Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang (35 page)

T
o understand the extraordinary political journey of Zhao Ziyang, it is important to know exactly what he was up against when he reached Beijing’s highest echelons in 1980.

The dominant players in his circle were the “Communist Party elders,” men who had been swept aside by Mao Zedong for their reluctance to embrace his radical programs. Having been deprived of their political clout by Mao for nearly two decades, the elders were anxious to seize power and use their remaining years to shape post-Mao China.

The most powerful among them was Deng Xiaoping. Deng had just the right experience to manage the two factions who emerged at the top. As a political conservative, he had the support of Party elders desperate to save the Party from ruin. As a liberal on economic issues—purged not once but twice by Mao—Deng was credible among those who wanted to break from the old days of collectivization. The division among Party leaders over the direction of reform required one top leader to settle disputes. With his combination of seniority, competence, and backing from military heavies, Deng emerged as the paramount leader, filling the void in an authoritarian system that had lost its Great Helmsman.

Another influential elder was Chen Yun, who was even more senior than Deng and was a founder of the Party. He had won enduring respect for having quickly stabilized the nation’s war-torn economy in the 1950s, when he was Vice Premier.

When this group came to power, it was clear what would dominate the agenda: economic recovery and an end to China’s isolation from the world. In December 1978, at the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee, the Party issued a resolution to shift its emphasis from “class struggle” to “economic development.” This brought an end to the Party’s obsession with destroying “class enemies,” which had persisted for thirty years. The Mao era was at an end, and the era of reform was under way.

New political stars began to emerge. Hu Yaobang took over as Director of the Organization Department in December 1977, with power over Party personnel decisions. He immediately began reinstating the victims of Mao’s purges; their gratitude turned into solid political support for Deng Xiaoping, who had promoted Hu.

Another new star was Zhao Ziyang. Two years earlier, Deng had sent Zhao to his own home province of Sichuan, which was then on the brink of agricultural disaster. Zhao, who already had years of experience administering Guangdong Province, restructured Sichuan’s rural economy. In just a few years, he dramatically raised agricultural production and average incomes in this province of 100 million people, where it was officially revealed that 10 million had died of starvation from Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Though his policies seemed to border on “capitalist,” their success made Zhao’s early reputation.

Despite his many years in provincial bureaucracies, Zhao possessed the political skill of not standing out too much, which helped him rise to the top without causing much commotion or upsetting hard-liners. His quick ascendance began in August 1977 at the 11th Party Congress, when he became an alternate member of the Politburo.

Deng quickly consolidated power by naming Hu Yaobang as Chairman of the Party and Zhao Ziyang its Vice Chairman and Premier of the State Council. Deng’s influence now hovered over the Party and state administrations.

Deng’s two rising stars began getting to work. Hu’s success rehabilitating disgraced Party members, coupled with Zhao’s gains from his agricultural innovations, allowed Deng to assert his control both within the Party and among the people. He also became the first Chinese communist leader to win widespread praise from abroad. The new catchphrase in China was “reform.” With the help of the Party’s propaganda machine, reform became the embodiment of all hope and all things good.

There was only one problem: no one could agree on exactly what form this reform should take. The pragmatists cared little for Marxist dogma. They knew from experience that incentives and market elements worked. Party elders such as Chen Yun, however, believed that the Communist Party should remain loyal to its founding ideology and pursue Soviet-style socialism. For them economic reform just meant recovering from the disasters inflicted by Mao. Among these conservatives, there were also personal reasons for opposing reform. Li Xiannian, who had managed economic affairs for a significant term during Mao’s era, saw reform as an implicit criticism of his past work and feared being marginalized. And career bureaucrats—the fabric of China’s administration—who had been trained for decades to believe that “capitalism” was the supreme evil, now felt disoriented and threatened by the new political culture.

All of this meant that China’s reformers would not have an easy ride. When Zhao became Premier in 1980, he was still new to Beijing’s high politics. The first major issue he had to handle was the 1981 economic “readjustment,” which had been launched by conservative elder Chen Yun. Zhao had no choice but to head the effort, but in that role he quickly grasped the weaknesses of the central planning system, which had managed economic affairs by assigning quotas throughout the land. He tried to move quickly with reforms.

It was a rocky period. Deng had made it clear that he wanted “no squabbling” at the top. Though the intention of his words wasn’t spelled out, they clearly meant that Deng hoped to do as he wished without interference. But when Deng’s beloved Special Economic Zones were starting to look overly capitalist, Chen Yun in 1982 launched a “Strike Hard Campaign Against Economic Crimes” that indirectly was aimed at neutralizing the liberal policies the zones allowed. Chen had found a way to exert his will without political “squabbling,” and Deng had not detected the ploy. Under these conditions both Hu and Zhao felt compelled to go along with Chen.

By this time, Zhao knew he was operating in a political minefield but pressed ahead in his effort to modernize the economy. It didn’t hurt that the idea of allowing food imports, for one, was actually proposed by Chen Yun himself, who was eager to break from the Maoist policy of total self-reliance. China quickly became one of the world’s major grain importers. With the pressure off domestic grain production, the state could relax restrictions and quotas that in the past had condemned 800 million peasants to poverty. China then decided to spread to the rest of the nation the rural reforms that Zhao had launched in Sichuan and others had launched in Anhui. Though the policy was resisted by a few provincial administrators, the gains were so immediate that most regions quickly adopted them voluntarily. In contrast with Mao’s ruthless campaign to force communes on rural China, the dismantling of this same system was done without coercion.

Progress continued along the coast, too. The Special Economic Zones in the east continued to develop. But because they were set up as isolated laboratories for reform, Deng was able to avoid broad and costly political debates among Party leaders about whether they passed the test of being “socialist.”

With the necessary conditions for further reform in place, what was most needed was a clear sense of direction from the central leadership. As the new Premier, Zhao concluded that the main economic imperative was to tackle China’s chronic inefficiency. Zhao may have been insulated within the world’s largest communist bureaucracy, but he realized that, to make progress, China had to abandon its planned economy in favor of a free market. It was the triumph of good sense.

But to make this happen in a government that still had considerable conservative opposition, Zhao had to twist orthodox doctrine, invent euphemisms for his policies, and keep pressing for Deng’s support while ignoring the complaints of other powerful elders. He was always vulnerable to the reality that his ideas were obvious contradictions of the Party’s official line.

Opponents such as conservative ideologues Hu Qiaomu and Deng Liqun tried to exploit this vulnerability and were a constant source of irritation for reformers such as Hu and Zhao. The major force keeping these attacks at bay on the “theoretical front” was Deng Xiaoping, who couldn’t care less about doctrine. When Zhao became Party General Secretary, he exercised his power to finally finish off the leftist institutions from which these attacks originated.

China’s transformation to a market economy passed the point of no return sometime in the 1980s. Politically, however, the Party never abandoned its authoritarian ways. The elimination of Mao’s “class struggle” was a breakthrough on one level, but it gave people a false impression that somehow the political system or the Party’s leadership style had changed. In fact, the problems of authoritarian rule persist to this day. Without a change, China cannot escape them: a lack of accountability and a Party that is always above the law.

This all but ensures that the government will continue to face episodes of rebellion. The Party has fretted throughout its history about how tolerant it should be in dealing with criticism. In 1957, Mao urged intellectuals to speak out in the Hundred Flowers Campaign, then cracked down on those who did so a year later with the Anti-Rightist Campaign (which Deng carried out). In 1979, Deng continued to suppress the critics. He shut down the “Democracy Wall” movement, in which thousands of intellectuals and young people had posted calls for political freedom on a wall in Beijing. He later sanctioned a 1983 drive against “Spiritual Pollution,” meaning primarily foreign influences, and he proposed the 1986–87 Anti–Bourgeois Liberalization Campaign.

When Hu Yaobang failed to carry out that campaign, Deng dismissed him. A major force for political reform was thus gone. Hu had seemed intent on trying to create a more tolerant, open Party. But as Deng’s displeasure with Hu grew, Party elders exploited the rift. With Deng’s sanction, they tried to curtail the powers of other reform-minded officials. They even attempted to replace Hu with one of their own.

On this issue, however, Deng stood firm. Although he had removed Hu, he was not about to let an opponent of economic reform, someone like Deng Liqun, succeed Hu. So he promoted Zhao to General Secretary. He did consent to the promotion to the premiership of Li Peng, whose mentor was conservative elder Chen Yun. But he did not trust Li to run the economy, and so to ensure that Zhao would still call the shots in that sphere, Deng created the Central Economic and Financial Leading Group and put Zhao in charge.

It was not the first time Deng had bypassed official institutions, nor would it be the last. In January 1987, he designated an ad hoc “Five-Person Group” to take over from the Politburo Standing Committee upon Hu’s dismissal. Then he appointed a “Seven-Person Group” to appoint officials in preparation for the leadership changes at the 13th Party Congress. Though Deng was able to maneuver past some of the recalcitrant elders, he had also planted the seed for future turmoil. In the end, Premier Li was not willing to submit to a reduced role. And an increasingly volatile economic situation helped him to cause trouble.

The decisive blow was an outbreak of high inflation in 1988, exacerbated by an ill-fated and (by Zhao’s own admission) ill-conceived attempt to make a bold breakthrough in reforming the pricing system. The government made a fatal error by announcing price hikes before executing them. The public reacted with panic buying and bank runs. The apparent severity of the situation caused Zhao to abruptly abandon price reform.

The damage to his political standing had been done. His opponents began a concerted effort to oust him. Zhao’s job became increasingly difficult. He had won impressive victories in his earlier efforts to keep reforms on track. He had neutralized the Anti-Liberalization Campaign in 1987. He had coined the phrase “the initial stage of socialism” as a theoretical basis for China’s adoption of free market policies in this first phase of its evolution.

But political reform was a thornier issue. At one point Zhao did write a letter to Deng urging him “to establish a much-needed system of leadership,” which suggested problems with the existing autocratic system. Deng got the letter but not the message. Deng had once spoken of the need for “political reform” and for more democracy within the Party, but that was when his political rival Hua Guofeng was the one with too much power. After Deng himself became the top leader, he never talked that way again. In general, Deng’s idea of “political reform” did not go beyond administrative reforms to make the Party more efficient.

Zhao mostly accepted Deng’s dominance because it helped him fend off other elders on economic matters. When Deng at one stage suggested retiring from the Politburo Standing Committee, Zhao attempted to persuade him to stay on; he needed Deng. But when Zhao prepared to present a series of political reforms at the 13th Party Congress, Deng imposed limits on them that Zhao had no choice but to accept. Deng wanted no part of the Western system: “Let there be not even a trace of tripartite separation of powers.”

Zhao recognized that the Party needed to change the way it governed. Without crossing Deng, Zhao proposed a “separation of power between Party and state.” The proposal was passed by the Party Congress but was later resisted by Party officials at all levels who were not willing to give up their authority. Serious political reform never got off the ground.

With the eruption of the student demonstrations of 1989, Zhao ran out of time. When Deng decided to call in the military, Zhao made clear he could not take part in such a decision. He was not the only top leader who was hesitant: Deng was unable to win over the majority of the five-member Politburo Standing Committee. So Deng, experienced in sweeping aside Party and government procedures when he needed, won the support of a prominent old general, Yang Shangkun, who guaranteed his control over the military.

After the protests were suppressed, Deng had to grapple with his own legacy. If the hard-line victory ended up killing economic reform as well, Deng would face the terrible prospect of being known as the butcher of Tiananmen who defended an indefensible regime and squandered the prestige he had gained earlier from the nation’s economic progress.

And so he set out to change things. In 1992, he went on a celebrated tour of the booming cities along the southern coast. It was a clear signal to China’s leaders that economic reforms should proceed—that no one should try to stop them. The move helped force the 14th Party Congress later that year to reaffirm further reforms.