CHAPTER 16
What Kind of Reform?
Deng’s Southern Tour
Deng’s Southern Tour
IN JUNE 1989, with the Communist Party leadership
divided on what to do, the Party General Secretary Zhao Ziyang,
appointed by Deng three years earlier, was purged over his handling
of the crisis. The Party Secretary of Shanghai, Jiang Zemin, was
elevated to head the Communist Party.
The crisis
confronting Jiang was one of the most complex in the history of the
People’s Republic. China was isolated, challenged abroad by trade
sanctions and at home by the aftermath of nationwide unrest.
Communism was in the process of disintegrating in every other
country in the world except North Korea, Cuba, and Vietnam.
Prominent Chinese dissidents had fled abroad, where they received
asylum, a sympathetic ear, and freedom to organize. Tibet and
Xinjiang were restive. The Dalai Lama was feted abroad; in the same
year as Tiananmen, he won the Nobel Peace Prize amidst an upsurge
of international attention to the cause of Tibetan
autonomy.
After every social
and political upheaval, the most serious challenge for governance
is how to restore a sense of cohesion. But in the name of what
principle? The domestic reaction to the crisis was more threatening
to reform in China than the sanctions from abroad. Conservative
members of the Politburo, whose support Deng had needed during the
Tiananmen crisis, blamed Deng’s “evolutionary policy” for the
crisis and pressured Jiang to return to traditional Maoist
verities. They went so far as to seek to reverse seemingly
well-established policies such as the condemnation of the Cultural
Revolution. A Politburo member named Deng Liqun (also known as
“Little Deng”) asserted: “If we fail to wage a resolute struggle
against liberalization or [against] capitalistic reform and opening
up, our socialist cause will be ruined.”1 Deng and Jiang held
exactly the opposite view. The Chinese political structure, in
their perception, could be given a new impetus only by accelerating
the reform program. They saw in improving the standard of living
and enhancing productivity the best guarantee of social
stability.
In this atmosphere
Deng, in early 1992, emerged from retirement for his last great
public gesture. He chose the medium of an “inspection tour” through
southern China to urge continued economic liberalization and build
public support for Jiang’s reform leadership. With reform efforts
stagnating and his protégés losing ground to traditionalists in the
Party hierarchy, the eighty-seven-year-old Deng set out with his
daughter Deng Nan and several close associates on a tour through
economic hubs in southern China, including Shenzhen and Zhuhai, two
of the Special Economic Zones established under the 1980s reform
program. It was a crusade for reform on behalf of “socialism with
Chinese characteristics,” which meant a role for free markets,
scope for foreign investment, and appeal to individual
initiative.
Deng, at this point,
had no official title or formal function. Nevertheless, like an
itinerant preacher, he turned up at schools, hightechnology
facilities, model businesses, and other symbols of his vision of
Chinese reform, challenging his countrymen to redouble their
efforts and setting far-reaching goals for China’s economic and
intellectual development. The national press (which was, at the
time, controlled by conservative elements) initially ignored the
speeches. But accounts in the Hong Kong press eventually filtered
back to mainland China.
In time, Deng’s
“Southern Tour” would take on an almost mythical significance, and
his speeches would serve as the blueprint for another two decades
of Chinese political and economic policy. Even today, billboards in
China portray images and quotations from Deng’s Southern Tour,
including his famous dictum that “development is the absolute
principle.”
Deng set out to
vindicate the program of reform against the charge that it was
betraying China’s socialist heritage. Economic reform and
development, he argued, were fundamentally “revolutionary” acts.
Abandoning reform, Deng warned, would lead China down a “blind
alley.” To “win the trust and support of the people,” the program
of economic liberalization must continue for “a hundred years.”
Reform and opening up, Deng insisted, had allowed the People’s
Republic to avoid civil war in 1989. He reiterated his condemnation
of the Cultural Revolution, describing it as beyond failure, a kind
of civil war.2
The heir of Mao’s
China was advocating market principles, risk taking, private
initiative, and the importance of productivity and
entrepreneurship. The profit principle, according to Deng,
reflected not an alternative theory to Marxism but an observation
of human nature. Government would lose popular support if it
punished entrepreneurs for their success. Deng’s advice was that
China should “be bolder,” that it should redouble its efforts and
“dare to experiment”: “We must not act like women with bound feet.
Once we are sure that something should be done, we should dare to
experiment and break a new path. . . . Who dares claim that he is
100 percent sure of success and that he is taking no risks?”3
Deng dismissed
criticism that his reforms were leading China down the “capitalist
road.” Rejecting decades of Maoist indoctrination, he invoked his
familiar maxim that what mattered was the result, not the doctrine
under which it was achieved. Nor should China be afraid of foreign
investment:
At the current stage, foreign-funded enterprises in China are allowed to make some money in accordance with existing laws and policies. But the government levies taxes on those enterprises, workers get wages from them, and we learn technology and managerial skills. In addition, we can get information from them that will help us open more markets.4
In the end, Deng
attacked the “left” of the Communist Party, which was in a sense
part of his own early history, when he had been Mao’s “enforcer” in
creating agricultural communes: “At present, we are being affected
by both Right and ‘Left’ tendencies. But it is the ‘Left’
tendencies that have the deepest roots. . . . In the history of the
Party, those tendencies have led to dire consequences. Some fine
things were destroyed overnight.”5
Prodding his
countrymen by appealing to their national pride, Deng challenged
China to match the growth rates of neighboring countries. In a sign
of how far China has come in less than twenty years since the
Southern Tour, Deng, in 1992, extolled the “four big items” it was
essential to make available to consumers in the countryside: a
bicycle, a sewing machine, a radio, and a wristwatch. China’s
economy could “reach a new stage every few years,” he declared, and
China would succeed if the Chinese dared to “emancipate our minds
and act freely” in responding to challenges as they arose.6
Science and
technology were the key. Echoing his pathbreaking speeches from the
1970s, Deng insisted that “intellectuals are part of the working
class”; in other words, they were eligible for Communist Party
membership. In an overture to Tiananmen supporters, Deng urged
intellectuals who were in exile to return to China. If they
possessed specialized knowledge and skills, they would be welcomed
regardless of their previous attitudes: “They should be told that
if they want to make their contributions, it would be better for
them to come home. I hope that concerted efforts will be made to
accelerate progress in China’s scientific, technological and
educational undertakings. . . . We should all love our country and
help to develop it.”7
What an extraordinary
reversal in the convictions of the octogenarian revolutionary who
had helped build, often ruthlessly, the economic system he was now
dismantling. When serving in Yan’an with Mao during the civil war,
Deng gave no indication that he would, fifty years later, be
traveling around his country, urging reform of the very revolution
he had enforced. Until he ran afoul of the Cultural Revolution, he
had been one of Mao’s principal aides, distinguished by his
single-mindedness.
Over the decades, a
gradual shift had taken place. Deng had come to redefine the
criteria of good governance in terms of the well-being and
development of the ordinary person. A considerable amount of
nationalism was also involved in this dedication to rapid
development, even if that required adopting methods prevalent in
the previously reviled capitalist world. As one of Deng’s children
later told the American scholar and head of the National Committee
on United States–China Relations David Lampton:
In the mid-1970s, my father looked around China’s periphery, to the small dragon economies [Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea]. They were growing at eight to ten percent per year and these economies had a considerable technological lead over China. If we were to surpass them and resume our rightful place in the region and ultimately the world, China would have to grow faster than them.8
In the service of
this vision, Deng was advocating many American economic and social
principles as part of his reform program. But what he called
socialist democracy was vastly different from pluralistic
democracy. He remained convinced that, in China, Western political
principles would produce chaos and thwart development.
Yet even as he
espoused the need for an authoritarian government, Deng saw his
ultimate mission as passing on power to another generation, which,
if his development plan succeeded, was bound to develop its own
conception of political order. Deng hoped that the success of his
reform program would remove the incentive for a democratic
evolution. But he must have understood that the change he was
bringing about was bound eventually to lead to political
consequences of as yet unpredictable dimensions. These are the
challenges now facing his successors.
For the immediate
future, Deng, in 1992, stated relatively modest goals:
We shall push ahead along the road to Chinese-style socialism. Capitalism has been developing for several hundred years. How long have we been building socialism? Besides, we wasted twenty years. If we can make China a moderately developed country within a hundred years from the founding of the People’s Republic, that will be an extraordinary achievement.9
That would have been
in 2049. In fact, China has done much better—by a
generation.
Over a decade after
Mao’s death, his vision of continuous revolution was reappearing.
But it was a different kind of continuous revolution based on
personal initiative, not ideological exaltation; connection with
the outside world, not autarky. And it was to change China as
fundamentally as the Great Helmsman sought, albeit in a direction
opposite of what he had conceived. This is why, at the end of the
Southern Tour, Deng sketched his hope for the emergence of a new
generation of leaders with their own new viewpoints. The existing
leadership of the Communist Party, he said, was too old. Now over
sixty, they were better suited for conversation than for decisions.
People of his age needed to stand aside—a painful confession for
someone who had been such an activist.
The reason I insisted on retiring was that I didn’t want to make mistakes in my old age. Old people have strengths but also great weaknesses—they tend to be stubborn, for example—and they should be aware of that. The older they are, the more modest they should be and the more careful not to make mistakes in their later years. We should go on selecting younger comrades for promotion and helping train them. Don’t put your trust only in old age. . . . When they reach maturity, we shall rest easy. Right now we are still worried.10
For all the
matter-of-factness of Deng’s prescriptions, there was about them
the melancholy of old age, conscious that he would miss the
fruition of what he was advocating and planning. He had seen—and,
at times, generated—so much turmoil that he needed his legacy to be
a period of stability. For all his show of assurance, a new
generation was needed to enable him, in his words, “to sleep
soundly.”
The Southern Tour was
Deng’s last public service. The implementation of its principles
became the responsibility of Jiang Zemin and his associates.
Afterward Deng retired into increasing inaccessibility. He died in
1997, and by then Jiang had solidified his position. Aided by the
extraordinary Premier Zhu Rongji, Jiang carried out the legacy of
Deng’s Southern Tour with such skill that, by the end of his term
in office in 2002, the debate was no longer over whether this was
the proper course but rather over the impact of an emerging,
dynamic China on world order and the global economy.