy a car. Rent in Singapore amounts to 15 percent of a worker’s monthly wages, and in Europe, one third.”
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He noted sarcastically that the Chinese Communist Party was still trying to motivate workers through “socialist competitions” (the Communist equivalent of those “worker-of-the-month” campaigns in businesses in the West). This, he said, was ridiculous. In the countries he had visited, workers got rewards in cash if they performed better—a practice that was obviously highly motivating.
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Deng had drawn other conclusions from his travels around the region. Chinese bureaucracy had become top-heavy, he told Yu, and decision-making authority needed to be shifted down to lower levels and away from the center. In some cases, he added provocatively, this might even take the form of local elections. Power within the party had to be diffused to prevent the recurrence of a Mao-style personality cult; collective leadership was imperative. (For all his strength of personality, Deng
did much more to incorporate the views of his colleagues into the decision-making process in the years to come than the imperious Mao.) Another of his observations was even more radical. “We should not be afraid of chaos caused by reliance on the market,” he told Yu. “We should accept a certain degree of regulation by the market.” Economic decision making was a matter of adjusting the balance between supply and demand.
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In another major departure from orthodoxy, Deng also took aim at the egalitarianism that had stood squarely at the center of Maoist policies. It was all right, Deng told him, for some people or regions to become “better off“ faster than others; to do otherwise would be to suppress initiative, creativity, and a healthy measure of competition. This, Deng explained, was a crucial point: “We should permit some people to achieve prosperity sooner than others, with the percentage of rural people who are prosperous first reaching five percent, rising to 10 percent, and increasing further to 20 percent. The percentage of urban people who are prosperous can stay at 20 percent. . . . Only this way shall we have a market, which itself will enable us to open up new industries. We must oppose egalitarianism. Whoever fares well will set a good example for his or her close neighbors to follow.”
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It is worth pointing out that Deng was broaching these ideas ten years after the Soviet leadership had abandoned the cautious decentralizing reforms of Nikita Khrushchev. In November 1978 the government of Leonid Brezhnev was two years into its Tenth Five-Year Plan, which doggedly maintained the supremacy of central planning even as it implicitly acknowledged that the USSR was falling behind in technological innovation. (Among other things, the plan provided for large purchases of information technology from the West.) Soviet prime minister Aleksey Kosygin was crafting a new set of directives for the following year that actually concentrated more decision-making power in ministries. The “reforms,” implemented in July 1979, expressly rejected the modest freedoms granted to enterprises by the Hungarians in their economic experiments.
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Of course, the speech that Deng ended up giving at the end of the Central Party Work Conference was nowhere near as radical as the thoughts he was sharing privately with Yu. But his remarks, which he delivered on December 13, were still sufficiently dramatic to signal the beginning of a new era of potentially far-reaching reforms. Deng spoke of the need to “emancipate our minds” and to “seek truth from facts.” He talked about encouraging the masses “to offer criticisms” and stated that “the thing to be feared most is silence.” One should not, of course, overstate the extent of his tolerance of free speech; Deng was still a senior leader of the
Communist Party, after all, and his willingness to tolerate an exchange of opinions would prove quite limited even for those inside the party. But the shift in tone was still conspicuous.

It was on the economic front, though, that the distinctness of Deng’s vision came through most clearly. “Initiative cannot be aroused without economic means,” he told his listeners. “A small number of advanced people might respond to moral appeal, but such an approach can only be used for a short time.” And he spoke with real passion of the imperative to pursue modernization through advances in science, technology, and modern management. Such generalities might sound banal to modern audiences, but to his listeners in the Jingxi Hotel, they represented a bracing rejection of Maoist zealotry.

By the end of the Central Party Work Conference, it was clear that Deng’s reformist faction had bested the defenders of Maoist-style “class warfare.” But Deng did not want the outside world to think that the party leadership was divided, so he and his associates made sure to keep some changes in the dark. Wang Dongxing was the only figure in the upper ranks of the party who was forced to make a quick departure. Hua emerged from the conference with his titles intact—though it would be just a few short years until he was pushed out of the leadership altogether. Chen Yun, the tough old Communist veteran who had called for the new policy on the Tiananmen Incident, and Hu Yaobang, the other Deng speechwriter and muscular advocate of reform, both joined the Politburo, where they became key personalities in the coalition that saw through the early phase of economic reforms.

As for Deng, his title as vice premier, officially the number-three position in the hierarchy, remained unchanged. But titles did not necessarily mean that much in the murky world of the Chinese Communist Party. What mattered was power, and Deng was the one who now held more of it than anyone else. His status had been explicitly acknowledged by the Politburo, and his personal authority—bolstered by the respect of his many allies in the top ranks, and especially by his close military ties dating back to the civil war—ensured that he never lost it.

At the conference itself there was one small outward signal that revealed something of the shift that had taken place. According to Communist Party protocol, it was the privilege of the country’s top leader to end a major party function like the Work Conference with a concluding summary. But this time the honor was given to no one. Hua was not entrusted with the task of providing the wrap-up, while Deng’s speech was not elevated to that state.
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That was fine by him.

Even today most Chinese are accustomed to thinking of the Third Plenum, the much bigger and more formal meeting in December 1978 that followed immediately
after the Work Conference, as the start of the reform era. The communiqué that was issued at the end of the Third Plenum does indeed display ample evidence of the victory of Deng’s reform faction. The text, carefully prepared by a party committee, specified that, starting in the next year (1979), the work of the party would thenceforth focus on “socialist modernization” (code for economic reform). The statement went on to criticize excessive bureaucracy and overcentralization and explicitly encouraged shifting authority away from central planners and dispersing it among lower-level managers and officials. It even promised farmers greater latitude in using private plots and pursuing side businesses (though there was still no talk of family farming).

The communiqué most certainly did not condemn Chairman Mao, though it did speak delicately of “shortcomings and errors” that he might have made.
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The chairman was still the party’s God. But he was also dead, and his remaining acolytes held new views about the substance of his teachings. From now on the party’s leaders would interpret his Word according to their own convenience.

F
or most countries, 1979 dawned in a fog of uncertainty. News of the party plenum in December 1978 gave many Chinese an inkling that positive changes were on the way, but no one knew for sure how far-reaching the reforms would be or how quickly they would come. Britons, for the moment, remained mired in the frustrations of the Winter of Discontent; an end to the strikes was not in sight. The simmering rebellion in Afghanistan posed little in the way of a systemic challenge to the government. The election of John Paul II suggested the possibility of a shift in Vatican policy toward the East bloc, but the Communist authorities in Warsaw had yet to issue a response to the new pope’s request for permission to visit his homeland.

In Iran there was no ambiguity. The opposition’s long wait was coming to an end. The regime was fighting for its life. Cordite, tear gas, and the smell of burning tires laced the air of Iran’s big cities. By January 1979, demonstrations had become a daily occurrence. Security forces and antigovernment guerrillas engaged in firefights. The only question now was how long the shah would manage to hold on.

Everyone disagrees about when the Iranian Revolution began. Some historians argue that it really got under way with the guerrilla campaigns waged by the left-wing Islamist groups who took their inspiration from Shariati’s teachings in the 1970s. Others point to the economic slump of 1976 that followed the astronomical oil prices of the year before. Desperate to bring the economy back under control, the Iranian government tried to throttle back the rate of growth. The shah’s planners
cut credit and froze prices. The bazaar merchants, already hit hard by earlier reforms, now found themselves at the receiving end of an “antispeculation campaign” that landed many of them in jail. (The corruption at the higher reaches of government and in the entourage of the shah remained untouched, of course.) The boom came to a screeching halt. Firms went bankrupt. Employees lost their jobs. All of it fueled anger with the government.

Some pinpoint the liberalization measures the shah cautiously implemented in 1977 in response to the human rights rhetoric of newly elected US president Jimmy Carter. Carter had entered office pledging to make human rights a central criterion in Washington’s relationship with its allies, and, at least in the case of the shah, he was as good as his word.