Deng’s First Return to Power
Deng’s was a fitful
and improbable road to power. In 1974, when Deng Xiaoping became
America’s principal interlocutor, we knew very little about him. He
had been General Secretary of the Communist Party’s powerful
Central Committee until he was arrested in 1966, charged with being
a “capitalist roader.” We learned that, in 1973, he had been
restored to the Central Committee through Mao’s personal
intervention and against the opposition of the radicals in the
Politburo. Though Jiang Qing had publicly snubbed Deng shortly
after his return to Beijing, he was clearly important to Mao.
Uncharacteristically, Mao apologized for Deng’s humiliation during
the Cultural Revolution. The same reports also told us that, in
speaking to a delegation of Australian scientists, Deng had struck
themes that were to become his trademark. China was a poor country,
he had said, in need of scientific exchanges and learning from
advanced countries such as Australia—the sort of admission China’s
leaders had never made heretofore. Deng advised the Australian
visitors to look at the backward side of China in their travels and
not only at its achievements, another unprecedented comment for a
Chinese leader.
Deng arrived in New
York in April 1974 as part of a Chinese delegation, technically
headed by the Foreign Minister, to a special session of the U.N.
General Assembly dealing with economic development. When I invited
the Chinese delegation to dinner, it became immediately evident who
its senior member was and, even more important, that far from being
restored to ease Zhou’s burden, as our intelligence reports
claimed, Deng was, in fact, assigned to replace Zhou and, in a way,
to exorcise him. Several friendly references to Zhou were ignored;
allusions to remarks of the Premier were answered by comparable
quotes from Mao’s conversations with me.
Shortly afterward,
Deng was made Vice Premier in charge of foreign policy, and only a
little later, he emerged as Executive Vice Premier with a
supervisory role over domestic policy—an informal replacement for
Zhou, who was, however, left with the now largely symbolic title of
Premier.
Soon after Mao
initiated the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Deng had been stripped
of his Party and government positions. He had spent the next seven
years first on an army base, then in exile in Jiangxi province,
growing vegetables and working a half-day shift as a manual laborer
in a tractor repair plant. His family was deemed ideologically
incorrect and received no protection from the Red Guards. His son,
Deng Pufang, was tormented by Red Guards and pushed off the top of
a building at Beijing University. Though he broke his back, Deng
Pufang was denied admission to a hospital. He emerged from the
ordeal a paraplegic.1
Among the many
extraordinary aspects of the Chinese people is the manner in which
many of them have retained a commitment to their society regardless
of how much agony and injustice it may have inflicted on them. None
of the victims of the Cultural Revolution I have known has ever
volunteered his suffering to me or responded to queries with more
than minimal information. The Cultural Revolution is treated,
sometimes wryly, as a kind of natural catastrophe that had to be
endured but is not dwelt on as defining the person’s life
afterward.
For his part, Mao
seems to have reflected much of the same attitude. Suffering
inflicted by him or on his orders was not necessarily his final
judgment on the victim but a necessity, potentially temporary, for
his view of the purification of society. Mao seems to have
considered many of those exiled as available for service as a kind
of strategic reserve. He recalled the four marshals from exile when
he needed advice on how to position China in the face of the
international crisis of 1969. This, too, is how Deng returned to
high office. When Mao decided to drop Zhou, Deng was the
best—perhaps the only—strategic reserve available to run the
country.
Having grown
accustomed to Mao’s philosophical disquisitions and indirect
allusions and to Zhou’s elegant professionalism, I needed some time
to adjust to Deng’s acerbic, no-nonsense style, his occasional
sarcastic interjections, and his disdain of the philosophical in
favor of the eminently practical. Compact and wiry, he entered a
room as if propelled by some invisible force, ready for business.
Deng rarely wasted time on pleasantries, nor did he feel it
necessary to soften his remarks by swaddling them in parables as
Mao was wont to do. He did not envelop one with solicitude as Zhou
did, nor did he treat me, as Mao had, as a fellow philosopher from
among whose ranks only a select few were worthy of his personal
attention. Deng’s attitude was that we were both there to do our
nations’ business and adult enough to handle the rough patches
without taking them personally. Zhou understood English without
translation and would occasionally speak it. Deng described himself
to me as a “rustic person” and confessed, “Languages are hard. When
I was a student in France, I never learned French.”
As time went on, I
developed enormous regard for this doughty little man with the
melancholy eyes who had maintained his convictions and sense of
proportion in the face of extraordinary vicissitudes and who would,
in time, renew his country. After 1974, out of the wreckage of the
Cultural Revolution, Deng, at some personal risk since Mao was
still in charge, began to fashion a modernization that during the
twenty-first century was to turn China into an economic
superpower.
In 1974, when Deng
returned from his first exile, he conveyed little sense that he
would be a figure of historic consequence. He articulated no grand
philosophy; unlike Mao, he made no sweeping claims about the
Chinese people’s unique destiny. His pronouncements seemed
pedestrian, and many were concerned with practical details. Deng
spoke on the importance of discipline in the military and the
reform of the Ministry of Metallurgical Industry.2 He issued a call to
increase the number of railway cars loaded per day, to bar
conductors from drinking on the job, and to regularize their lunch
breaks.3 These were technical, not transcendent,
speeches.
In the wake of the
Cultural Revolution and given the hovering presence of Mao and the
Gang of Four, workaday pragmatism was a bold statement in itself.
For a decade, Mao and the Gang of Four had advocated anarchy as a
means of social organization, endless “struggle” as a means of
national purification, and a sort of violent amateurism in economic
and academic endeavors. The Cultural Revolution having elevated the
pursuit of ideological fervor as a badge of authenticity, Deng’s
call for a return to order, professionalism, and efficiency—almost
boilerplate in the developed world—was a daring proposition. China
had endured a decade of rampaging youth militias that had come
close to destroying Deng’s career and family. His pragmatic,
matter-of-fact style recalled China from the dream of cutting short
history to a world where history is fulfilled by sweeping ambitions
but in practical stages.
On September 26,
1975, in remarks entitled “Priority Should Be Given to Scientific
Research,” Deng sounded several of the themes that would become his
trademarks: the need to emphasize science and technology in Chinese
economic development; the reprofessionalization of the Chinese
workforce; and the encouragement of individual talent and
initiative—precisely the qualities that had been paralyzed by
political purges, the shuttering of the universities during the
Cultural Revolution, and the promotion of incompetent individuals
on ideological grounds.
Above all, Deng
sought to end once and for all the debate about what, if anything,
China could learn from foreigners that had been raging since the
nineteenth century. Deng insisted that China emphasize professional
competence above political correctness (even to the point of
encouraging “eccentric” individuals’ professional pursuits) and to
reward individuals for excelling in their chosen fields. This was a
radical shift of emphasis for a society in which government
officials and work units had dictated the most minute details of
individuals’ educational, professional, and personal lives for
decades. Where Mao took issues into the stratosphere of ideological
parables, Deng subordinated ideological pursuits to professional
competence:
Presently, some scientific research personnel are involved in factional struggles and pay little or no attention to research. A few of them are engaged in research privately, as if they were committing crimes. . . . It would be advantageous for China to have one thousand such talented people whose authority is generally recognized by the world. . . . As long as they are working in the interest of the People’s Republic of China, these people are much more valuable than those who are engaged in factionalism and thereby obstruct others from working.4
Deng defined
traditional Chinese priorities as “the need to achieve
consolidation, stability and unity.”5 Though not in the position of supreme power
with Mao still active and the Gang of Four remaining influential,
Deng spoke bluntly about the need to overcome the prevailing chaos
and “put things in order”:
There is at present a need to put things in order in every field. Agriculture and industry must be put in order, and the policies on literature and art need to be adjusted. Adjustment, in fact, also means putting things in order. By putting things in order, we want to solve problems in rural areas, in factories, in science and technology, and in all other spheres. At Political Bureau meetings I have discussed the need for doing so in several fields, and when I reported to Comrade Mao Zedong, he gave his approval.6
What Mao was, in
fact, approving when he had given his “approval” was left vague. If
Deng was brought back to supply a more ideological alternative to
Zhou, the opposite was the result. How Deng defined order and
stability remained the subject of intense challenge from the Gang
of Four.