Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (24 page)

By now the wall was besieged by visitors, day and night. People read, expostulated, and listened “with an openness unprecedented in the history of the People’s Republic.” Some visitors spoke their messages through bullhorns. The foreign correspondents and diplomats who came to see what was going on found themselves besieged by curious locals. During the years of the Cultural Revolution, ordinary Chinese had done whatever they could to avoid even the most cursory contact with citizens of other countries. Now, liberated by the air of candor around the wall, they
peppered the foreigners with questions. Roger Garside, a Chinese-speaking British diplomat who wrote one of the most vivid accounts of the early reform period in China, recalled the scene:

            
They bombarded me with questions on democracy and human rights: “Can you really criticize your Prime Minister? Who owns the newspapers in Britain? How do they decide their editorial policy? How is the BBC controlled? How are elections organized?”

                    
Some were by no means ignorant but wanted to check out the information they had acquired one way or another; others were simply thirsty for knowledge.
¹⁰

In Garside’s description, Democracy Wall functioned like a sort of proto-Inter-net: posters with derivative content were quickly papered over, while those that had something new or powerful to say were left uncovered. Readers wrote comments on some of the posters with ballpoint pens; when a popular one was torn by accident, visitors quickly glued it back together. Some of the texts were written on scraps of paper torn from notebooks, while others were composed on sheets of paper three feet high with brush and ink. Some authors used paper in pink or green to attract attention.
¹¹

Garside listened in as a group of Chinese interrogated an Australian visitor to the wall about his views on the state of human rights in China:

            
His circumspect answer was greeted with obvious disappointment, so he turned the questioning around and asked the young men what they wanted for China. One of them replied: “A prosperous nation, with a strong army [
fu-guo qiang-hing
].”

                    
“What do you others think?” asked the Australian. “Do you agree or disagree?”

                    
“Agree! Agree!” other voices called out. As I heard this exchange I could not help wondering where the ideal of Communism fitted in. What we were hearing was the nationalist strain to which Zhou Enlai’s Four Modernization formulation appealed so strongly.
¹²

As this exchange suggested, something important was shifting in Chinese political discourse. Some were already thinking beyond the narrow parameters of Maoist
ideology. The question was precisely how much latitude the Communist Party’s leaders were prepared to allow.

The importance of Democracy Wall was not limited to its role as a proving ground for new ideas. It also had eminently practical effects on the looming power struggle in the upper ranks of the Communist Party. Even as the writers at the wall dismantled one taboo after another, they were notably reluctant to say anything negative about Deng. Criticism focused on those who had engineered the Cultural Revolution and still clung to the doctrine of Mao’s infallibility. One poster, for example, attacked the “feudal fascist despots” who were behind the suppression of the 1976 Tiananmen protests—and then went on to eulogize Deng as the “living Zhou Enlai.”
¹³
It is extremely hard to determine the extent to which such sentiments reflected genuine public opinion at the time. What is clear is that Deng was perfectly positioned to take advantage of them.

D
eng was not physically present as the Central Party Work Conference opened in Beijing on November 10, 1978; he was traveling in Southeast Asia. It was Hua, in his capacity as the top leader, who gave a keynote speech urging delegates to push ahead with the Four Modernizations; it was time, he said, to focus on economic development, above all in agriculture. But the spirit of Democracy Wall, and the many criticisms of the party’s course that had emerged there, had already shown that the public mood was changing. Sensing a shift within the party as well, Hua refrained from his usual invocation of the “two whatevers.”
¹⁴

Many of the delegates quickly made it clear that they were not going to leave it at that. Members of the Practice Faction showed that they were more interested in addressing simmering political issues than trading platitudes about farming. In speech after speech, they assailed the “two whatevers.” Many officials who had been victimized during the Cultural Revolution were still awaiting rehabilitation, they declared, and their verdicts had to be reversed. The delegates at the conference had been divided into six groups. One of them, representing the southern coastal regions of the country, declared their unanimous support for “Practice is the sole criterion for judging truth.” It was obvious that Hua had lost control over the agenda of the meeting. By the second day of the conference, Marshal Ye—whose status as the party’s senior soldier made him a key power broker—was warning Hua to pay attention to the critics.
¹⁵

Conference participants did manage to address the biggest economic problem that faced them. One of Hua’s deputies, Vice Premier Ji Dengkui, gave a speech that
frankly acknowledged the dire state of China’s 700 million farmers, who made up the overwhelming majority of the country’s citizens. In not so many words, Ji acknowledged that the twists and turns of official policy during the Cultural Revolution had left farmers unsettled and confused. He proposed a few technical remedies: increasing the supply of seeds and fertilizer, boosting the volume of agricultural credits, and significantly raising the price the state paid farmers for their grain.
¹⁶

Ji’s speech did mark a departure from the sterile sloganeering of the Cultural Revolution era. Even so, party policy remained detached from the brutal realities of rural life. There was no way you could improve the prospects for China’s economy without bettering the lot of its peasants. Yet at the end of the 1970s, the countryside remained mired in poverty, a hollow landscape haunted by ghosts and famine. The legacy of the Great Leap Forward was still tangible. In the early 1960s, in the wake of the titanic famine caused by the Great Leap, Deng Xiaoping and his then-mentor, Liu Shaoqi, had tried to stimulate agricultural productivity by allowing some peasants to return to the prerevolutionary practice of family farming. The onset of the Cultural Revolution (which had cost Liu his life) put an end to these experiments.

Wherever possible, though, the peasants seized opportunities to work the system. The incentives were greatest in the regions that had been hit hardest by the Great Leap. In the late 1970s there were rural areas—especially in the provinces of Anhui, Sichuan, and Guizhou—where many people still lived under the threat of starvation. Very quietly, some of them began to make deals with local officials, who were only too eager to improve their own living standards. Farmers paid bribes for the privilege of cultivating extra plots on vacant lots, raising animals on the side, or keeping surplus produce for their own use. “Give enough to the state and to the collective and the rest to ourselves” was one of their slogans.
¹⁷

Here and there, officials embraced the principle of agricultural reform. One of them was Zhao Ziyang, the newly appointed head of Sichuan Province (the lush southern region where Deng had grown up). In 1962, Zhao had actually moved to disband the people’s communes there—a policy that had landed him in deep trouble early in the Cultural Revolution. By 1978, worried that famine was looming in remote corners of the province, he was already moving to lift restrictions on private farming for some of the hardest-hit areas. In Anhui Province, on the other side of the country, another provincial party chief, Wan Li, was considering similar measures to prevent a recurrence of starvation. At the Central Party Work Conference, Wan justified his efforts by pointing out that his province’s per-capita grain production had yet to reach the level of 1955.
¹⁸

So the notion of reintroducing the early 1960s principle of farming by household (
baochan daohu
) was clearly on the minds of the delegates. Farmers needed incentives in order to get agriculture going again—but this implied discarding one of Mao’s most treasured policies, the nationwide collectivization campaign of the Great Leap, when he had forced farmers together into “people’s communes.” Mao had reacted with indignation to any suggestion of a return to family farming, a policy he regarded as a scandalous, “counterrevolutionary” heresy.

Nor was anyone quite yet ready to take that fateful step in November 1978. Yet Hu Yaobang—the same official who had orchestrated the publication of “Practice Is the Sole Criterion for Judging Truth”—nonetheless made a report at the Work Conference that ventured into this delicate territory. It was time, he said, to take measures that would awaken the private initiative of the farmers. Those who heard or read his speech understood immediately what he had in mind. Yu Guangyuan, a Deng associate who chronicled his own experiences as a participant in the conference, recalled it this way: “Hu Yaobang spelled out his views so fully that I realized that he was speaking of the necessity of ‘bao chan dao hu,’ fixing farm output quotas down to each household. Although he did not yet use the expression precisely, it was as if—with a light poke of the finger through a thin piece of window paper—the four characters would appear. . . . He maintained that once the farmers’ initiative was aroused, China had enormous potential for increasing agricultural production.” Given the times, merely implying the need for such a policy was an act of extraordinary boldness. But Hu’s sally was as far as anyone could go for the moment—at least officially.
¹⁹

Indeed, it is notable that the Central Party Work Conference failed to bring any concrete progress in the specific policy realm, agriculture, that it was intended to address. Mao had been dead for two years, but his ghost still loomed large in the minds of his heirs. It was becoming increasingly clear that they could move ahead only by putting his spirit to rest. That was the challenge that they now faced.

A
t the previous round of high-level party gatherings in the spring of 1977, Whateverist orthodoxy had held fast. But a lot had changed by November 1978. The unresolved social legacy of the Cultural Revolution—the economic devastation, the rise in crime and hunger, the discontent of the students, and the general sense of disillusionment—had spilled out into the streets. Democracy Wall was giving critics a public voice. The trickle of senior Communist functionaries returning from banishment was starting to reshape sentiment within the party as well.

It took only a few days for all the pent-up frustration to explode into the open at the conference. In speech after speech, delegates assailed Hua and his fellow leaders for moving too slowly on the rehabilitation of the party members who had suffered during the Cultural Revolution.

On November 12, two days in, party heavyweight Chen Yun took to the lectern. Chen was a veteran Communist and economic expert who enjoyed wide respect for his granite-like probity. Now he surprised everyone by issuing a ringing condemnation of the leaderships current course. He demanded that the party reverse its negative judgments on five groups of people who had, in his opinion, suffered unjust condemnation during the era of Mao’s reign. One of the cases he cited dated back to 1937.

But the most sensitive topic he broached was also the most recent: the Tiananmen Incident of April 1976. As the Central Party Work Conference began, Hua and his Maoist allies had persisted in defining the pro-Zhou demonstrations of two years earlier as a “counterrevolutionary movement.” Now Chen insisted that those who had suffered in the 1976 crackdown should be cleared of the charges against them and that the Tiananmen upheaval “should be treated as a popular mass movement.”
²⁰

Chen’s speech galvanized his listeners. Many of them had long looked askance at the party’s suppression of the Tiananmen demonstrators, who were, after all, expressing their reverence for Zhou Enlai. Chen’s taboo-breaking remarks had the added effect of implicating two of the most powerful people at the top: Hua and former Mao bodyguard Wang Dongxing (the one who had helped Hua neutralize the Gang). Both men had played a crucial role in organizing the 1976 crackdown—along with the Gang of Four, who were now behind bars. Speakers in each of the six working groups seconded Chen’s demands. Just in case Hua and Wang had not grasped the extent of their defeat, the leading Beijing newspaper followed up the next day by publishing an announcement from the Beijing party chapter that unilaterally declared the Tiananmen protests to be “revolutionary” (a synonym for “good” in partyspeak). The text of the announcement was quickly republished in a number of other media—effectively issuing a public rebuke to two of the most senior leaders in the country.
²¹

To everyone’s surprise, Hua reversed himself with barely a murmur. A few days later he allowed himself to be photographed signing the title page of a collection of poems praising the 1976 demonstrators. Wang, the leading Politburo stalwart of ultra-Maoist sloganeering, was not quite so flexible. Just days before, Wang’s
position had appeared impregnable. Wang was not only a Politburo member, a vice chairman of the Central Committee, and the head of the party’s elite security detail. He was also in charge of the effort to edit the collected works of Mao’s writings and speeches, a position that—in a society where Mao’s words exerted totemic force—imbued the person who held it with an aura of sanctity. It was no surprise that Wang had bitterly resisted demands for further rehabilitations.