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China Introduction
REFORM--DUBBED CHINA'S "SECOND REVOLUTION"--was one of the most
common terms in China's political vocabulary in the 1980s. Reform
of the Chinese Communist Party and its political activities, reform
of government organization, reform of the economy, military
reforms, cultural and artistic reforms, indeed, China's post-Mao
Zedong leaders called for reform of every part of Chinese society.
The leaders of the People's Republic of China saw reform as the way
to realize the broad goal of the Four Modernizations (announced by
Premier Zhou Enlai in 1975: the modernization of industry,
agriculture, science and technology, and national defense) and to
bring China into the community of advanced industrial nations by
the start of the new millennium. The reform movement had
antecedents in Chinese history in the Han (206 B.C.-A.D. 220), Song
(960-1279), and Qing (1644-1911) dynasties, when concerted efforts
were made to bring about fundamental changes in administrative
methods while keeping the overall institutional framework intact.
Thus, the reform movement of the 1980s--which has been attributed
largely to the insights and determination of Deng Xiaoping, the
most important figure in the post-Mao Zedong leadership--took its
place in the broad spectrum of Chinese history. As with previous
reform movements, history will measure this one's success.
Late twentieth-century Chinese society has developed out of
some 3,300 years of recorded history and, as archaeological finds
indicate, several millennia of prehistoric civilization. For
thousands of years, the Middle Kingdom (Zhongguo--the Chinese name
for China) was marked by organizational and cultural continuity,
which were reaffirmed in a cyclic rise, flourishing, and decline of
imperial dynasties. Short-lived, vibrant, but often tyrannical
dynasties frequently were followed by long periods of stability and
benevolent rule that were built on the best features of the
preceding era and that discarded or modified more authoritarian
ideas. An ethical system of relations--governed by rules of
propriety attributed to the School of Literati (also known as the
Confucian school)--carefully defined each person's place in
society. In this system, harmony of social relations rather than
the rights of the individual was the ideal. The highest social
status was held by scholar-officials, the literati who provided the
interpretations needed for maintaining harmony in a slowly evolving
world. Hard-working farmers, the providers of sustenance to
society, also occupied an important place in the societal
structure.
China's development was influenced by the alien peoples on the
frontiers of Chinese civilization, who were sinicized into the
Chinese polity
(see
fig. 1, frontispiece). Occasionally, groups
arose among alien border peoples that were strong enough to conquer
China itself. These groups established their own dynasties, only to
be absorbed into an age-old system of governance. The importation
of Buddhism, too, in the first century A.D. and its gradual
assimilation had a fundamental impact on China. Early contacts with
the premodern Western world brought a variety of exchanges. The
Chinese contributed silk, printing, gunpowder, and porcelain.
Staple foodstuffs from Africa and the Americas were assimilated by
China, as was the Western-style chair. In later centuries, Chinese
scholars studied Western astronomy, mathematics, and other branches
of science. Westerners arrived in China in the nineteenth century,
during the decline of the Qing dynasty, in search of trade and
colonial empires. Through force of arms the Westerners imposed
unequal treaties compelling China to accept humiliating compromises
to its traditional system of society and government.
China reacted to intrusions from the West--and from a newly
modernized Japan (to which China lost a war in 1895)--in a variety
of ways, sometimes maintaining the traditional status quo, adapting
Western functions to Chinese substance, or rejecting Chinese
tradition in favor of Western substance and form. As the Qing
dynasty declined, reforms came too late and did too little. The
unsuccessful reform efforts were followed by revolution. Still
burdened with the legacy of thousands of years of imperial rule and
nearly a century of humiliations at foreign hands, China saw the
establishment of a republic in 1911. But warlord rule and civil war
continued for nearly forty more years, accompanied in 1937-45 by
war with Japan.
The Chinese civil war of 1945-49 was won by the Chinese
Communist Party, the current ruling party of China, led by its
chairman and chief ideologist, Mao Zedong. The Communists moved
quickly to consolidate their victory and integrate all Chinese
society into a People's Republic. Except for the island of Taiwan
(which became the home of the exiled Guomindang under Chiang Kai-
shek and his successors), the new government unified the nation and
achieved a stability China had not experienced for generations.
Eagerness on the part of some Communist leaders to achieve even
faster results engendered the Great Leap Forward (1958-60), a
program that attempted rapid economic modernization but proved
disastrous. Political reaction to the Great Leap Forward brought
only a temporary respite before a counterreaction occurred in the
form of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), a period of radical
experimentation and political chaos that brought the educational
system to a halt and severely disrupted attempts at rational
economic planning. When Mao Zedong died in 1976, the Cultural
Revolution era effectively came to an end.
Eager to make up for lost time and wasted resources, China's
leaders initiated China's "second revolution"--a comprehensive
economic modernization and organizational reform program. Deng
Xiaoping and his associates mobilized the Chinese people in new
ways to make China a world power. Starting with the Third Plenum of
the Chinese Communist Party's Eleventh National Party Congress in
December 1978, Deng reaffirmed the aims of the Four Modernizations,
placing economic progress above the Maoist goals of class struggle
and permanent revolution. Profit incentives and bonuses took the
place of ideological slogans and red banners as China's leaders
experimented with ways to modernize the economy. Mao's legendary
people's communes were dismantled and replaced by a responsibility
system, in which peasant households were given greater decision-
making power over agricultural production and distribution. Farm
families were allowed to lease land and grow crops of their own
choosing. In the urban sector, factory managers were granted the
flexibility to negotiate with both domestic and foreign
counterparts over matters that previously had been handled by
central planners in Beijing. Exploitation of China's rich natural
resources advanced significantly in the late 1970s and throughout
the 1980s. As China's industrial sector advanced, there was
increasing movement of the population to urban areas. China's
population itself had surpassed 1 billion people by 1982 and was
experiencing an annual rate of increase of 1.4 percent. As in times
past, foreign specialists were invited to assist in the
modernization process, and joint ventures with foreign capitalists
and multinational conglomerates proliferated. Increasing numbers of
Chinese students went abroad to pursue advanced degrees in a wide
range of scientific and technical fields.
All this change was not without cost--both political and
monetary. Efforts at fundamental transformation of economic,
governmental, and political organizations caused discontent among
some people and in some institutions and were resisted by those who
clung to the "iron rice bowl" of guaranteed lifetime job tenure.
Beijing's reform leaders made repeated calls for party members and
government bureaucrats to reform their "ossified thinking" and to
adopt modern methods. Older and inappropriately trained bureaucrats
retired in great numbers as a younger and more technically oriented
generation took over. In the ongoing debate between those who
emphasized ideological correctness and those who stressed the need
for technical competence--"reds" versus "experts"--the technocrats
again emerged predominant. But developing and successfully applying
technological expertise--the very essence of the Four
Modernizations--cost vast sums of money and required special effort
on the part of the Chinese people. In a rejection of the time-
honored concept of "self-reliance," China entered into the milieu
of international bank loans, joint ventures, and a whole panoply of
once-abhorred capitalist economic practices.
As politics and the economy continued to respond to and change
each other, China's reformers had to balance contending forces
within and against their reform efforts while maintaining the
momentum of the Four Modernizations program. In doing so, Deng
Xiaoping and his associates were faced with several unenviable
tasks. One was to create unity and support for the scope and pace
of the reform program among party members. There was also a
necessity to deliver material results to the broad masses of people
amid economic experiments and mounting inflation. Failure to
achieve these balances and to make mid-course corrections could
prove disastrous for the reform leadership.
A sound ideological basis was needed to ensure the support of
the party for the reform program. Deng's political idioms, such as
"seeking truth from facts" and "socialism with Chinese
characteristics," were reminiscent of reformist formulations of
centuries past and had underlying practical ramifications. The
supporters of Deng held that theory and practice must be fully
integrated if success is to be hoped for, and they articulated the
position that the Marxist-Leninist creed is not only valid but is
adaptable to China's special--if not unique--situation. The
ideological conviction that China was still in the "initial stage
of socialism"--a viewpoint reaffirmed at the Thirteenth National
Party Congress in October and November 1987--provided a still
broader ideological basis for continuing the development of the
Deng's reform program in the late 1980s and early 1990s. This
ideological pronouncement also emphasized reformers' fundamental
tenet that since the end of the "period of socialist
transformation" (turning over private ownership of the means of
production to the state) in 1956, there had been numerous "leftist"
errors made in the party's ideological line. Mistakes such as the
Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution had produced
setbacks in achieving "socialist modernization" and had kept China
from emerging from the initial stage of socialism. It was, perhaps,
the very failure of these leftist campaigns that had paved the way
for the reforms of the 1980s.
Political confrontation over the reforms was pervasive and, to
many foreign observers, confusing. In simplistic terms, the
"conservatives" in the reform debate were members of the post-Mao
"left," while the "liberals" were the pro-Deng "right." Being
conservative in China in the 1980s variously meant adhering to the
less radical aspects of Maoist orthodoxy (not all of which had been
discredited) or accepting the goals of reform but rejecting the
pace, scope, or certain methods of the Deng program. Thus, there
were both conservative opponents to reform and conservative
reformers. While many reform opponents had been swept away into
"retirement," conservative reformers until the late 1980s served as
members of China's highest ruling body and locus of power, the
Standing Committee of the party's Political Bureau. Such leaders as
Standing Committee member Chen Yun, one of the principal architects
of economic reform, objected to the "bourgeois liberalization" of
the modernization process that came with infusions of foreign,
especially Western, culture. In the conservative reform view, the
application of Chinese values to Western technology (reminiscent of
the traditional tiyong [substance versus form] formulation
evoked in the late-nineteenth-century reform period) would serve
the People's Republic in good stead.
In the 1980s China's intellectuals and students frequently
tested the limits of official tolerance in calls for freer artistic
and literary expression, demands for more democratic processes, and
even criticisms of the party. These confrontations reached their
apex in late 1986, when thousands of students throughout the nation
took to the streets to make their views known. In the resulting
crackdown, some prominent intellectuals were demoted or expelled
from the party. Even its highest official was not invulnerable:
General Secretary Hu Yaobang was demoted in January 1987 for having
dealt unsuccessfully with public activism and criticism of the
party. Hu's ouster paved the way for the chief implementer of the
Deng reforms, Zhao Ziyang, premier of the State Council, to assume
command of the party and more firmly establish Deng's ideology as
the status quo of reform. At the time of the writing of this book,
it remained to be seen what degree of success the conservative
reform elements would have in effecting a compromise, having placed
their own representatives in the Political Bureau Standing
Committee and the State Council's highest offices in late 1987.
Self-proclaimed successes of the reforms of the 1980s included
improvements in both rural and urban life, adjustment of the
structures of ownership, diversification of methods of operation,
and introduction of more people into the decision-making process.
As market mechanisms became an important part of the newly reformed
planning system, products circulated more freely and the commodity
market was rapidly improved. The government sought to rationalize
prices, revamp the wage structure, and reform the financial and
taxation systems. The policy of opening up to the outside world
(the Chinese eschew the term open door, with its legacy of
imperialist impositions) brought a significant expansion of
economic, technological, and trade relations with other countries.
Reforms of the scientific, technological, and educational
institutions rounded out the successes of the Deng-inspired
reforms. For the first time in modern Chinese history, the reforms
also were being placed on the firm basis of a rational body of law
and a carefully codified judicial system. Although reform and
liberalization left the once more-strictly regimented society open
to abuses, the new system of laws and judicial organizations
continued to foster the stable domestic environment and favorable
investment climate that China needed to realize its modernization
goals.
Amid these successes, the authorities admitted that there were
difficulties in attempting simultaneously to change the basic
economic structure and to avoid the disruptions and declines in
production that had marked the ill-conceived "leftist experiments"
of the previous thirty years. China's size and increasing economic
development rendered central economic planning ineffective, and the
absence of markets and a modern banking system left the central
authorities few tools with which to manage the economy. A realistic
pricing system that reflected accurately levels of supply and
demand and the value of scarce resources had yet to be implemented.
The tremendous pent-up demand for consumer goods and the lack of
effective controls on investment and capital grants to local
factories unleashed inflationary pressures that the government
found difficult to contain. Efforts to transform lethargic state
factories into efficient enterprises responsible for their own
profits and losses were hampered by shortages of qualified managers
and by the lack of both a legal framework for contracts and a
consistent and predictable taxation system. The goals of economic
reform were clear, but their implementation was slowed by practical
and political obstacles. National leaders responded by reaffirming
support for reform in general terms and by publicizing the
successes of those cities that had been permitted to experiment
with managerial responsibility, markets for raw materials, and
fundraising through the sale of corporate bonds.
National security has been a key determinant of Chinese
planning since 1949. Although national defense has been the lowest
priority of the Four Modernizations, it has not been neglected.
China has had a perennial concern with being surrounded by enemies-
-the Soviets to the north and west, the Vietnamese to the south,
and the Indians to the southwest--and has sought increasingly to
project itself as a regional power. In response to this concern and
power projection, in the 1970s China moved to augment "people's
war" tactics with combined-arms tactics; to develop
intercontinental ballistic missiles, nuclear submarines, and other
strategic forces; and to acquire sophisticated foreign technologies
with military applications. In the international arena, China in
the 1980s increasingly used improved bilateral relations and a
variety of international forums to project its "independent foreign
policy of peace" while opening up to the outside world.
March 8, 1988
* * *
After the manuscript for this book was completed in the summer
of 1987, several momentous events took place in China. Some were
alluded to as imminent in the various chapters of the book. From
October 25 to November 1, 1987, the Chinese Communist Party held
its Thirteenth National Party Congress. Dozens of veteran party
leaders retired from active front-line positions. Not least among
the changes was the alteration of the Standing Committee of the
party Political Bureau--the very apex of power in China--both in
personnel and in stated purpose. Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun, and Li
Xiannian stepped down, and Hu Yaobang's demotion to mere Political
Bureau membership was confirmed. Only one incumbent--Zhao Ziyang--
was left on the Standing Committee. In place of the party elders
and Hu Yaobang, a group of mostly younger, more technologically
oriented individuals were seated. The Political Bureau's Standing
Committee comprised Deng's protege, sixty-eight-year-old Zhao
Ziyang (who relinquished his position as head of government to
become general secretary of the party); Li Peng, a sixty-year-old,
Soviet-educated engineer, who became acting premier of the State
Council in Zhao's place (he was confirmed as premier in spring
1988); Qiao Shi, a sixty-four-year-old expert in party affairs,
government administration, and legal matters; Hu Qili, a fifty-
eight-year-old party Secretariat member in charge of ideological
education, theoretical research, and propaganda; and veteran
economic planner and conservative reform architect Yao Yilin, the
new party elder at age seventy-one. In regard to function, the
Political Bureau no longer was conceived of as a group of
influential individuals but as a consensual decision-making
organization. The party constitution was amended to make the party
Secretariat a staff arm of the Political Bureau and its Standing
Committee, rather than the somewhat autonomous body it had been
since 1982. By mid-1988, the Chinese Communist Party announced that
its increasingly well educated membership had risen to 47 million,
an all-time high.
The retirees were not left without a voice. Deng, eighty-three
and still China's de facto leader, retained his positions as
chairman of the party and state Central Military Commissions, the
latter of which designated him as commander-in-chief of the Chinese
armed forces. (Zhao Ziyang was appointed first vice chairman of the
party and state Central Military Commissions, giving him military
credentials and paving the way for him to succeed Deng.) Eighty-
two-year-old Chen Yun gave up his position as first secretary of
the party Central Commission for Discipline Inspection but replaced
Deng as chairman of the party's Central Advisory Commission, a
significant forum for party elders. Li Xiannian who relinquished
his position as head of state, or president, to another party
elder--eighty-one-year-old Yang Shangkun--to become chairman of the
Seventh Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference in
spring 1988, was left without a leading party position. Hu Yaobang,
far from being totally disgraced after his January 1987 debacle,
retained membership on the Political Bureau and enjoyed a fair
amount of popular support at the Thirteenth National Party Congress
and afterward.
Below the national level, numerous leadership changes also took
place following the Thirteenth National Party Congress. More than
600 younger and better educated leaders of provincial-level
congresses and governments had been elected in China's twenty-nine
provinces, autonomous regions, and special municipalities.
The Seventh National People's Congress was held from March 25
to April 13, 1988. This congress, along with the Seventh Chinese
People's Political Consultative Conference, held from March 24 to
April 10, 1988, was marked by a new openness and tolerance of
debate and dissent. The opening ceremony of the National People's
Congress was televised live, and meetings and panel discussions
were recorded and broadcast the same day. Chinese and foreign
journalists were permitted to attend the panel discussions and
question the deputies in press conferences. Dissenting statements
and dissenting votes were widely publicized in the domestic press.
A spirit of reform prevailed as laws and constitutional amendments
were ratified to legitimize private business and land sales and to
encourage foreign investment. The State Council was restructured
and streamlined. Fourteen ministries and commissions were dissolved
and ten new ones--the State Planning Commission and ministries of
personnel, labor, materials, transportation, energy, construction,
aeronautics and astronautics industry, water resources, and machine
building and electronics industry--were established. Many of the
ministries that were dissolved were converted into business
enterprises responsible for their own profits and losses.
Li Peng was elected premier of the State Council, as expected,
and Yao Yilin and fifty-nine-year-old financial expert Tian Jiyun
were re-elected as vice premiers. Sixty-six-year-old former
Minister of Foreign Affairs Wu Xueqian also was elected vice
premier. State councillors, all technocrats chosen for their
professional expertise, were reduced in number from eleven to nine.
All state councillors except Beijing mayor Chen Xitong and
Secretary General of the State Council Chen Junsheng served
concurrently as heads of national-level commissions or ministries.
Although seven of the nine were new state councillors, only Li
Guixian, the newly appointed governor of the People's Bank of
China, was new to national politics. On a move that seemed to bode
well for reform efforts, long-time Deng ally and political moderate
Wan Li was selected to replace Peng Zhen as chairman of the
Standing Committee of the Seventh National People's Congress. The
conservative Peng had been considered instrumental in blocking or
delaying many important pieces of reformist legislation. It also
was decided at the Seventh National People's Congress to elevate
Hainan Island, formerly part of Guangdong Province, to provincial
status and to designate it as a special economic zone.
In September and October 1987 and again in March 1988, riots
erupted in the streets of Lhasa, the capital of Xizang Autonomous
Region (Tibet). Calls for "independence for Tibet" and expressions
of support for the exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, were
made amid violence that claimed the lives of at least six people in
1987 and at least nine more (including policemen) in 1988. Many
more were reported to have been badly injured. Although Chinese
authorities condemned the riots, their initial response was
restrained in comparison with actions they had taken against
earlier anti-Chinese demonstrations in Xizang. In addition, the
authorities accompanied their censure of the Lhasa riots with a
plethora of publicity on advances made by the inhabitants of Xizang
in recent years and a lifting of travel restrictions on foreign
correspondents. The March 1988 rioting spread to neighboring
Qinghai Province, where there is a sizable Tibetan (Zang) minority.
This time the authorities resorted to sterner measures, such as
military force and numerous arrests, but only after offering
lenient treatment to rioters who turned themselves in voluntarily.
By mid-1988, it appeared that both the Dalai Lama, concerned that
violence and bloodshed in his homeland was out of control, and the
Chinese government, worried about instability in a strategic border
area, were displaying greater flexibility in their respective
positions.
The January 1988 death of Taiwan's leader, Chiang Ching-kuo,
brought expressions of sympathy from Zhao Ziyang and other Chinese
Communist Party leaders and renewed calls for the reunification of
China under the slogan "one country, two systems." Implicit in the
mainland's discussion of the transfer of power to a new generation
of leaders--Taiwan-born Li Teng-hui succeeded Chiang--was regret
that the opportunity had been lost for reaching a rapprochement
with the last ruling member of the Chiang family. Beijing appealed
to the patriotism of the people in Taiwan and called for unity with
the mainland but, at the same time, kept a close watch for any
sentiments that might lead to independence for Taiwan.
In foreign affairs, Beijing continued to balance its concern
for security with its desire for an independent foreign policy.
China reacted cautiously to the signing of a nuclear arms treaty by
the Soviet Union and the United States and refused to hold its own
summit with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Despite a lessening of
tensions between Beijing and Moscow and greatly improved Chinese
relations with the governments and ruling parties throughout
Eastern Europe, China continued to insist that the Soviet Union
would have to end its support for Vietnamese occupation of
Cambodia, withdraw all of its troops from Afghanistan, and
significantly reduce Soviet forces deployed on the Sino-Soviet
border and in the Mongolian People's Republic before relations
between the Chinese and Soviet governments and parties could
improve. By mid-1988 there were indications that the Soviet Union
was taking steps to remove these "three obstacles" to improved
Sino-Soviet relations. As early as the fall of 1986, the Soviet
Union announced the pullback of a significant number of troops from
Mongolia and the Sino-Soviet border. In May 1988 Moscow began
withdrawing troops from Afghanistan with the goal of evacuating its
forces from that country by early 1989. But China remained
skeptical of Vietnamese government announcements that it would
withdraw 50,000 troops from Cambodia by the end of 1988, and
China's leaders continued to pressure the Soviet Union to exert
more influence on Vietnam to secure an early withdrawal of all
Vietnamese troops from Cambodia. Already strained Sino-Vietnamese
relations were exacerbated when Chinese and Vietnamese naval forces
clashed in March 1988 over several small islands in the
strategically located Nansha (Spratly) archipelago.
In Sino-American relations, disputes over trade and technology
transfer in 1987 were further clouded by United States concern over
reported Chinese Silkworm missile sales to Iran, sales of Dongfeng-
3 intermediate range missiles to Saudi Arabia, and disclosures that
Israel allegedly assisted China in the development of the missile
system later sold to the Saudis. Another concern was China's
protest over an October 1987 United States Senate resolution on the
"Tibetan question" that focused on alleged human rights violations
in Xizang. A visit to Washington, by then Minister of Foreign
Affairs Wu Xueqian in March 1988, however, had salutary effects on
bilateral relations: China made assurances that it would cease
Silkworm missile sales to Iran and the United States pledged to
continue to make desired technologies available to China. The
perennial Taiwan issue and problems in Xizang apparently were
subsumed by larger national interests.
In February 1988 Beijing China achieved its long-sought goal of
establishing diplomatic relations with Uruguay, one of the few
nations that still had state-to-state ties with Taipei. With this
accomplishment China increased its diplomatic exchanges to 134
countries, while Taiwan's official representations were reduced to
22.
The dynamism of China's domestic activities and international
relations will continue the new millennium approaches. Developments
in the all-encompassing reform program and their resulting impact
on Chinese society, particularly the efforts of China's leaders to
bring increasing prosperity to the more than 1 billion Chinese
people, and China's growing participation and influence in the
international community will remain of interest to observers
throughout the world.
July 15, 1988
Robert L. Worden, Andrea Matles Savada, and Ronald E. Dolan
Data as of July 1987
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