China It Cannot Harm Us

The first of every year is often marked by fresh resolutions, but last week China’s government workers experienced an especially bracing change. Instead of the traditional two-hour lunch break, which usually allowed time for a nap, they were permitted only an hour off. Though the cutback had been announced in advance, it still proved a rude jolt. Workers who were accustomed to cycling home for lunch found themselves forced to eat near their jobs; since few offices have canteens, employees jammed into crowded restaurants cursed with slow service. Schoolteachers in Canton even asked their supervisors for a < return to the two-hour recess to give students enough time for a meal at home.

So began the first week of 1985 for the world’s most populous nation. Six years after Deng Xiaoping, in an attempt to shape China into a powerful, modern nation, introduced some of the most daring and far-reaching reforms ever attempted in a Communist country, the winds of change are blowing as strongly as ever. Like Mao Tse-tung before him, Deng, now 80, is trying to imprint his notion of what China should be upon the country before he dies. However, unlike Mao, an eternal revolutionary, Deng is a shrewd pragmatist whose economic reforms have proved popular, at least so far, among a people eager for Western-style prosperity. His policies, aimed at transforming a centrally planned economy into one that is more market-oriented, have not been greeted with approval by hard-liners among party and army officials, who suspect their positions are eroding. Deng is moving, cautiously but firmly, to weed out some of his stauncher critics: only two weeks ago, 40 senior military officers were forced into retirement. “I am afraid that some of our old comrades have this fear: after a generation of socialism and Communism, it is unacceptable to spout some capitalism,” said Deng in a speech published in the Chinese press on New Year’s Day. “It cannot harm us. It cannot harm us.”

Deng actually delivered those remarks at the October meeting of the Central Advisory Commission, a grouping of the Communist Party’s elder statesmen, but the full text had not been published before. In what was clearly a dramatic effort to give the reform movement even greater momentum, the country’s press carried the speech on front pages. “No country can now develop by closing its door,” said Deng, in a spirited defense of his policy of building ties to the West. “We suffered from this, and our forefathers suffered from this. Isolation landed China in poverty, backwardness and ignorance.” Only by means of foreign investment and trade, Deng said, could China achieve a paramount goal: to quadruple its gross national product to $1 trillion by the year 2000.

Deng’s campaign moved forward on several other fronts last week. A pamphlet containing Deng’s major pronouncements over the past two years went on nationwide sale at 10 cents a copy. Titled Building China with Socialist Characteristics, the 72-page booklet stressed productivity as the solution to China’s ills. According to Deng, every worker must “find a thousand and one . ways to make the country prosperous,” because “when our state is powerful, all will be well.” A day later Premier Zhao Ziyang announced in a speech that the rigid wage system for government workers would be loosened to reflect individual merit. Combined with the government’s plans for imminent price decontrol through the removal of state subsidies, these policies represented the most sweeping–and riskiest–steps yet in the piecemeal revolution Deng is pursuing.

Perhaps the most dramatic sign of ferment came during last week’s National Congress of the Chinese Writers Association in Peking, only the fourth such meeting in the 35-year history of the People’s Republic and the first since 1979. Delegates freely discussed how China should never again experience the crackdown that followed Mao’s “Let a hundred flowers bloom” movement in 1957 or anything like the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, when many writers were banished to manual labor for failing to toe the ideological line. What attracted the most attention, however, was a speech made by Hu Qili, a high- ranking member of the party’s Secretariat. Hu told his 800 listeners that the party believed “literary creation must be free” and pledged that writers would never again become victims of political persecution. According to the People’s Daily, some of the delegates wept openly with joy. Though Hu did not define what “freedom of creation” meant, many felt reassured by his words. Said the editor of a literary magazine: “There is a feeling that we can never go back to something like the Cultural Revolution.”

Deng’s efforts are now focused on extending the reforms from the countryside, where they have worked extremely well, to the cities. Shortly after he emerged as China’s supreme leader in 1979, he established an incentive system for peasants that allowed them, once they had turned over a share of their crops to the government, to sell the rest on the open market. Despite sniping from diehard Maoists, the innovations were a smashing success: the grain harvest, for example, rose from 320 million tons in 1980 to a record 400 million last year, and average peasant income more than doubled, to $112, in 1983.

The boom, however, did not extend to the cities, where most of the large but inefficient state-owned industries are located. At a party meeting last October, the delegates approved a Deng-inspired resolution detailing an ambitious package of reforms aimed at reinvigorating the urban economy and giving industrial workers some incentives. The program called for virtual autonomy for state-owned enterprises, the levying of corporate-type taxes and a radical cutback in central planning. Most important, the plan looked toward price reforms on goods subsidized by the state. Deng envisioned removing the subsidies, which account for nearly half of the country’s $96.33 billion budget, and allowing prices to respond to market forces.

Many Chinese fear that as a result, the costs of such basic items as rice and clothes will skyrocket. Hardest hit would be the country’s 80 million urban workers, who still have less opportunity for earning extra money than the peasants. “That’s all the Chinese talk about now,” said a British teacher working at a major Peking university. Premier Zhao last week dismissed rumors of impending price rises as “street gossip,” but the fact that the government has not revealed how and when the price strategy will go into effect only makes consumers more nervous.

If prices do rise and China has to cope with major inflation, the complaints could be powerful fodder for Deng’s opponents. Though no party official has publicly criticized his programs, some in the 24member Politburo are believed to have strong reservations about the policies. Chen Yun, chairman of the party’s disciplinary commission, for example, is thought to favor Soviet- style economic planning and to oppose Deng’s open-door policy to the West. Other party officials also distrust Deng’s reforms because of their capitalistic flavor, but much of their opposition is rooted in self-interest. For Deng’s programs to work, people with managerial and intellectual skills will be needed to run them. Yet a large percentage of China’s 40 million party members have never even finished primary school.

China’s future leaders are now emerging. At a party meeting in late December, Deng lavishly praised several younger members, including Hu Qili, who is in charge of the Secretariat’s day-to-day operations and who, at 56, is considered a rising star. Deng also announced a party delegate conference for next September to elect as many as 50 new members to the 346-seat Central Committee. The anticipated housecleaning is intended to make room for younger, more open-minded and better-educated officials who are likely to promote rather than resist reform. Efforts are also under way to transform the highly politicized 4.2 million-strong People’s Liberation Army into a leaner, more professional fighting force by cutting back on manpower and recruiting educated young men and women instead of promoting politically reliable but uneducated officers.

Deng is obviously trying to ensure that his reforms will survive after he is gone. In recent months he has stressed to foreign visitors that his overtures to the West are a permanent feature of Chinese foreign policy, not a passing fad. But as the blitz of New Year’s pronouncements indicated, Deng also feels that the attempt to bring reform to the cities needs a fresh personal push. That effort has brought him back into the limelight after two years of governing largely behind the scenes. The strategy may help attract public support and build a national consensus, but it also carries the risk of creating a personality cult for Deng–and inviting rejection of his programs after he dies. Deng’s challenge is to protect and nurture his achievement without making it look too much like what it is: his legacy.