Deng Is China's 'Last Emperor'
China's 'Last Emperor'
Washington Post Foreign ServiceThursday, February 20, 1997; Page A26
Deng Xiaoping, who died yesterday of complications from Parkinson's disease and a lung infection at age 92, led China out of the chaos and isolation of Communist rule under Mao Zedong into a new era marked by rapid economic growth. Deng maintained the rigid Communist political system but opened the world's most populous nation to the influence of Western capitalism and culture.
A blunt man of action who survived wars and fierce power struggles by placing pragmatism over politics, Deng was regarded by admirers and critics alike as China's "last emperor" -- the last of his generation of revolutionary leaders to hold paramount power.
However, his power never equaled that of Mao, the founder and longtime ruler of Communist China. Deng's prestige declined in his later years because of spreading official corruption, inequalities entrenched in the Communist system, and the crackdown he mandated in June 1989 against student-led protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square.
In the end, Deng's sweeping initiatives, aimed at decentralizing control over the economy and replacing state planning with a market-oriented system, left the economy only half reformed. Those who follow him face the enormous, risky task of completing the job.
In his later years, Deng was the first among equals of Communist Party elders who shared power as members of an octogenarian oligarchy, overseeing the work of younger leaders. He formally retired from his last government post in 1990 but continued to influence important domestic and foreign policy decisions through his prestige and personal connections, which included close ties with many of China's military leaders.
A Pragmatic Communist
After becoming a Communist while living in France in the early 1920s, Deng never relinquished his belief in communist ideology. But he was always less dogmatic than Mao. Deng's pragmatism allowed him essentially to redefine Marxism to make productivity -- rather than the class struggle championed by Mao -- the key measure of success.
A famous quotation attributed to Deng summed up his philosophy: "It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white as long as it catches mice."
Deng cautioned against the "worship" of capitalism but believed China could modernize only by adopting new technologies from the West. To that end, he opened diplomatic relations with the United States, concluded a peace treaty with Japan and oversaw an agreement with Britain for Hong Kong's return to Chinese control this year. He also sent Chinese to study abroad, including tens of thousands to the United States.
Still, despite his flexibility in economic matters, Deng was a hard-liner about politics throughout his life. Thus, when he rose to power in December 1978 -- winning a power struggle that followed Mao's death in 1976 -- Deng began to liberalize the economy while at the same time preserving China's Soviet-style political framework. He strongly defended the Chinese Communist Party's monopoly on power.
Nevertheless, an unintended consequence of Deng's opening to the rest of the world was that along with foreign capital came an infiltration of Western political and social ideas. This ultimately led to the most precarious period for the government under his rule -- the massive demonstrations for democracy and the army crackdown on protesters in the spring of 1989.
These demonstrations found their focal point at Beijing's vast Tiananmen Square, where many tens of thousands of people gathered in an anti-government rally that grew over several days. Deng and his allies saw the protest as a direct challenge to their authority. Their response was a brutal crackdown with tanks and troops that left hundreds dead -- and changed the tenor of China's relationship with the rest of the world.
To crush the democracy movement, Deng joined forces with rival leaders who questioned the scope, pace and side effects of his economic reforms -- and who feared that those changes would destroy the party's political control. The following months saw furious infighting over the implementation of some of the economic changes. After months in seclusion, Deng surfaced and successfully urged the party leadership to speed the pace of reform.
One of Deng's greatest failures was his inability to provide for an orderly transition of power that would guarantee continuation of his reforms. Two of Deng's designated successors, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, were ousted from power in 1987 and 1989, respectively, as a result of Deng's criticisms and pressure from more orthodox leaders. Deng once described Hu and Zhao as "pillars" holding up the sky.
Indispensable to Mao
At several points in his long and rich career, Deng was forced to retreat and compromise. In the mid-1960s, he agreed to make a humiliating self-criticism in which he confessed to departing from the socialist economic parameters set out by Mao. The doctrinaire Mao purged Deng twice and allowed him to be attacked by radical Red Guards during the tumultuous Cultural Revolution of 1966-76. But Deng's ability and tenacity made him indispensable to Mao, who turned to him to reestablish order and stability when the Cultural Revolution ended.
Despite his reputation as tough and demanding, Deng impressed many who met him as plain, unassuming and even self-deprecating. During a luncheon in Washington in January 1979, he joked that Time magazine may have made a mistake in twice naming him its Man of the Year.
In a crisis, however, Deng proved to be extraordinarily self-confident and unsentimental. It was Deng, through his clout with the army, who marshaled troops from all over China during the Tiananmen crisis of 1989 and then showed no sign of remorse over the bloodshed.
According to Lucian W. Pye, a political scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied Deng's personality, Deng's displays of anger were controlled and precisely directed. He gained a reputation for service over the years, Pye said, as the party's "pit bull" -- the man called upon to denounce wrongdoers or lead attacks in the Sino-Soviet dispute.
Deng married three times. His first wife, Zhang Xiyuan, one of his schoolmates from Moscow, died when she was 24, a few days after giving birth to Deng's first child, a baby girl, who also died. His second wife, Jin Weiying, left him after he came under political attack in 1933.
His third wife, Zhuo Lin, was the daughter of an industrialist in Yunnan Province. She became a member of the Communist Party in 1938, and a year later married the veteran Red Army man in front of Mao's cave dwelling in Yanan.
She and Deng had three daughters and two sons: daughter Deng Lin, a painter, born in 1941; son Deng Pufang, a paraplegic who heads China's Disabled Persons Federation, born in 1944; daughter Deng Nan, deputy minister of the State Science and Technology Commission, born in 1945; daughter Xiao Rong, who wrote a biography of her father and became his personal assistant in the last years of his life, born in 1950; and son Deng Zhifang, born in 1951, who earned a PhD in physics at the University of Rochester and is involved in property development and investment.
Whereas Mao's birthplace in Hunan Province was turned into a much-visited monument, Deng's childhood home in Sichuan Province was kept almost secret for many years. When foreign journalists were permitted to visit the site in 1985, they found a large 16-room farmhouse with stucco walls surrounded by rice paddies and tall stalks of bamboo.
Deng was the eldest son of a landlord who owned about 25 acres of land, a huge tract compared with the small plots farmed by most Chinese peasants today.
In 1920, at age 16, Deng traveled to France on a work-study program. During his five-year stay, he worked in shoe and automobile factories and joined a branch of the Chinese Communist Youth League organized by Zhou Enlai, Deng's mentor and a future premier of China. Deng helped edit and mimeograph a Communist youth magazine and became known within secretive party circles as the "doctor of duplication."
After a brief period of study in Moscow, Deng returned to China in 1926, taught in a military academy and worked in the Communist Party underground in Shanghai. He later helped implement Mao's plans to deploy rural guerrillas in a protracted struggle, rather than fight in cities, against Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang forces.
Mao's opponents in the Communist leadership initially overruled Mao on the tactic and accused both Mao and Deng of defeatism. But Kuomintang attacks forced the Communists to halt their internal battles and unite in the Long March to the northwest of China.
From 1934-35, the Red Army embarked on perhaps history's longest retreat in terms of time and distance. During a 6,~~~000-mile march across China, Mao emerged as the top leader of both the party and the military, and Deng as a high-level political commissar. At the same time, Deng became a close confidant of Mao.
The troops with which Deng served fought the Japanese occupation forces from 1937 to 1945 and, in one of the world's bloodiest civil wars, the Nationalists from 1945 to 1949. In 1948-49, Deng helped organize a military campaign that contributed heavily to the Communists' victory.
In 1952, Deng was appointed a deputy premier, and by 1956 he had joined the inner circle of the party's top leadership. He traveled to Moscow that year and witnessed Nikita Khrushchev's denunciation of the late Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. But Deng, like Mao, disapproved of Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign. In 1959, Deng emerged as a forceful critic of Soviet "revisionism" and in 1960 led the Chinese attack on Khrushchev at a meeting in Moscow of international Communist parties.
After Mao's disastrous Great Leap Forward economic plan, Deng and Mao's designated successor, President Liu Shaoqi, attempted to rebuild the economy through pragmatic, market-oriented policies that foreshadowed the economic reforms initiated by Deng more than a decade later. But Mao came to suspect that Deng and Liu were undermining his control and plans to collectivize agriculture.
With the opening shots of Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which pitted radical Red Guards against members of the party hierarchy, Mao ousted Deng and Liu from power in 1966. Deng was forced to confess that he had adopted the "capitalist reactionary line."
Mao complained that for several years, Deng never bothered to consult him and, in a snub, deliberately sat far from Mao at meetings and with Deng's deaf right ear turned toward the chairman. He accused Deng of attempting to set up an independent power base in the party secretariat.
In later years, while praising the deceased chairman for his role in founding the People's Republic of China, Deng criticized Mao for a leadership style that Deng called feudal, patriarchal and out of touch with reality.
Mao seemed at times to admire Deng and at times to mistrust him. In the 1960s, as if in warning, Mao pointed out Deng to Khrushchev. "See that little man over there?" Mao asked the Soviet premier. "He is highly intelligent."
Mao also said of his eventual successor: "Deng is a rare talent. He is like a needle wrapped in cotton. . . . His mind is round, and his actions are square."
After the purge of 1966, Deng was out of power for seven years. From 1969 to 1973, he lived through some of his most difficult moments. While he was spared the severe punishment meted out to Liu, who died a sick and broken man in 1969 after being imprisoned and denied medical aid, Deng was forced for more than two years to live in internal exile in southern China, quartered in an abandoned two-story house under armed guard.
Deng and his wife spent their days in a tractor factory, where Deng worked as a machine parts fitter. Their eldest son Deng Pufang, persecuted and beaten by Red Guards, attempted to commit suicide by jumping out of a window; denied medical treatment for a broken spine, he was paralyzed from the waist down.
Deng was then rehabilitated in 1973, only to be purged again in 1976. This last ouster was triggered, ironically, by what has become known as the first Tiananmen Incident of April 1976. Workers, students and citizens of Beijing had gathered in Tiananmen Square to mourn the death of Premier Zhou Enlai. When the authorities, led by radical leaders known as the "Gang of Four," tried to disperse the assembly, pent-up resentment against Mao's repressive policies began to take form in speeches and posters.
Hundreds of protesters were arrested, many were branded counterrevolutionaries, and Deng was stripped of power for allegedly supporting the demonstration.
In September 1976, Mao died. Within weeks, members of the ultra-leftist Gang of Four, headed by Mao's widow, Jiang Qing, were purged and arrested.
In July 1977, Deng made his first public appearance since his second fall from power and again was reinstated.
Using the tactics of war and party maneuvering honed over the course of decades, Deng isolated Mao's designated successor, Hua Guofeng. Without formally removing him from office, Deng eased Hua out of power.
By late 1978, Deng was able to tighten his grip on the party, government and army. He began to place his successors in positions of power and launched the reforms that have led to China's recent stunning economic growth.
Deng's first big success after taking power was achieved in China's countryside, where about 70 percent of Chinese live. Deng and his reformist colleagues abandoned the Stalinist and Maoist emphasis on heavy industry, instead placing more stress on decentralization and the development of agriculture and light industry.
In the late 1970s, Deng dismantled agricultural communes, allowed renewal of semi-private farm plots and permitted peasants to sell a portion of their output at markets. Agricultural production tripled as a result but leveled off, along with farmers' incomes, in the late 1980s.
Reforms Despite Resistance
Deng also opened Special Economic Zones along the south China coast to lure foreign investors with low tax rates and other concessions.
Deng's reforms encountered heavy resistance in the cities, where entrenched Communist bureaucrats and most factory workers held guaranteed lifetime jobs under socialist central planning. They resented moves by reformist officials to eliminate unprofitable, unproductive and overstaffed factories, and many of these factories managed to survive with the help of state subsidies.
Another failure of Deng's partially reformed economy was that party officials used their connections to obtain state bank loans or raw materials at fixed prices and profiteered on the free market. The resulting corruption, together with inflation, was a periodic source of discontent and a major cause of the 1989 protests.
Deng's opening to the outside world was widely considered a success for China, but the country also paid a price. Foreign investment was heavily concentrated in a few coastal and inland provinces. The transfer of new technologies to China was limited. New forms of corruption emerged in the Special Economic Zones, with millions of dollars lost to land speculators and exporters illegally depositing their earnings overseas.
Like some of China's emperors, Deng believed he could import Western skills and technology while rejecting Western political ideas. His crackdown on the small-scale Democracy Wall movement of 1978-79 showed that he did not believe, as many young Chinese intellectuals did, that economic modernization had to be accompanied by political liberalization.
Deng stuck with Mao's authoritarian social policies. He believed in dealing harshly with criminals and launched an anti-crime campaign in 1983, which, according to Amnesty International, the London-based human rights organization, led to tens of thousands of arrests and several thousand executions.
Deng also supported China's controversial "one couple, one child" birth control program, which critics say involved forced abortions on a wide scale.
Crackdown on Protests
At the same time, Deng's opening to the West encouraged more independent thinking among students and intellectuals, who demanded a more liberal and less corrupt government.
That atmosphere led finally to the protests of 1989 -- and to Deng's decision to end the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square by force.
Although Deng was concerned about the corruption of entrenched Communist Party bureaucrats, he most feared disunity and a breakdown in political control. He had experienced chaos first during China's warlord period in the 1920s and '30s, and again as a victim of the Cultural Revolution.
Deng apparently saw in the student protesters of 1989 a revival of the anarchy of the Cultural Revolution and a direct threat to Communist Party rule. It was Deng who decided that the Tiananmen student movement constituted social "turmoil." From that moment on, a crackdown was inevitable.
The decision to send the tanks into Tiananmen on June 4, 1989, was widely seen as meant to intimidate anyone who might sympathize with the students' cause. In this sense, Deng and his colleagues in the senior leadership succeeded. Since then, no one has dared mount a comparable challenge to the government's absolute authority. But the decision to use deadly force also colored the world's perception of Deng and the nation he led.
In a sense, Tiananmen Square proved that Deng was more like Mao Zedong than many of Deng's admirers in the West had come to believe.
© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company
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