Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (32 page)

To be sure, there were also reminders that the relationship between Communist China and the liberal democracy of the United States still faced plenty of obstacles. One commentator in the
Washington Post
informed his readers that current US investment projects in China—like a plan to build six new Intercontinental hotels or a big US Steel plant for processing iron ore—would almost certainly run into problems with the top-heavy Chinese bureaucracy or the mutual incomprehension between Chinese workers and their US managers. “This may dampen the enthusiasm of American businesses eyeing the China market, an enthusiasm even leading promoters of China trade here think has gone too far.”
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Officials in Deng’s entourage had other problems on their minds. Taiwanese extremists, angry that the United States was forsaking their country in favor of the People’s Republic, were said to have hired snipers to shoot Deng during the visit. A Ku Klux Klan member actually attempted to attack Deng in Houston, but Secret Service agents succeeded in tackling him first. And there was even an attack—somewhat more symbolic in nature—by members of a self-described Maoist group based in the United States, who vandalized the Chinese Liaison Office in Washington, the embryonic embassy. They broke windows and splashed white paint across the front of the building, all to underpin their denunciation of Deng as a “capitalist roader” who was selling out China’s real interests.
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This last bit of political theater reflected a more ominous reality. For all the upbeat atmospherics, Deng’s program still had plenty of bitter enemies back at home. And this, perhaps, was the even more important subtext of his American journey: it was carefully designed to build momentum for the reforms to come. Each stage of his itinerary was exhaustively covered by the Chinese media, who conveyed every detail to an audience of hundreds of millions of people. The Chinese heard radio broadcasts about factories where industrial robots already worked with humans at the assembly line and machines that could make you believe that you were flying. Those lucky few with access to TV sets—still a rare commodity in prereform China—saw images of skyscrapers and glistening shopping centers and highways filled with cars that were apparently (astounding as it seemed) mostly owned by ordinary Americans.

By the time Deng embarked on his American visit, he was already unusually well traveled for a Chinese politician (even disregarding his youthful years in France and
the Soviet Union). In 1974 he had attended the United Nations session in New York, and then, after his return to power in the wake of Mao’s death, he had taken a series of other trips around East Asia, including one to Southeast Asia and one to Japan. (It was these visits that had such a profound impact on his thinking in the run-up to the Central Party Work Conference.) All of these journeys had brought tangible benefits—including vital industrial investments from the Japanese as well as useful advice on the advantages of authoritarian capitalism from Singaporean prime minister Lee Kwan Yew. His visits to Singapore and Japan had also yielded plenty of favorable coverage in the media back home. But none of these trips had quite the impact of the one he took to America. It is one thing to hear about the advantages of an open economy; it is another to see them. Deng’s trip to the United States brought the potential benefits of modernization into the homes of ordinary Chinese. As for Deng himself, he later told his colleagues that his experiences in America had kept him awake for several nights after returning home. How could China possibly catch up?
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T
he triumph of Deng’s visit added to the growing political momentum in favor of change. In January, while Deng was still away, a crowd of high-ranking guests gathered in the Great Hall of the People. There was no mistaking the sense of euphoria. It was January 1979, the first time in fifteen years that the Communist Party elite had gathered to mark the beginning of the Chinese Lunar New Year. The Cultural Revolutionaries had banned the Spring Festival (the most important Chinese holiday, analogous, perhaps, to Christmas in the West) as a vestige of outmoded tradition. But now Mao was gone, and many of the guests were celebrating their return from oblivion. The widow of Liu Shaoqi, the former head of state who had been tortured to death by Red Guards, rubbed elbows with a once-disgraced vice premier who, like her, had been banished from public view for years. Peng Zhen, the former Beijing mayor who had been savagely vilified and abused at the start of the Cultural Revolution, announced that he was ready to return to work after a decade of exile in the countryside. All of them offered ritual praise to Hua Guofeng, but they knew whom they really had to thank for their political resurrection.

These people were Deng Xiaoping’s past. Like them he had emerged from the ruins of the old imperial order to pledge himself to the Communist ideal, one that had little prospect of success in the beginning. Like them he had weathered the horrors of the Long March, when the Communist guerrilla army had staged its epic escape from the Nationalist armies of Chiang Kai-shek in 1934. Like them he had endured the humiliations of the Cultural Revolution and reemerged to release the
country from Mao’s ideological straitjacket. Like them he was responsible for countless lives destroyed in political intrigues or on the battlefields of the wars against Japan and Chiang. And, like them, he had navigated his way through countless moral compromises along the way. The ex-Beijing mayor Peng, for example, had been one of Deng’s allies until he became one of the first senior officials to fall from grace in 1965–1966. Deng had disavowed him—the kind of betrayal committed by many others during those harrowing years. (Indeed, the path of the Cultural Revolution had been so tortuous that individual stories often fused the roles of victim and perpetrator.) Still, Peng would prove to be a crucial supporter of Deng and the economic reform program in the years ahead.
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Contradictions ran deeply through all the biographies of these party survivors.

Yet, almost miraculously, most of them continued to remain deeply loyal to the Communist Party. They shared Deng’s belief that it was only the party that could lead China forward to modernization. After all, they had not brought the revolution to its fruition in 1949 only to relinquish power. They wanted to tame Mao’s legacy, not to eliminate it altogether. They wanted to repair the injustices committed under his rule—which they viewed primarily in terms of the damage he had done to the party itself.

But many ordinary Chinese did not necessarily see things this way. Discontent ran deeply through the countryside, where the material situation of the peasantry had improved little since the early 1960s, after the Great Leap Forward had devastated their way of life and plunged the countryside into starvation. Workers, exhausted by a decade of sloganeering, raucous campaigns, and sometimes even open warfare, also remained impoverished. The students now flooding back to the cities jostled for precious spots in the universities and institutes, where academic life was still in the process of returning to normal.

The most obvious public sign of the festering contradictions of Chinese society was the presence of the petitioners. For months, hundreds of thousands of people had been appearing in the cities to ask redress for the suffering they had endured during the revolutionary caprice and mob rule of the previous decade. Like other Communist societies, the People’s Republic had an institutionalized process for handling petitions. But the offices designed to cope with demands for rehabilitation or the restoration of property found themselves overwhelmed. Petitioners who found themselves unable to find a receptive audience in their hometowns often traveled hundreds or thousands of miles—sometimes on foot—to seek better treatment in Beijing. Some of them even pressed their demands with public demonstrations. The British diplomat Roger Garside, perhaps the best foreign observer of this period in China, encountered a group of these justice seekers freshly arrived
from the countryside in central Beijing. Their clothes ragged and patched, their faces sunburned nearly black, the elderly petitioners evoked all too vividly the dire poverty that the “New China” was supposed to have eliminated for good after the Communist takeover in 1949. Garside described another group he encountered in January 1979 as the “angriest group of people” he had ever met.
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It was easy to understand why. Officials at the lower levels usually had little in the way of reparations to offer, or were ill-inclined to satisfy demands for justice that might cast a poor light on the party. And all too few of the petitioners who made the trip were able to find satisfaction in Beijing, either.

Deng’s focus on raising living standards certainly offered one way of addressing the general yearning for change. But some of his policies cut in a different direction. During his visit to the United States, Deng had warned President Carter that China was preparing a “punitive strike” against Vietnam, which, in the Chinese view, had grown a bit too self-assured in its role as Moscow’s proxy in Southeast Asia. (Among their other offenses, the Vietnamese had invaded Cambodia in December 1978, bringing down the Chinese-supported regime of the Khmer Rouge, which had just completed one of the century’s most horrific genocides against its own people.) On February 17, 1979, Deng made good on his threat. Two hundred thousand Chinese troops crossed the border into Vietnam, confident that they would quickly inflict a humiliating defeat on the uppity Vietnamese Communist Party. Instead, the result was a shocking humiliation for the People’s Liberation Army, and the first serious political setback for Deng since his ascent to the summit of the political hierarchy. In the first two weeks of the war, the Chinese force managed to penetrate only twenty-five miles into Vietnamese territory. The commanders of the People’s Liberation Army needed just one month to decide that they had had enough. They pulled back to the border, destroying everything they could along the way. In those four weeks, according to one Western analysis, twenty-six thousand Chinese soldiers were killed and tens of thousands of others wounded.
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Both sides in the conflict declared victory. In reality, it was an utterly pointless exercise for all concerned.

Needless to say, the official party media maintained strict discipline on the subject, trumpeting China’s achievements and ignoring the problems. But for once, those who disagreed with the government’s foreign policy had a forum to air their concerns. The writers at Democracy Wall were quick to pick up on the theme. The text of one poster criticized the leaders of a “big country like China” for “striking a little child like Vietnam.”
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This was not the sort of open challenge to his authority that Deng was prepared to tolerate.

Among the voices demanding change at Democracy Wall was a stocky young man who worked as an electrician at the Beijing Zoo. This was a former Red Guard by
the name of Wei Jingsheng. During the Cultural Revolution, he had enthusiastically embraced Mao’s call to overturn the established order. His revolutionary enthusiasm launched him on a prolonged journey deep into the interior, where he saw firsthand the extraordinary poverty and backwardness of rural China. He witnessed the famine conditions that still plagued the peasantry years after the end of the Great Leap. He heard about the injustices committed against farmers and workers by party activists who claimed to hold their best interests at heart. The experience changed him forever. After Mao’s death, as the memory of utopian hysteria ebbed away, Wei returned to the capital a deeply disillusioned man. On December 5, 1978, he posted a text at Xidan Democracy Wall that presented the conclusions he had drawn.

Its title was “The Fifth Modernization,” a reference to the “Four Modernizations” that were now being held high by Deng and other reformers eager to prioritize economic development over ideology. Wei began by observing that popular opinion strongly approved of Deng’s new emphasis on pragmatism: “The people expected him to review the past and lead them to a realistic future with a ‘seeking truth from facts’ approach.” Yet, he noted, the party’s willingness to correct or revise Maoist ideology only went so far. The fundamental principle of Communist Party rule in China brooked no modification. It was merely being clothed in new slogans—“the Four Modernizations”—that offered no substantive change. Wei advised his compatriots to cease believing in the “political swindlers” and urged them to start trusting their own judgment. “We have been tempered in the Cultural Revolution and cannot be that ignorant now,” he wrote. “Let us find out for ourselves what should be done.”

What was needed, he said, was not the sort of limited reform proposed by Deng and the other party elders. Wei wanted something he called “true democracy,” which he defined as the right of the people to choose their own representatives. The Americans, the Japanese, and the French all had the political power to run their own leaders out of office. In China, by contrast, anyone daring enough to make critical remarks about the deceased Chairman Mao could expect to end up in jail. This was not the way it should be: “We want to be masters of our own destiny. We need no gods or emperors. We do not believe in the existence of any savior. We want to be masters of the world and not instruments used by autocrats to carry out their wild ambitions. We want a modern lifestyle and democracy for the people. Freedom and happiness are our sole objectives in accomplishing modernization. Without this fifth modernization all others are merely another promise.”
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Many of the earlier Democracy Wall writers had assailed Mao or the Gang of Four without challenging the precepts of Communist rule itself. Wei was different. He dared to question the very basis of the system. His principled stand soon
brought him in contact with other liberal dissidents, and together they began to publish a new magazine called
Explorations
, in which they pushed the boundaries even further with pieces that exposed the caprice and injustice of one-party rule. They were not alone in this. They were merely the vanguard of a broader movement that seized upon the new opportunities for expression to demand greater freedom.