prc politics in the post-mao era: 1976–2008

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PRC Politics in thePost-Mao Era:

1976–2008

6CHAPTER

INTERREGNUM: 1976–1978Hua Guofeng, having claimed Mao Zedong’s mantle by virtue of his conversa-tion with the dying chairman, was duty-bound to preserve Mao’s legacy. Hepledged himself to “support firmly whatever decisions Chairman Mao made,and to follow persistently whatever directives Chairman Mao gave.” Thispledge, referred to as “the two whatevers,” would later cause Hua consider-able discomfort.

Initially, however, Hua Guofeng’s position seemed secure. In the confusedand potentially volatile months before and immediately after Mao’s death,Hua seemed to have at least the acquiescence, if not necessarily the enthusias-tic support, of the major groups in the political spectrum. These includedgroups ranging from the far-left followers of the Gang of Four, led by Mao’swidow, Jiang Qing, to the furthest-right group, characterized by extremely bit-ter memories of the Cultural Revolution, whose most prominent member wasDeng Xiaoping. In between were three factions representing different groupswithin the military and a group known as the Petroleum Faction which sawopportunities for developing the PRC’s impressive fossil-fuel resources after aMiddle East–based oil cartel had succeeded in raising world petroleum pricesin the early 1970s. Throughout all their interactions, an underlying issue wasthe principles under which the PRC would henceforth be ruled. Mao’s deathhad meant the end of an era. Should the new era be a continuation of the oldor involve a reassessment of the changes of the past and a radical break withMaoism? Those who adhered to the former view were frequently described asideologues or hard-liners. They wished to affirm Maoist radical values andmethods. Those who preferred to break sharply with the Maoist past are

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114 CHAPTER 6 PRC Politics in the Post-Mao Era: 1976–2008

generally termed reformers, even though the reforms they wished to institute,including reduction of state subsidies and greater personal accountability inproduction, will strike foreign observers as more like what would be referredto in the West as conservatism. Finally, there were a number of people whooccupied various intermediate positions on the spectrum between ideologicalhard-liners and reformers, being in favor of some reforms under some cir-cumstances. The origins of these groups and their interactions fit in well withthe central–regional model introduced in Chapter 1, in both its native-placeand field-army variants. The events also fit in nicely with the analyses of thebureaucratic politics and palace politics schools. Although foreign policy wasof lesser importance than internal considerations during this period, argu-ments over the method by which China should acquire foreign technology andon which, if any, foreign powers to rely have overtones of the strategic inter-action and political–cultural schools. Ultimately, of course, there was a gener-ational struggle going on as well.

The reader will also notice a reassertion of traditional Chinese values,including the importance of family and patronage ties, which resonates withthe China-is-China-is-China paradigm. In the sense that ideological differencesdid not preclude alliances among different groups, the factional model seemedto apply as well. Since the system now permitted a limited form of competitionamong those who favored different policies, one may also see an incipientform of pluralism. As predicted by the communist neo-traditional paradigm,political competition took place more within the institutional framework setup by the party than it did along Western-inspired models of interest grouparticulation. However, none of these analyses could have predicted what wasto follow.

Hua’s acceptability to various groups as a compromise candidate was incertain ways a liability rather than an asset: He was faced with reconcilingoften incompatible demands from across the political spectrum and riskedbeing attacked from all directions by those whose requests he could not satisfy.For example, victims of the Cultural Revolution and other leftist-inspiredattacks demanded a thorough repudiation of these policies and reinstatementof their pre-purge status. At the same time, those who had profited by thecampaigns strongly resisted attacks on the Maoist system, fearing that theirown status would deteriorate.

At the time of Mao’s death, the Gang of Four, concerned for its future atthe hands of military leaders it had previously dealt harshly with, had tried totake over, using the urban militia as its armed force. The military acted force-fully in support of Hua, easily defeating the militia. Less than a month afterMao’s death, Hua arrested the Gang of Four. Saved from one group, hebecame more beholden to another. In July 1977, acceding to the wishes ofleading military figures, Hua rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping. Understandablyreluctant to reinstate the man whose place he had so obviously moved into theyear before, Hua took this step only after Deng gave written guarantees of hissupport for Hua as Mao’s successor and admitted his own mistakes. Deng wasthen restored to his former positions of member of the standing committee of

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the politburo, vice-premier of the State Council, vice-chair of the CentralMilitary Commission, and chief of the PLA’s general staff.

Pledges notwithstanding, Deng immediately began to undermine Hua’sposition. He revived the office of party general secretary, which had beendefunct since Deng had held it at the outset of the Cultural Revolution. Dengthen used the position to take over the responsibility, formerly exercised byHua as premier of the State Council, of overseeing the implementation of polit-buro decisions. At the same time, Deng began moving his supporters frompositions they held in the provinces to the central government in Beijing. Oneprotégé, Zhao Ziyang, the first party secretary of Deng’s native province ofSichuan, showed open contempt for Hua. Sichuan did not participate in praiseof Hua and instituted agricultural policies that were quite different from thosesanctioned by Hua.

In addition to moving his people from the provinces into the center, Dengconsolidated power in areas where he and his former mentor, Zhou Enlai, hadbeen strongest, such as the foreign ministry. He rehabilitated previouslypurged cadres, thereby earning the gratitude and, presumably, the allegiance ofexperienced and capable people. At the same time, Deng worked to purge ormarginalize Hua’s supporters. Hua tried to fight back, wrapping himself in thecloak of Maoist legitimacy and seeing that stories showing his love for thepeople and his ties with Mao appeared regularly in the official press.Observers noticed that he even began to comb his hair in the same style asMao had.

Deng’s supporters retaliated, accusing Hua of attempting to create a cult ofpersonality. They also ridiculed him for the “two whatevers,” implying thatHua was incapable of more than slavish imitation of Mao. Moreover, theyhinted strongly, Hua might have fabricated his alleged deathbed conversationwith the chairman. Deng counterposed Hua’s pledge to follow Mao’s princi-ples with a slogan of his own, “seek truth from facts.” This derived from Mao’sessay on the need to link theory with practice, which argued that when atheory did not prove consonant with practice, it was necessary to revise thetheory. Apart from providing Deng Xiaoping with a cleverly indirect way toattack Hua, the slogan confirmed Deng’s reputation as a pragmatist.Henceforth, he declared, practice would be the sole criterion of truth. Dogmawas officially dead.

Finally, in December 1978, Deng decided to permit a degree of liberali-zation. Drawing his inspiration from a Qing dynasty poem that began “Tenthousand horses stand mute,” Deng argued that the repressive atmosphere ofprevious years had stifled the population’s creativity and desire to work hard.Deng proposed to allow the people to actually exercise the freedoms of expres-sion that the constitution had, in theory, already given them. The populaceresponded with enthusiasm, writing wall posters that contained vigorousdenunciations of policies and leaders they disagreed with. Certain wallsbecame gathering places for poster writers and those who wished to expresstheir views orally. Known as “democracy walls,” they sprang up in manycities. By far the most famous was in central Beijing, not far from Tiananmen



Square. Because many of the people who gathered at these walls demanded theremoval of precisely those powerholders Deng wanted to get rid of, his deci-sion to permit greater freedom of speech proved an effective weapon.

By early 1979, with its aims largely achieved, the movement was graduallycut off. No longer content with criticizing past leaders, critics had begun tomake adverse comments about the present elite, including Deng. Wall-posterwriters were first moved from central Beijing to a much less convenientlylocated park, ostensibly because they had been disrupting traffic. Thoughthis was indeed true, other government actions indicated that the leadershiphad more in mind than gridlock reduction. Poster writers were told to registertheir names and work units with public security personnel, who were to mon-itor activities in the park. Finally, even this constricted avenue of expressionwas closed.

At the same time, the journals of dissent that had flourished during thisperiod were ordered to cease publication; some of their authors received severeprison terms. The charges against them seemed contrived and implausible. Forexample, Wei Jingsheng was accused of having passed secrets on China’s warwith Vietnam to a foreigner. It was difficult to imagine how Wei, an electricianat the Beijing Zoo, came to acquire military secrets. What was not controver-sial was Wei’s outspoken advocacy of human rights and democratic reforms.He was sentenced to fifteen years in prison. In 1980, the “four freedoms”clause, which allowed people to assemble, express their views, write wallposters, stage demonstrations, and—a fifth freedom—hold strikes, was removedfrom the PRC’s constitution.

Some analysts have interpreted Deng’s sponsorship of the democracymovement as cynically manipulative: a tool to be discarded when it had servedits purpose. Others saw the crackdown not as evidence of a ruse but, rather, asan attempt to mold democracy into a less socially disruptive form. Yet a thirdview is that Deng was himself a reformer and in favor of democratic freedomsbut had acceded to the wishes of party conservatives who feared that themovement was getting out of hand.

DENG ASCENDANTBy the time the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee of theChinese Communist Party (CCP) was held in December 1978, the extent towhich Deng had been able to exert his influence was clear. With the cult ofpersonality proscribed and Hua diminished in stature, Deng reintroduced amuch more ambitious form of the Four Modernizations program that hadoriginally been discussed some years earlier. It was revived by Hua soon afterMao’s death, but after the Third Plenum, the program and its ambitious goalof bringing the PRC into the ranks of the more developed countries by the year2000 became identified with Deng.

The primary focus of the Four Modernizations was economic and isdiscussed in Chapter 7. The sociopolitical ramifications of these economic


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reforms were, however, enormous. In order to encourage people to producemore, the leadership sanctioned economic incentives that would have beenunthinkable under Mao. They were told that there was no shame in being rich,and, further, that it was all right for some people to become rich before others.Wealth could even be inherited. Agricultural goods could be sold in freemarkets, and productive factory workers could be awarded bonuses.Unproductive factories would be closed, with workers forced to find otheremployment. The media repeatedly warned people that the “iron rice bowl”—guaranteed employment regardless of job performance—would be smashed.

Intellectually rigorous examinations were reintroduced as the criterion foradmission to universities. At the same time, the requirement for political relia-bility was quietly downgraded. Under the new regime, “redness” was to beless important than expertise. Rapid modernization would require knowledgeof modern technology. To accomplish this faster, Deng announced an “opendoor” to the advanced countries of the world. Advocating measures thatwould have sounded familiar to proponents of the self-strengthening move-ment a century before, Deng announced that foreign trade was welcome,foreign technology could be purchased, and Chinese students would be sent toWestern and Japanese universities. There were other innovations as well. Sinceincreases in productivity would have a lesser effect if they had to be dividedamong a larger number of people, a stringent birth control policy wasannounced: The ideal family would have only one child, and no more thantwo was permitted.

In order to enlist the support of intellectuals, the Maoist characterizationof them as “the stinking ninth category” was removed. Experts were no longerto be despised; their advice would even be actively sought out. Major partyand state ministries and commissions began to consult think tank specialists.The whole concept of progress through class struggle, which had been soimportant to the Maoist variant of Marxism–Leninism, was explicitly repudi-ated. Henceforth, cooperation rather than confrontation was to be the drivingforce of progress. A new state constitution, promulgated in 1982, deleted the1978 constitution’s definition of China as a “dictatorship of the proletariat”and replaced it with a description of China as a “people’s democratic dictator-ship.” This meant a return to the language used in the original 1954 stateconstitution.

Class labels, such as capitalist and landlord, that had been awarded aslong as thirty years ago and that had been hereditary, were removed. An inves-tigation was promised into verdicts rendered during such mass campaigns asthe antirightist movement of 1957 and the Cultural Revolution of the late1960s; people discovered to have been wronged would have their verdictsreversed. Many famous figures, including former head of state Liu Shaoqi,were rehabilitated posthumously. Henceforth, verdicts were supposed to bedelivered according to proper legal procedures. Because the legal professionhad all but disappeared by the late 1970s, codes would have to be drawn upand people trained to implement them. The codes would also cover business



practices, since foreign companies were understandably reluctant to trade witha country that did not provide them with any means of redress for such prob-lems as delivery of substandard merchandise or failure to deliver goods at all.

Constitutional guarantees and procedures would also be extended to theelectoral system. In marked contrast to the practice of the previous decade,party and state organs would henceforth meet at their scheduled times.Representatives to these bodies were to be chosen by secret ballot. Therewould be more candidates than positions, although in lower-level electionsonly, at least at first. This would be a first step toward competitive elections.The Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference was revived. As theorgan of the united front, it had disappeared during the Cultural Revolution,when the whole concept of the united front came under attack for beingtantamount to collaboration with bourgeois revisionism.

A separation was to be effected between party and government andbetween party and military. Revolutionary committees, which had replacedthe organs of party and government during the Cultural Revolution and thenretained governmental functions after party organs reappeared, were phasedout. Communes first lost their government functions and then were dis-mantled completely. They, as well as the revolutionary committees, werereplaced by standard, pre–Cultural Revolution governmental bodies.

A new, more tolerant policy toward religion was announced. Servicescould again be held, and the government offered help in rebuilding churches,mosques, and temples that had been destroyed in the Cultural Revolution. Itannounced the creation of an institute for the study of religion and that itwould subsidize a new edition of the Koran—the first to be printed, legally atleast, in China since 1949. Policy toward ethnic minorities also became moretolerant.

While foreign observers described these changes as China’s turn towardcapitalism and democracy, Deng vigorously denied it, stating that his intent wasto create “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” What this meant was neverexplicitly stated, though the official media supplied a four-point summary,known as the Four Basic Principles, of the new orthodoxy:

1. acceptance of the leadership of the communist party2. adherence to Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong thought3. the practice of democratic centralism4. following the socialist road

There are obvious problems with this definition. A great deal in Deng’snew program ran precisely counter to Marxism, Leninism, and the thought ofMao. And how could one follow the socialist road when many of the direc-tional signals appeared to be written in capitalist language? Other problems inoperationalizing Deng’s principles soon appeared. Economic decentralizationhad uncomfortable consequences for the centralized political leadership of theCCP. And promises for truly competitive elections at lower levels ran uncom-fortably counter to the practice of democratic centralism. Although theprinciple of democratic centralism stipulates that lower-level bodies should


The Legacy of Mao 119

elect the members of higher-level bodies, in reality it had been just theopposite. Now, when the higher levels persisted in picking all the candidatesfor lower-level positions, vigorous protests occurred. Ambiguities and dis-sonances from reality notwithstanding, the Four Basic Principles constitutedthe definition of the new socialism and became the standard against whichloyalty was judged.

THE LEGACY OF MAOThe large number of changes from Maoist theory and practice, plus the reha-bilitation of so many people, including Deng, who had suffered under him,inevitably raised the question of Mao’s legacy. Deng apparently wanted anexplicit repudiation of the chairman and was enthusiastically supported bymany others who considered themselves victims of Mao’s regime. Severalmoves were made in this direction. The Mao mausoleum was closed forseveral months in 1979, and stories appeared in the official press describingthe hardships of the workers whose homes had been razed in order to build theedifice. In that it was clear to all who had given the order to build the Maomausoleum, this had the effect of tarnishing Hua as well as Mao. In August1980, the central committee issued a directive banning all personality cults ofall leaders, dead or alive. Mao’s and Hua’s pictures were the only ones thatwere regularly hung in public places, and images of both rapidly disappearedfrom most offices and meeting halls. Several statues of Mao were dismantled,some of them toppled by angry crowds. There was no overt official sanction ofsuch acts, but neither were the perpetrators punished, as would have happenedonly a few years before.

In November 1980, the Gang of Four was put on trial, with carefullyedited excerpts of the proceedings made available for television broadcast. TheGang was charged with executing policies that were widely believed to havehad the backing of Mao. A defiant Madame Mao argued exactly this fromthe prisoners’ dock. Characterizing herself as “Chairman Mao’s dog,” shedescribed her role as barking when he told her to bark. Most politically awareChinese seem to have understood the trial as an indictment of Mao. Foreignvisitors who spoke with locals about the Gang of Four report that they point-edly held up five fingers, the last digit representing the chairman as unindictedco-conspirator.

There were also people who strongly disapproved of the idea of destroyingMao Zedong’s reputation. Some of these were ideological hard-liners who hadbeen advantaged during the period when such policies had prevailed.Significantly, however, others had not. One elderly military officer who hadbeen treated extremely badly during the Cultural Revolution pleadedpoignantly that removing Mao from his place of honor would leave youngpeople with nothing to believe in thus provoking the kind of crisis of confi-dence that he had noted in many countries of the West, despite the high level ofmaterial well-being they had achieved.



Eventually, a compromise was reached by declaring that his record was70 percent positive and 30 percent negative. The Mao mausoleum reopened,with a chamber containing Zhou Enlai memorabilia added. Pictures of Maowere rehung in public places, albeit in lesser numbers than before. The studyof his works resumed, but more selectively and with less fervor. No longeridolized, Mao was at least accorded a modicum of respect.

POLITICAL REALIGNMENT AND POLICYREADJUSTMENTPolitically, Deng Xiaoping moved steadily to consolidate his power. The sameThird Plenum of the party’s Eleventh Central Committee that introduced anew, more ambitious version of the Four Modernizations also saw the resig-nation of several potential rivals. As well, the plenum officially reversed theverdict on the Tiananmen incident of 1976, which had led to Deng Xiaoping’slast purge. Because Hua Guofeng had been minister of public security atthe time of the incident, he might well have been indicted in 1980 along withthe Gang of Four. Deng’s price for not doing so was reported to be Hua’sresignation.

Hua was replaced as premier by Deng’s protégé, the former Sichuan partysecretary Zhao Ziyang. Another Deng ally, Hu Yaobang, whose previouscareer had been concentrated in the Communist Youth League (CYL), tookover as party general secretary. Deng Xiaoping himself took over Hua’sposition as head of the party’s Central Military Commission. Deng thenwithdrew from his position as head of the PLA’s general staff department andreplaced himself with yet another old ally from his Second Field Army, QinJiwei. He had thus chosen to install his protégés in the top positions in partyand government rather than taking either position himself. There was,however, no doubt who exercised ultimate decision making. Deng was referredto as “the paramount leader,” a position that existed on no organization chart.Actual power at the top of the PRC leadership was therefore not synonymouswith theoretical power, as indeed it had not been under the latter part of HuaGuofeng’s time in high office either.

Deng then moved to discredit the Petroleum Faction by holding itresponsible for concealing the capsizing of an oil-exploration rig in theNorth China Sea. Suspicions that the release of this information was politi-cally motivated—the information was released a year after the event hadoccurred—were reinforced when the scandal was not blamed on the remnantpoison of the Gang of Four, as virtually everything else at that time had been.A military faction leader was removed after a spate of PLA publications tooka markedly different propaganda line from that espoused by Deng. Anothermilitary leader, Marshal Ye Jianying, was decidedly more difficult for Dengto deal with. Though privately defiant, he did not publicly challenge Deng.As Ye was also nearly ninety years old, Deng may have considered that timewas on his side.


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Having successfully neutralized his rivals, Deng found that some of hisreforms were themselves causing problems. The “ten thousand horses” thathad stood mute were definitely energized, but the flaw in Deng’s reasoning washis assumption that the changes he introduced would cause all of them to rushforward in the desired direction. What actually happened was that while somedid rush forward, others hung back or charged off in a number of differentdirections, and a few even butted heads with each other. In practice, economicdecentralization often led to wasteful duplication, adversely affecting profitsand sometimes leading to cutthroat competition. For example, five areasdecided to build cigarette factories when only one was needed. From thegovernment’s point of view, too much money was being invested in the wrongkinds of projects: Localities typically preferred to construct upscale guesthouses rather than more needed facilities like fertilizer factories. Some areasrefused to sell resources needed by others, preferring to use them locally, andmight also indulge in other market-fragmenting actions like imposing levies ontrucks passing through. If selling vegetables brought more money than sellingpigs, many independent producers switched to raising vegetables, resulting inshortages of pork. A policy that tried to limit families to just one child wasmost unpopular, particularly among the farmers who formed the great major-ity of China’s citizens.

Deng’s judgment that it was acceptable to be rich and that it was all rightfor some to become rich before others led to increasing inequalities of incomeand a concomitant increase in jealousy—the “red-eye disease.” Those with anentrepreneurial flair and the willingness to work longer hours than theirfellows often did become comparatively wealthy, but not without dangers tothemselves. One woman’s neighbors destroyed all the eggs she had planned tosell; another’s broke the legs of her milk cows, forcing her to kill them herself.Still other newly prosperous people were victimized by cadres who exactedpunitive “taxes.” Moreover, not everyone who became rich did so because ofintelligence and hard work. Some prospered because they were able to exploitfamily or other connections—the pervasive guanxi. Those who had access tovehicles and warehouses could buy items cheaply in one area, smuggle them toanother, and hoard them until scarcity drove the price up to the profit marginthey wanted. Regional income disparities were also widened by the newpolicies: Nature had endowed some areas with better resources than others.

Another focus of jealousy was the children of high-ranking officials. It wasnoted that they constituted a disproportionate number of those who wereselected to study abroad and that Deng Xiaoping’s own son was among them.When and if they decided to return to China, these privileged sons and daugh-ters of the powerful frequently obtained positions with access to foreigncurrency and travel to coveted destinations. Often, such positions were con-nected with the PRC’s newly founded foreign trading companies, where theoccupants could exact lucrative bribes from companies desiring contracts oraccess to their influential parents. This aroused intense resentment from theirpeers, who considered themselves at least as well qualified, and often were.The individuals thus favored became known as princelings.



Many leaders became concerned with the rise of what they regarded asrampant materialism that led people to have little regard for other humanbeings. Examples that would support their claim abounded. A surveyconducted at a Tianjin factory asked the question “What is your ideal?” Acomposite response went something like “I find revolutionary ideals hollow.Only visible and tangible material benefits are useful.” On the other side of thespectrum from materialism, the reforms also generated idealism of a sort thatmade some leaders equally uncomfortable. In 1980 and 1981, a series of dis-turbances took place on college campuses in different parts of the country. Theproximate cause was a local communist party decision to delete from theballot the name of a student who was a candidate for local office in Changsha.Arguing that elections in which the party vetted the candidates were not freeelections, large numbers of students began to protest. Their demands soonmoved beyond reinstating the student’s name on the ballot and toward morefundamental issues like human rights and democracy.

The promise to investigate past judgments and, if warranted, to reverseverdicts, clogged the system. Enormous numbers of petitioners appeared.These included people who had been sent down to the countryside ten andtwenty years before and were desperate to return. When their demands werenot dealt with quickly, they were likely to demonstrate in front of party or gov-ernment offices and to publicly declare that they held their leaders responsible.Eager to present their grievances to the leadership, a small army of peasantscamped out in Beijing in the winter of 1979–1980. They also proved ready totalk with foreign reporters: Much to the annoyance of the elite, their pinchedfaces and sad stories were frequently featured by foreign news media.

Generally speaking, there was broad agreement within the leadership, andeven the public at large, on what the country’s problems were: inflation,corruption, nepotism, inefficiency, and low production levels. The status quoapparently being acceptable to no one, differences arose on how to deal withthe problems. Though previous factions and personal affiliations did notsimply disappear, the policy differences of the 1980s seemed to coalescearound two points of view. Leftists tended to hold the reforms responsible forthe problems and to argue that recentralization of party and government con-trols was needed to curb these dangerous tendencies before chaos ensued.Reformers felt that many of the problems had arisen because the reforms hadbeen partial: more reforms were needed. They added that to rescind thereforms or to suppress people’s right to criticize aberrations of the systemwould lead to worse problems and even chaos. Both groups favored the goalsof the reforms, but leftists tended to be more fearful of the consequencesthereof. They wanted to move more slowly on implementing the reforms whileacting faster to correct problems they saw as caused by them.

One should be wary of differentiating too sharply between the twogroups, since the specific circumstances of China’s situation at any given pointin time could persuade some people who had been in favor of rapid reforms toopt for a more moderate pace, or vice versa. And even the strongest prodemoc-racy activists were aware that many obstacles had to be overcome before they



could bring about the sort of sweeping reforms they favored. For example, inthe mid-1980s, a young man who would become a prominent human rightsactivist during the 1989 demonstrations attempted to survey public opinion inrural Gansu province. He abandoned the effort after discovering that mostpeasants were unable to read, much less fill out, his questionnaires. An inter-view with one of the richest and best-educated peasants in the area also yieldedsurprising results. Of course, said the patriarch with feeling, he knew whoChairman Mao was: the emperor. He had been a great emperor, and the newemperor, Deng, also seemed good. The peasant added emphatically thatreform was good, and that he agreed with whatever the government did.Later, the frustrated interviewer told a fellow researcher that “if we gave thesepeople the vote tomorrow, they would simply agree to surrender all their rightsto the emperor.”

The crisis of faith that some had feared would accompany a repudiation ofMao seemed to come about anyway. One small incident in 1981, involving atraffic accident between the mayor of Shanghai’s limousine and a truck, maybe indicative of attitudes toward authority. Seemingly indifferent to the matterof who was responsible for the crash, a crowd of bystanders quickly surgedforward to form a barrier between the truck driver and the traffic police. Inshouted consensus, they announced that a fitting punishment would be for themayor to be crushed to death in his car. Reformers had, in essence, encouragedemancipation of the mind from the fetters of rigid and outworn dogma, butwithout providing a coherent new set of ideals. This, in turn, caused many topursue selfish materialistic goals or, alternatively, to adopt Western notions offreedom and democracy. Both tendencies worried the leadership, and itsemphasis switched from reform to readjustment, aiming to correct the imbal-ances caused by previous reforms.

A campaign against “spiritual pollution” began in October 1983 to try tocounter rampant materialism. Excoriating the emphasis on moneymaking, italso criticized those who had forsaken fine revolutionary traditions of plainliving and austerity in favor of Western-derived notions of hedonism. Theseincluded wearing long hair, gold jewelry, tight blue jeans, and sunglasses aswell as interest in “vulgar” Western books, rock music, and pornography. Thelast category was rather broadly interpreted and included material thatWesterners might describe as merely bawdy, off-color, or even as art.

The protracted debate of the 1980s over how much to borrow fromforeign industrialized states and how much to rely on China’s indigenousresources and customs reminded many observers of the abortive self-strengthening movement of a hundred years before. The twentieth-centurydebate about how to deal with distasteful customs and mores that accompa-nied foreign technology seemed to emphasize again what Yan Fu had pointedout in the nineteenth century: Western learning had an essence of its own,which proved impossible to separate from the practical uses to which Chinawished to put Western technology.

The campaign against spiritual pollution was not a success. Peasants,many of whom had been among the beneficiaries of Deng’s encouragement of



free-market policies, concluded that the new rhetoric was likely to portend areversal of those policies. Their concern that they might be branded capitalistsand persecuted, present ever since the new policies were introduced, grew.Those who had developed a fondness for Western clothing, hairstyles, andentertainment were loath to give them up. Foreign reaction ranged fromamusement at all the sins that Western influence was held responsible for toapprehension that China’s open door might be about to close again. In thatpeasant concerns about the movement were having a dampening effect onagricultural production, rural areas were exempted from the campaign againstspiritual pollution only two months after it began. The campaign itself fadedout a few months later, on Deng’s orders.

Other problems addressed at this time included streamlining bureaucraticorgans and the number of personnel who staffed them. Ambitious economicdevelopment plans had led to a proliferation of new offices and bureaus tooversee them. A good deal of redundancy and overlap existed among the dif-ferent entities, causing lengthy delays in getting projects approved, turf fights,and various other inefficiencies. Some reform plans were thwarted by leftists,often elderly and poorly educated, who were entrenched in the bureaucracy.No retirement age had been established for senior cadres, many of whom werein their seventies and eighties. Below them, a large number of capable peoplehad remained unpromoted for decades, thus dampening their enthusiasm.Reduction in numbers and ages of personnel offered a way to solve some ofthese problems. Since it would be possible to have the cuts fall disproportion-ately on opponents of Deng’s programs, the drive could be used to reducefactionalism and ease the path of reform as well.

The Twelfth Party Congress in September 1982 established the CentralAdvisory Commission as a way to retire some elderly senior leaders withhonor. The commission did absorb some of these, but not necessarily with thedesired effect. Several individuals agreed to leave their current positions for theadvisory group, but not until they were able to select their own successors.Typically, this was someone who could be expected to do his mentor’s bidding,and the older leader therefore continued to rule from behind the scenes.

The handpicked successor was often the retiree’s own son or daughter,thus swelling the ranks of the princelings and giving credibility to the argu-ments of critics of that faction. Some elderly leaders would not resign at all.These included Ye Jianying, Deng’s erstwhile ally and more recent nemesis. Inthat more people who did not possess formal power continued to exercise realpower, the creation of the Central Advisory Commission and various otherschemes to induce the elderly to retire widened the gap between theoreticalresponsibility and actual authority.

The retirements caused other problems as well. In his zeal to reduce theaverage ages of officeholders, Deng had passed over an entire generation in itssixties and late fifties, leading to grave disappointments and loss of morale.Moreover, a select group of Deng cronies, headed by Deng himself, remained atthe center stage of power despite being in their late seventies or early eighties.A newspaper that suggested that Deng should set an example by resigning

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himself was promptly closed down. Deng had, in fact, made an effort torelinquish his position as chair of the Central Military Commission—thoughhe did not suggest leaving his seat on the politburo—in favor of his protégé HuYaobang. Since Hu was party general secretary, this would have placed theparty’s top military position in the hands of the person who held the highestposition in the party, as had been the case while Mao ruled and also duringthe earlier part of Hua Guofeng’s time in office. Arguing that Hu had nosignificant military experience, and apparently also feeling that he lacked goodjudgment, PLA leaders were able to block the move. This resistance from themilitary represented a significant weakness in Hu’s position. While Dengcertainly retained ultimate decision-making power with regard to the military,he was busy with many more pressing aspects of the administration of China.The actual day-to-day running of the PLA was in the hands of the CentralMilitary Commission’s general secretary, Yang Shangkun.

The mid-1980s were characterized by some events that allowed thereformers to claim success for their program and by others that lent credence tothe leftist critique thereof. For example, nominal personal income rose in 1985,but so did the inflation rate. Rising prices triggered panic buying, which in turncaused shortages. Shortages encouraged black marketeering, speculation, andsmuggling. Many of these illegal activities were organized by cadres or theirchildren, thus further eroding the ordinary citizen’s faith in the leadership. Anelaborate, $1.5 billion foreign exchange scam was uncovered on Hainan Island,with the island’s highest-ranking official serving as ringleader. Trying to recoverthe total amount would have crippled the island’s economy. Punishments wererather light, and therefore probably had little disincentive effect on others whomight be contemplating similarly deft financial maneuvers.

The removal from office of the leftist propaganda chief who had headedthe campaign against spiritual pollution cheered reformers, as did the resultsof a special party conference held in September 1985. Ten of the politburo’stwenty-four members resigned, including the doughty Ye Jianying. In whatwas believed to be Ye’s price for departing, his son, Ye Xuanping, was namedgovernor of Guangdong province shortly thereafter. The senior Ye had been amember of the even more select standing committee of the politburo as well;his departure from that body meant that the standing committee now num-bered five, with the reformers Deng Xiaoping, Hu Yaobang, and Zhao Ziyanghaving a slight numerical edge over leftists Chen Yun and Li Xiannian. Hereagain, however, there were doubts as to how much the reform faction hadgained. The procedures involved in the resignations were quite irregular.According to the party constitution, the resignations should have occurred at aparty congress, not a conference whose members are invited at the discretionof the party leader. The implication was that Deng felt he lacked broad con-sensus within the party to make these changes.

A plenary session of the party central committee held right after the con-ference added six new members to the politburo, most of them younger andbetter educated than those they replaced. One of the new politburo memberswas Li Peng, a Soviet-educated engineer. Although Li, orphaned at an early



age, was the adopted son of Zhou Enlai, the widespread popular affection forZhou did not extend to Li. A leftist in most aspects, he was also a member ofthe princeling faction. Hu and Li represented the “third generation,” whosemembers would eventually succeed Deng Xiaoping’s second generation of HuYaobang and Zhao Ziyang.

The same plenary session also featured a highly unusual—because it was sopublic—debate between Deng Xiaoping and the leftist economist Chen Yun.Predictably, Deng made a speech praising the results of his reforms and notingthe increases in living standards that had resulted. Chen followed by pointingout that the number of high-income households had been greatly exaggerated,and noting that the country’s grain production had, in reality, gone down. Inwhat is perhaps the most telling indication of the relative strength of the twosides, the official media printed both speeches, in order of presentation.

The disagreements between those who were more in favor of reforms andthose who were less so were also mirrored in a debate on the relevance ofMarxism to present-day problems. Initially, Marx seemed to be losing ground.In October 1984, Deng Xiaoping observed that China need not fear “a littlecapitalist stuff,” and on December 7, an unsigned commentary in the officialparty newspaper Renmin Ribao stated that “one cannot expect that the worksof Marx and Lenin, written in their times, will solve the problems of today.” Afew days later, however, the paper noted that it had made a mistake; the com-mentary should have said that the works of Marx and Lenin should not beexpected to solve all of present-day China’s problems. In March 1985, Dengstressed the need to heighten ideological vigilance lest the country’s youngstersfall victim to capitalist ideas. Marx and Lenin had clearly regained officialbacking, with Deng’s behavior interpreted as yet another of his tactical retreatsin the face of criticism.

Infighting between reformers and leftists continued. Uncertainty aboutwhether the system would move backward, forward, or stay the same causedproblems, too. The nation’s peasant-oriented newspaper repeated a favoriteslogan of its constituency: “Fear neither waterlogging nor drought, but achange in the party’s policies.” Those who felt that they could make no predic-tions about the future were reluctant to invest in the present. Though suchattitudes were understandable, they had a dampening effect on development.Officials also worried about the rising incidence of disorder, with the popula-tion increasingly unwilling to accept their directives. In widely different partsof the country, there were soccer riots, anti-Japanese demonstrations, TurkicMuslim protests against nuclear testing in Xinjiang, and demonstrationsagainst various official abuses of power. In 1986, a Beijing crowd estimated at1,000 cornered a police vehicle, jeering at its occupants and threatening tooverturn it. The rather minor incident that had sparked this confrontation—apoliceman had slapped a motorcyclist in an argument over a traffic violation—suggested the existence of a more serious, underlying hostility toward policeauthority.

At the end of 1986, large student demonstrations began at a university inHefei, Anhui province. Despite an official attempt to suppress the news, they



soon spread to many other areas, including Shanghai and Beijing. On January1, 1987, Beijing students assembled in Tiananmen Square, defying both anexplicit ban against demonstrating and the freezing weather. To furtherdiscourage the gathering, the police had sprayed water on the huge square,transforming it into a slick sheet of ice. Among the students’ demands weregreater democratization in general and, specifically, the return of the “fourfreedoms” clause that had been deleted from the constitution in 1980. Afterseveral weeks of uncertainty, the demonstrations were put down.

Leftists saw the unrest as proof of their contention that granting poli-tical freedoms would lead to chaos and disruption. Hu Yaobang, with hisbackground in the Youth League and his association with the reform group,was blamed for mishandling the demonstrations and resigned as partygeneral secretary. A spate of anecdotes illustrating Hu’s inept conduct in theoffice began to circulate. Some simply repeated previously known stories;others may have been fabricated. The common thread of the anecdotes rein-forced the wisdom of PLA leadership in blocking Hu’s appointment as headof the Central Military Commission. Others of lesser renown were alsorelieved of their positions for complicity in the demonstrations. Amongthem was Fang Lizhi, the vice president of the Anhui university where thedemonstrations began. An eminent astrophysicist, he had also been vocal insupport of democratization.

Deng’s acquiescence in the dismissal of his longtime protégé Hu Yaobangwas generally interpreted as yet another tactical retreat in the face of resist-ance. The commonly heard analogy was to chess: Deng had sacrificed apawn, Hu, in order to save the king, himself, and his reforms. Subsequentevents seemed to bear out this hypothesis. Leftists of all ages, and elderlyleftists in particular, seemed to gain in power. A campaign against bourgeoisliberalism was stepped up, and there was much talk about upholding the FourBasic Principles. Official pronouncements declared that adherence to the fourprinciples had become “the central task of the political and ideologicalsphere.” Deng himself sounded more leftist, calling, for example, for arestoration of the party’s tradition of democratic centralism. He also spoke of“neo-authoritarianism,” implying that steady progress toward economicdevelopment could best be ensured by a leadership with highly concentratedpowers.

By April 1987, the tide had turned toward reforms. Deng again tookthe lead, telling a foreign visitor that a “leftist” tendency in the party wasjeopardizing China’s economic reforms. Zhao Ziyang, who had taken over Hu Yaobang’s position on an acting basis, delivered several speeches withliberal overtones. In November 1987, the party’s Thirteenth Party Congressconfirmed Zhao as general secretary and made him first vice-chair of theCentral Military Commission, an honor never bestowed on his predecessor.Deng Xiaoping, Li Xiannian, and Chen Yun resigned from the standingcommittee of the politburo on grounds of their advanced ages and collectivelyentered the Central Advisory Commission. This left Zhao as the only holdoverfrom the previous standing committee. Although the new standing committee



had a three-to-two leftist edge, it contained no open critics of reform.Reformers were prominently represented in the politburo as well. Theseincluded Hu Yaobang. Since Hu had been demoted by the leftists partiallybecause they thought he had been too lenient in his treatment of the students,the students now saw him as the champion of their cause. The deliberations ofthe congress indicated that reforms would continue to be made.

The Seventh National People’s Congress, meeting in March and April1988, continued the mixed signals sent by the Thirteenth Party Congress. Itscommuniqué stressed that reform was China’s central task. At the same time,two elderly leftists with military backgrounds, Yang Shangkun and WangZhen, were selected as president and vice president of the PRC, respectively,and Li Peng became premier. Li’s speech focused on coping with inflation anddeclining grain production, both standard leftist themes.

A few months later, Zhao Ziyang, apparently with Deng’s backing,launched an ambitious retail price reform. While completely in line with theend goal of reducing state subsidies and moving toward a free market, thereform produced the worst inflation in post-1949 China. The official figure,18.5 percent, is believed to be less than half the actual inflation rate, whichsome estimates placed at almost 50 percent. There were runs on banks, panicbuying, and greatly increased social disorder. Deng characteristically opted fortactical retreat; Zhao, however, pressed on. During the summer, he presentedthe politburo with a daring proposal to end all state price controls within fourto five years and, furthermore, proposed to devalue the currency in order toencourage the country’s exports.

This scheme would have been ambitious under the best of circumstances.These were not the best of circumstances. Given the escalating inflation rateand level of popular discontent, Zhao’s plan struck not only leftists but alsosome reformers as unacceptably foolhardy. Sources close to Zhao laterexplained that Deng had urged Zhao to do it, but shifted the blame to himwhen resistance was encountered. By the time of the Thirteenth CentralCommittee’s Third Plenum in September, it became clear that price reform hadbeen postponed indefinitely. Other solutions favored by leftists would bepursued: efforts to cut back on capital construction, recentralize decisionmaking, and rectify ideology. Rumor had it that Zhao had been stripped of hisresponsibility for economic work. Though this was vigorously denied byofficial sources, Zhao’s activities in the economic sphere did seem to havediminished at the same time that leftists like Li Peng became more active.The diminution of Zhao’s ability to influence economic policy, when added tothe fact that he had never exercised much influence over the military, meantthat his position was weak indeed. Official sources again spoke of theadvantages of neo-authoritarianism, with its proponents envisioningZhao Ziyang as the strong force guiding reform. Deng appeared to become in-creasingly worried about the consequences of his own reform program, and tobe siding with the leftists. This shift seemed to go unnoticed by foreignanalysts, who perhaps considered it to be simply another temporary retreat.In the words of one disgruntled intellectual, Deng’s admonition to seek truth



from facts had been transformed to mean “seek truth from certain approvedfacts.” Anti-Deng doggerel became increasingly common. One of the morepopular ditties, sung to the tune of the hymn to Mao, “The East Is Red,” went:

The west is red; the sun has set/A Deng Xiaoping has comeHe serves the privileged very well/And tells the rest to go to hell

Such pressures seem to have convinced the leadership to respond bydigging in its heels rather than giving in. Protests in Tibet during March 1989,later alleged to have been instigated by the government, resulted in martial lawbeing declared there. Intellectuals responded negatively and called for greaterfreedom for all and the release of political prisoners. Students spoke openly ofa large demonstration to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of theMay Fourth movement in 1919. The atmosphere was rife with anticipation.

The Tiananmen Demonstrations, 1989The sense that a time of reckoning was near may have convinced Hu Yaobangto come forward again. At a politburo meeting dedicated to the discussion ofproblems in education, Hu reportedly suffered a fatal heart attack while argu-ing with a leading leftist over greater state aid to the field. This rumor seemedsuspiciously tailored to fit the students’ cause, though the important thing isthat it was believed by large numbers of people. Again flouting the ban ondemonstrations, as they had in 1986–1987, thousands of students staged a sit-in at Tiananmen Square the night before Hu’s memorial service was to be heldat the adjoining Great Hall of the People. There was talk of founding unionsfor students and workers on the model of Poland’s Solidarity movement.Similar demonstrations were held, and similar demands made, in many otherChinese cities.

Zhao Ziyang was on an official visit to North Korea, thus inadvertentlyhelping the leftist cause. Premier Li Peng and President Yang Shangkun, whowas concurrently general secretary of the Central Military Commission, metwith Deng Xiaoping, who approved a hard line toward the demonstrations.On April 26, Renmin Ribao published an editorial prohibiting the protests,which were deemed counterrevolutionary. It warned that troops would be sentin, if necessary, to quell the “chaotic disturbances.”

The students, who generally considered themselves patriotic remonstra-tors in the traditional Chinese sense of carrying out their duty as educatedcitizens to press the government to right existing wrongs—were upset andinsulted by the April 26th editorial. A mass march of as many as 100,000students surged into Tiananmen Square, meeting only token resistance fromsecurity forces. The students were supported by an estimated 1 million citizensof Beijing, many of whom marched with them under the banners of their workunits and made their own demands on the government. Newspaper reporters,for example, carried banners asking to be allowed to print the truth, therebyimplying that they had been forced to print lies for the past forty years.Needless to say, the government was not pleased.



Placards denouncing inflation and official corruption joined those askingfor freedom and democracy. Leaders were criticized by name, with Li Peng afavorite target. Deng Xiaoping also had a number of detractors, with onebanner reading “It doesn’t matter whether it is a black cat or a white cat if it isa bad cat.” The party’s monopoly of power was criticized as well: One poster,written in English as well as Chinese, proclaimed that “absolute powercorrupts absolutely.” The students began a hunger strike in support of theirdemands, again with the rapt attention of the foreign media. By mid-May, theentire population of Beijing seemed to support the demonstrators.

Although the leadership tried to keep news of the demonstrations fromreaching other parts of the PRC, the U.S.-sponsored radio service Voice ofAmerica (VOA) which reported the events as they took place, has a wide audi-ence all over China. Always acutely sensitive to foreign influence in Chinesepolitics, partially because of the experiences of the previous century, the lead-ership became very angry with both the VOA itself and the government thatsponsored it. Chinese living abroad were also able to communicate foreignmedia reports to their friends and relatives in the PRC via telephone or thecountry’s still rather few facsimile machines (“truth from fax,” quipped oneobserver). In Hong Kong, where many citizens were apprehensive about thecolony’s scheduled reversion to PRC sovereignty in 1997, self-interest as wellas ethical values led to strong support for the demonstrators’ demands. To theannoyance of the PRC leadership, generous donations poured in from HongKong, Taiwan, and elsewhere.

Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to Beijing, whichshould have provided the Chinese leadership with a triumphant conclusion tothe Sino-Soviet dispute, was disrupted. Since the logical, and more impressive,route from the airport to the Great Hall of the People was blocked by severalhundred thousand protestors, Gorbachev’s car had to be rerouted throughdilapidated back streets. This sent a clear signal that the CCP’s control over itspeople was tenuous, which could only weaken the Chinese leadership’sbargaining position with Gorbachev. Infuriated, Li Peng and Yang Shangkunlectured an unrepentant group of students on their behavior.

Zhao Ziyang, having returned to China, attempted to play the inter-mediary between the protestors and the party-government hard-liners, but hiscompromise proposal was rejected by the politburo.. At midnight on May 19,the day after Gorbachev left China, Premier Li Peng chaired a nationallytelevised meeting of several thousand party, government, and military officials.He announced that, in accordance with Article 89 of the country’s constitu-tion, the government had decided to declare martial law in most of Beijing.Zhao Ziyang was the only member of the politburo standing committeenot present on the platform. Symbolically, Zhao’s place was occupied byPRC president and party Central Military Commission general secretaryYang Shangkun.

The next two weeks were characterized by behind-the-scenes maneu-vering. Some influential PLA leaders objected to the use of military forcesagainst civilians, and Deng was reportedly using his powers of persuasion to



enlist their support. Yang Shangkun was also able to call upon units consid-ered part of his loyalty network, the “Yang family village.” The process bywhich this took place left little doubt that the functioning of the modernChinese state continued to be marked by a high degree of personalism.

Civilian resistance made it difficult for even those troops who wanted toenforce martial law to do so. Meanwhile, heat, exhaustion, and poor sanitaryconditions in Tiananmen Square were rapidly depleting the ranks of demon-strators. In what seemed a desperate move to staunch the outflow, art studentscreated a large, styrofoam statue of a woman with a torch that they called theGoddess of Democracy. Set up in the square, the figure, which bore a markedresemblance to America’s Statue of Liberty, attracted a large number of people.Foreign observers described the crowds as drawn more by curiosity than a desireto join the protest. Nonetheless, leftists, already leery of foreign “bourgeois”influence, did not react well to the arrival of the statue. Finally, in the early hoursof Sunday, June 4, the troops attacked. In full view of foreign television cameras,tanks smashed barricades, and soldiers fired into the crowds.

By morning’s first light, the demonstrators were gone. The governmentclaimed that only 300 were killed, none of them in Tiananmen Square itself;foreign and dissident Chinese estimates ranged into the low thousands.Whatever the actual count, it was small in comparison to those who died in theGreat Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution. The significance of theTiananmen incident of 1989 lies not in the numbers killed but in the symbolismof the event. The image of tanks rolling toward unarmed young people andordinary citizens protesting injustice was horrifying. The party’s already tenu-ous claim to represent the people was weakened still further. Demonstrations inother cities were put down as well.

The failure of the Tiananmen demonstrators to achieve their goalsweighed heavily on the survivors and their sympathizers, particularly afterthe victories of similar popular protests in the USSR and in Eastern Europe.They tended, probably unfairly, to blame themselves. The demonstrations inthe PRC, by encouraging others to voice their grievances openly, may haveresonated throughout the communist world. The Chinese situation was alsodifferent from that in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. DengXiaoping’s personal ties with the military appear to have been critical inwinning over PLA leaders who were reluctant to move on the protestors. Bycontrast, Gorbachev had made many enemies within the Soviet militarythrough years of budget-cutting. And the Romanian military did not sup-port Ceaucesçu. Poland, unlike China, had an organized opposition, theSolidarity movement, headed by the charismatic Lech Walesa. Factionalismwithin the ranks of the Chinese demonstrators was indeed a problem. Andapparently no attempt was made to draw the peasants into the protestmovement. Were the demonstrations to be held again today, the outcomemight be very different. No subsequent leader had or has the depth of tieswith the military and the personal authority that Deng Xiaoping enjoyed.And the peasantry, quiescent during the 1989 demonstrations, has becomefar more restive.



In the short run, the resolution of the demonstrations was a victory forleftists. The day after the Tiananmen incident, Deng appeared, surrounded byhis octogenarian support group, most of them (President Yang Shangkun andVice President Wang Zhen the exceptions) members of the Central AdvisoryCommission rather than holders of formal positions of authority. Thereseemed no better way to symbolize who was in charge in China: The PRC hadnot yet managed the transition from the revolutionary generation to the suc-cessor generation.

Zhao Ziyang was replaced as party general secretary by Jiang Zemin, aformer Shanghai party chief. Like premier Li Peng, Jiang was an engineer whohad received training in the Soviet Union. Never very popular in Shanghai,Jiang may have come to the attention of party leftists after his efficientsuppression of the 1986–1987 demonstrations there. He had also fired theeditor of a Shanghai newspaper known for its willingness to test the limits ofgovernment censorship. Shanghai people felt that Jiang had not worked veryhard to obtain their city’s fair share of resources allocated from the centralgovernment, which central government leftists may have regarded as a point inhis favor. However, Jiang had presided over a number of reforms in Shanghaiand could not simply be classified as a leftist.

Zhao was also deprived of his seat on the standing committee of the polit-buro, being replaced with Jiang Zemin. The policies China pursued for the twoyears after the Tiananmen incident of 1989 were somewhat more to the left,but with certain important countertrends. Initial fears that the open door to theoutside world would be slammed shut were not borne out. The new leadershipcontinued to value the skills that could be learned in foreign countries; it alsocontinued to seek foreign investment and foreign tourism. Market reformsmoved ahead, and stock exchanges were opened. Internally, however, thegovernment became more repressive. Those who spoke out during the demon-strations were identified and apprehended. There were increased pressurestoward ideological conformity, including a campaign to learn, yet again, fromthat selfless hero of the early 1960s, Lei Feng (see Chapter 9).

Domestically, the leadership continued to chart a course of economicreforms and political authoritarianism. Deng’s well-publicized trip in early 1992to areas of south China that had prospered through his reforms symbolized hisdecision to again speed up the pace of those reforms. In line with his wishes, theFourteenth Party Congress, meeting in October 1992, called for the creation ofa socialist market economy. The Western press immediately renamed thisunusual hybrid “market-Leninism” (see Chapter 7). Deng Xiaoping and the sur-viving octogenarian leaders stressed the need for stability. The party congressabolished the Central Advisory Commission, though this did not guarantee thatthe members thereof, with their powerful network of connections and protégés,would no longer influence decision making.

Despite Deng’s emphasis on rejuvenation, the average age of theFourteenth Central Committee’s members was up slightly, from 55.2 years inthe Thirteenth Central Committee to 56.3. However, in the much smaller and



more powerful politburo, this situation was reversed: The average age of itstwenty full and two alternate members declined from 68.6 to 62.5 years.Thirteen members had graduated from college, mostly in engineering andnatural sciences, vis-à-vis only four in the previous politburo. The newpolitburo also had more of what might be called an external orientation: Theforeign minister and minister of foreign trade became members, as did theheads of five coastal provinces and cities. Liu Huaqing, a military man loyal toDeng, joined the politburo’s standing committee. Yang Baibing became amember of the politburo, though his formal ties to the PLA were severed at thesame time he was appointed (see Chapter 9). Deng’s motive was apparently toensure that his chosen successor, Jiang Zemin, would not be deposed by amember of the Yang faction of the military. Yang Shangkun resigned aspresident of the PRC; shortly thereafter, his position was assumed by JiangZemin. Since Jiang remained party general secretary and head of the militarycommission, he had thus concentrated much of the formal political power ofthe PRC in his person.

While open challenges to party and government authority continued to beharshly punished, the citizenry became increasingly assertive. A number ofBeijing voters protested the slate of candidates offered to them in a 1991 localelection by casting ballots for Zhao Ziyang, whose name was not listed. At theNational People’s Congress two years later, 11 percent of the delegates eithervoted against premier Li Peng or abstained. Since the delegates had beenchosen partly on the basis of their loyalty, their actions represented a stunningrebuke. In Beijing during the closing months of 1993, leading democracyactivists formed a “Peace Charter” group that called on the CCP to accept amultiparty system or face the only other alternative: violent change. Its mem-bers were promptly arrested.

Not all protest was so overt. Although China’s security apparatus wasregarded as so ruthlessly efficient that escape was hardly thought of, much lessattempted, eight of the twenty-one June 4th dissidents on the government’s“most wanted” list managed to flee to the West. Several years later, a camera-man with politically sensitive film was told by a public security officer, “I could arrest you, but what for? I’ll get some praise, but I won’t get rich. Andthen . . . the situation will change. You will be exonerated and I’ll be the one introuble for having arrested you.”

The radio call-in show, a new phenomenon with potentially great impacton Chinese politics, appeared in a few urban areas. Callers showed remarkablefrankness in criticizing local officials for poor performance of duty and inpointing out violations of laws. They suggested ways to better handle prob-lems from toll collection to garbage pickup. People were also more willingto protest, sometimes violently, when they felt that their grievances were notbeing addressed. Each year brought a new, record number of these distur-bances. In the countryside, clan and religious leaders gained power at theexpense of party organs. Power drifted away from the center, with regions andprovinces becoming more important.



THE “THIRD GENERATION”: CHINA UNDER JIANG ZEMINBy the mid-1990s, Deng Xiaoping’s public appearances became more and morerare. Chinese and foreigners alike speculated on whether Jiang Zemin, Deng’sheir apparent, could survive his mentor’s demise. Though his ability to actindependently was surely constrained to some degree by Deng’s presence, Jiangbegan to take a more active role in governance. He paid ceremonial visits tovarious areas of the country, talking with officials, peasants, workers, andethnic minorities about their problems and successes. Mass media emphasizedthe need for stability and loyalty to the party center, with Jiang as its core. Apowerful potential rival, Chen Xitong, head of the party apparatus in the cityof Beijing, was convicted of corruption. And in a symbolic assertion of hisauthority over the military, Jiang personally conferred promotions on generals.

In early 1997, Deng Xiaoping slipped into a coma; he passed away onFebruary 19th. Possibly because his death had been expected for so long,mourning was subdued, and power passed seamlessly to what was called the“third generation.” The mass media reiterated the need for stability andloyalty to Jiang. Both themes had a defensive tone. Economic problems werelooming. In 1996, for the first time, subsidies to state-owned enterprises(SOEs) were greater than the amount they remitted to the state treasury, andthe deficit was projected to worsen. In a major speech to the Central PartySchool in May, Jiang proposed to reorganize SOE ownership criticizing the leftby name in the process of doing so. The Fifteenth Party Congress, held inSeptember 1997, was regarded as an important test for his leadership.

The result was a qualified victory for Jiang. The central committee sup-ported his request for a mandatory retirement age of seventy, with the year ofbirth and the month of June rather than one’s actual birth date being used forpurposes of calculation. This allowed Jiang Zemin to remain as general secre-tary but forced his major rival, Qiao Shi, to retire. However, a man regardedas Qiao’s protégé replaced him on the politburo standing committee. AdmiralLiu Huaqing, in his eighties, also retired, meaning that there was no militaryrepresentation on the standing committee. Li Lanqing, a vice-premier of thestate council with special responsibility for education, filled the vacancy. Theother members remained the same.

Jiang also failed to revive the position of party chair, a post he had hopedto assume. If, as alleged, Jiang was trying to create a Shanghai faction, hissuccess was only partial. A number of Shanghainese thought to have Jiang’sbacking failed to receive enough votes to serve on the central committee. Onlyone of Jiang’s “gang” was elected to the politburo, with his vote tally beingone of the lowest. Jiang’s fellow standing committee member Zhu Rongji wasalso from Shanghai, but because of his success in bringing a “soft landing” toChina’s overheated economy in the mid-1990s, Zhu was more often regardedas Jiang’s rival than as a member of his clique.

The new standing committee had seven members, the youngest of whom,Hu Jintao, had been elevated to the standing committee in 1992 at an unusually


The “Third Generation”: China Under Jiang Zemin 135

early age. Hu was thus regarded as the front-runner to succeed Jiang. Membersof the Fifteenth Central Committee, its politburo, and its standing committeewere comparable in age to, though better educated than, those of theFourteenth. Engineering was by far the best-represented profession, with foreignanalysts predicting that this would lead the standing committee to seek prag-matic solutions to problems.

At the congress, Jiang spelled out in more detail the plan for economicrestructuring he had initially mentioned at the Central Party School. TheNinth National People’s Congress, meeting in March 1998, decreed that fortyministries would be reduced to twenty-nine and half of the state bureaucracy’seight million jobs eliminated. Skeptics noted that the PRC’s numerousprevious efforts to prune its bureaucracy had resulted in an initial reduction,after which numbers of cadres actually increased beyond the original levels.Plans also aimed at reorganizing the country’s entire financial structure,including its banking system and investment institutions. State-owned enter-prises were to be drastically restructured, privatized, merged, and, if all elsefailed, closed down.

The Three RepresentsAfter a brief effort to establish “Jiang theory,” Jiang fell back on the studyof “Deng Xiaoping theory” as a method of achieving consensus. Treadingvery lightly on the subject for obvious reasons, he added that his mentor’stheories must not be applied too rigidly. In 2000, Jiang introduced a newformulation designed to leave his ideological stamp on history, the “ThreeRepresents”. The party, he claimed, represented the most advanced produc-tive forces, the most advanced culture, and the fundamental interests of thebroad masses of the Chinese people. Despite their innocuous sound, thesewords were political dynamite. For one thing, Jiang had not mentioned hismentor’s Four Basic Principles. For another, the phrase “most advancedculture” seemed to signal greater openness to modern Western culture.Finally, and most explosively, the “most advanced productive forces” includedthe capitalists, entrepreneurs, and educated classes that Mao Zedong had sodespised.

Those with leftist leanings were shocked: With millions of workersbeing laid off in the economic restructuring and peasant incomes declining,the party was, in effect, turning its back on the workers and peasants whohad brought it to power and associating itself with bourgeois capitalism.Jiang’s supporters countered that his theory represented an importantideological breakthrough, since now the party would represent the interestsof all the people. A disgruntled official rebutted with “The theory is that theparty can represent both the exploited and exploiters. How do you do that?Just because you say you do?” Nonetheless, the country’s media praised theThree Represents extravagantly and often, advocating that they serve asguidelines for doing virtually everything from educational reform to moder-nizing the military.



Civic OrganizationsBy the mid-1990s, the number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) hadproliferated. In order to make sure that they do not escape control, all arerequired to register with the government. Some, however, manage to evade closesupervision and behave with a degree of autonomy. Some do not register at all,and hence exist outside the law. One study of NGOs observed that, while theymight evolve from “state corporatist” to “societal corporatist” modes of organ-ization, high-status groups rather than ordinary people are likely to be the prin-cipal beneficiaries of the evolution. And although some of these groups stronglyfavor the protection of individual liberties and democratic reforms, others advo-cate a variety of other positions, including strong leadership and the suppressionof any sort of freedom of expression that could cause social instability. Even so,the central government, fearing loss of control, became concerned.

In 1998, Beijing passed more restrictive laws that disestablished a largenumber of NGOs for reasons that included redundancy, poor management,illegality, serious interference in social and economic order, and possession of apolitically problematic nature. One of those disestablished was Falun Gong, asociety combining meditative elements of Buddhism and Daoism with tradi-tional Chinese breathing exercises and certain martial arts techniques. In lateApril 1999, more than 10,000 of its members quietly gathered outside theleadership compound of Zhongnanhai to request re-registration. Party andgovernment appear to have been taken completely by surprise: The group’smembers had come to Beijing from many different parts of the country, elud-ing the surveillance techniques that are supposed to prevent such organizedmovements. Falun Gong’s timing was also sensitive, coming exactly ten yearsafter the Tiananmen demonstrations began. A crackdown resulted in the arrestand often brutal treatment of thousands of innocuous-seeming middle-agedand even elderly people, some of whom died as a result. Other religions weretargeted as well. From the point of view of those who wanted to see a civilsociety emerging in the PRC, this represented regression.

Despite Jiang’s concern with stability, a modicum of freedom was allowed.Both books critical of reform and books critical of the critics and demandingmore reforms were tolerated. Prison conditions improved somewhat. Somehigh-profile dissidents, most notably Wei Jingsheng, were released. This didnot necessarily indicate a softer attitude toward dissent, since the dissidentswere freed so that they could seek medical treatment abroad. This had theadvantage of ridding the PRC of high-profile, potential troublemakers whilesimultaneously allowing American political leaders who champion their causeto claim that they have extracted a concession from their Chinese counter-parts. Just after one set of dissidents is released, others may be arrested.

Changing Central–Local RelationshipsAt the same time, a fundamental restructuring of the relationship between thecentral government and its subordinate units was occurring. Scholars disagreeon what this means for Beijing’s ability to extract compliance with its orders.



Some see provinces and localities as becoming more autonomous. Otherspoint out that, despite having independent sources of revenue, even wealthierprovinces and localities remain dependent on the center for budgetary sub-sidies. Since Beijing’s ability to reduce or withhold such subsidies can result inserious budget shortfalls, it is an important lever in ensuring compliance. So,too, is the central government’s ability to appoint and remove officials: Thoseregarded as loyal and reliable will have their careers advanced insofar as theyobey Beijing’s orders; those who do not will be removed.

Still, there are limits to the center’s powers. Although officials tend to bevery responsive to orders from their immediate superiors, they tend to be lessresponsive to superiors at successive levels above them. Individual officialsmust also operate within their local bureaucracies, which often have interestsand goals that differ from those of the center. If local officials try too hard toenforce policies from higher up, they risk alienating their constituents; if theydo not implement the policies, they may hurt their careers. The art of balanc-ing these contradictory pressures often involves telling both sides what theywant to hear. Quiet deviation and rule-bending are less dangerous and moreeffective than outright defiance but, if discovered, can also have adverse con-sequences for the individuals involved.

Alternate sources of revenue, such as locally raised, illegal taxes, can lowerdependence on Beijing. To its dismay, the central government has discoveredsome villages, and even small cities, that operate quite autonomously from itscontrol. While some of these so-called “independent kingdoms” are well runby what the media term their “local emperors,” lack of supervision is con-ducive to the abuse of power and corruption. Imposing age and educationalrequirements to improve cadres’ qualifications has a downside as well. It sepa-rates officials into two categories: promotable and terminal, with most of thelatter found at lower levels of party and government. Knowing that theirtenure in office is limited leads such terminal officials to take as many of thespoils of office as they feel they can get away with. Hence, the decreasingcontrol of the state does not necessarily mean an evolution toward pluralistgovernment or civil society.

At the lowest level of society, Deng’s reforms also fundamentally changedthe nature of central government control. The disbandment of communes ledto a rapid erosion of the party’s authority in rural areas. Crime rates rose, asdid resistance to government policies such as tax collection and family plan-ning. Certain tasks that the commune had taken care of were simply not beingdone. By the early 1980s, peasants in some areas began to experiment withvarious forms of self-government. The central government saw in these a wayto relegitimate its authority in rural areas, allowing it to maintain social stabilityand raise revenue. In 1987, the National People’s Congress passed a provisionallaw on village elections, revising and extending it in 1998. All of the country’s730,000 administrative villages must now conduct direct elections everythree years.

There have been both successes and problems in the implementation ofthis reform. Elections have provided a safety valve for peasants who feel angry



and exploited. They also introduced a standardized system of elections into aculture with very little prior experience in making political choices, thus foster-ing a new value system and awareness among peasants that they have someleverage in bargaining with party and government. On the debit side, cadreshave sometimes refused to allow individuals to exercise their constitutionalright to run for office. Those who know the law and insist on their rights maybe arrested, charged with endangering national security, and sentenced toseveral years in prison. Clan organizations, mafia-style “black gangs,” andquasi-religious leaders exercise powerful pressures in many villages. Vote-buying occurs more often than the government would like. Still, there are alsovillages where the process works as it should, providing a valuable educationin democracy.

Education in democracy is but a first step. There are few indications thatvillage democracy is challenging the local power structure. Voters tend toselect candidates who are acceptable to the local power elite. And, sincecorruption is often perpetrated by cadres at township or county level, it isdifficult for even the most motivated village leaders to do anything to curb it.An author who was invited to one county to write about its economicsuccesses described bureaucrats there and elsewhere as speaking two lan-guages: standard mandarin and under-the-table deal making. He found thatthey ignored regulations and the central government’s guidelines, concent-rating instead on their own interests. The scores of defamation suits aggrievedofficials filed against the author were dropped after he presented evidence toback up his statements.

While extending suffrage upward from the village might prove helpful,party leaders have said that they have no current plans to do so, and that itmay not happen for fifty years or more. They may not have the final word onthis, however. In 1999 the central government criticized a township election inBuyun, Sichuan, as unconstitutional—but, surprisingly, allowed the results tostand. Townships, the administrative level above the village, have much morepower over such matters as taxation, road building, running schools andhospitals, allocating central government funds, and land use. Hence, electionsat this level are more meaningful. Interestingly, provincial-level party officialssupported the experiment, although they tried to keep it quiet. In December2001, the same township held another direct election for township magistrate,though the process has not become widespread. Several townships have used aless radical model than Buyun, called the “open recommendation and selectionsystem.” Under it, any adult resident can run for township head, but a councilof community leaders then narrows the candidate pool to two, and the localpeople’s congress makes the final selection. Not a direct ballot, it at leastprovides a modest degree of choice in the selection of township leaders. At thenext level up from township, the county, there have been a few experiments atopen recommendation and selection polls for the position of county deputychief. These limited experiments are carefully watched by the central govern-ment. But the old culture of deference and passivity in the face of higherauthority would seem to be changing.



Even this limited degree of democracy has consequences. Village heads arelikely to feel more responsible to the people who elected them and, therefore,may represent their opinions to higher levels more vigorously than villageleaders who were chosen by higher levels. It will be harder for higher levels ofgovernment to extract compliance with unpopular policies. This is not alwaysa matter of central government versus local-level interests: Sometimes, peas-ants appeal to the central government for redress against exploitation andcorruption at levels subordinate to Beijing. Doing so does not necessarily rightthe situation. The few who manage to appeal successfully may find themselvestargeted for vicious retaliation after the central government leaves the scene.

In urban areas, elections have been occurring on an experimental basissince 1999, when twelve pilot cities were allowed to choose positions onurban residence committees. These constitute the lowest level of state powerin cities. As with rural elections, these are sometimes reasonably democraticand sometimes far from it. With regard to the latter, lists of candidates may,for example, be prepared by an election committee controlled by the munici-pal government. Sometimes, the committees have achieved results of signi-ficant importance to their constituents, such as getting the government toimprove sanitation collection, close down a noisy karaoke bar, or improvestreet lighting. The authorities also hope that the committees will help them inreporting on, for example, the presence of illegal workers or members ofbanned religious sects.

The path to reform is not linear, and there have been significant setbacks.Free-wheeling Shenzhen, the Special Economic Zone abutting Hong Kong,was chosen as the testing ground for a new municipal structure implementedin 2003. Government was to be divided into three divisions—policy making,execution, and supervision, replacing the traditional communist governmentstructure that had no such division of power. Shenzhen officials, aware thatthe concept of the separation of powers is taboo, explicitly denied any simi-larity between this tripartite arrangement and the executive–legislative–judicial division that is common in Western governments. Nonetheless, theplan was quickly abandoned and replaced with a less ambitious plan that is,unfortunately, less likely to solve Shenzhen’s corruption and other problems.

The party itself is undergoing an evolution. Hoping to reverse the trend ofloss of party control by having more members, particularly at the lower levelsof society, authorities staged a recruitment drive that raised the number ofCCP members from 50 million in 1991 to 78 million in 2010. This stillamounts to less than 6 percent of the PRC’s total population. Nor is it certainthat the new recruits will help reimpose party control. Many join because theybelieve that membership will result in economic or political benefits to them-selves rather than from ideological conviction. Younger and better educatedthan previous generations of members, they are unlikely to be as amenable toparty discipline as their predecessors.

Another salient feature of Jiang Zemin’s administration was a driveagainst corruption, the Strike Hard (yanda) campaign. Jiang’s sincerity indoing so cannot be questioned—among other problems it causes, corruption



means less tax revenue reaches the central government treasury—but he wasbelieved to have other motives as well. Arrested Beijing party leader ChenXitong was not only corrupt but also one of Jiang’s rivals: Critics pointed outthat Jiang had numerous other associates who were equally corrupt butnonetheless had not been investigated. The campaign against corruption inXinjiang and certain other ethnic minority areas seemed a thinly disguisedexcuse for intimidating those minorities who were unhappy with Beijing’s rule.Another facet of the drive against corruption was Jiang’s July 1998 order tothe PLA to divest itself of its commercial empire. These efforts notwith-standing, corruption seemed to be becoming more rather than less entrenchedin the political and economic system. Jiang came to power at a time of greatdifficulties for his country. Unlike his predecessors, he had no revolutionarycredentials, and he was regarded as lacking both vision and charisma. TheChinese populace had become more overtly cynical, as exemplified by a bit ofdoggerel that could be heard in widely separated parts of the country:

Chiang Kai-shek led thieves and mugs; Mao Zedong led peasant thugsDeng Xiaoping led a corrupt crew; Jiang Zemin asks “What do we do?”

The common person’s reaction to his plan to restructure the economy was nobetter:

Mao Zedong wanted us to xiafang [do manual labor in rural areas]Deng Xiaoping wanted us to xiahai [jump into the sea of business]Jiang Zemin wants us to xiagang [be laid off]

THE “FOURTH GENERATION”ASSUMES POWERAs the Sixteenth Party Congress approached in 2002, speculation grew inintensity. Five of the seven members of the politburo’s standing committee—allsave the outspoken Li Ruihuan and heir apparent Hu Jintao—would be ineligibleto continue since they were over seventy years of age. Should the transitionto what was called the “fourth generation” occur without major upheaval,this would be a milestone in CCP history as well as an important marker in theinstitutionalization of political power in the PRC. Yet the media’s incessant praiseof Jiang Zemin and his Three Represents, championed by the military, causedmany to wonder whether the transition would actually take place.

In the end, Jiang did step down and, except for Hu Jintao, so did all theother standing committee members, even Li. Hu assumed the title of partygeneral secretary, though Jiang retained the position of chair of the party’sCentral Military Commission. Some argued that this could open a divisionbetween the party and the gun, and there was much talk of “two centers” ofpower, Jiang’s and Hu’s. Jiang’s efforts to place himself among the great namesof the party fell a bit short: The congress agreed unanimously to take“Marxism–Leninism, the thought of Mao Zedong, Deng Xiaoping theory and


The “Fourth Generation” Assumes Power 141

TABLE 6.1

China’s Top Leaders: Politburo Standing Committee,Elected November 2002.

Name Date of Birth Place of Birth Higher Education

Hu Jintao 1942 Anhui Engineering

Wu Bangguo 1941 Anhui EngineeringWen Jiabao 1942 Tianjin EngineeringJia Qinlin 1940 Hebei EngineeringZeng Qinghong 1939 Jiangxi EngineeringHuang Ju 1938 Zhejiang EngineeringWu Guanzheng 1938 Jiangxi EngineeringLi Changchun 1944 Liaoning EngineeringLuo Gan 1935 Shandong Engineering

the Three Represents” as its guide to action, pointedly not attaching Jiang’sname to his contributions. The congress also decreed that the ThreeRepresents would be a guiding ideology that the party must uphold for a longtime to come—that is, not forever, as appeared to be the case for Marx’s,Lenin’s, Mao’s, and Deng’s contributions. In his concluding report, Jiangannounced the objective of creating a well-off (xiaokang) society by 2020.This task would, of course, fall to Hu Jintao to implement.

There were doubts about whether Hu, despite holding the position ofparty general secretary, would be able to wield the power associated with it.The unusually large, new politburo standing committee had nine members—two more than its predecessor. Five or possibly six of them were regarded asallied with Jiang. Of these, at least four, with Zeng Qinghong the most impor-tant, were considered Jiang loyalists. The unusually large size of the standingcommittee was believed to reflect the rivalry between Jiang’s “Shanghaimafia” and Hu’s power base, the CYL. Shortly after the congress, Zeng wasappointed head of the Central Party School, a post from which the incumbentcan influence the management of party affairs (see Table 6.1).

The average age of the standing committee members was 61.1 years, aboutthe same as that of the comparable group in the Fifteenth Party Congress.Curiously, no member was young enough to be considered as a member of the“fifth generation” and, therefore, being groomed for a top position. Theabsence of military leaders, as in the previous standing committee, may meanthe institutionalization of a norm that the military should not have formal rep-resentation at the highest levels of political decision making. All nine standingcommittee members had an engineering background, leading many analysts toconclude that they were technocrats and, therefore, predisposed to seekpragmatic solutions to problems. Others pointed out that China has manyengineers who did not rise to high political positions: The members of thestanding committee attained their preeminence not because they were



pragmatic problem solvers but because they had survived numerous bureau-cratic battles and factional strife. With regard to the politburo as a whole,fourteen of the twenty-five members, or 56 percent, had had substantial expe-rience at provincial level, as opposed to five out of twenty-four, or 21 percent,in the Fifteenth National Congress, raising the possibility that one of thesecleavage lines could be regional in nature.

Speculation about a Jiang–Hu rivalry reached a crescendo as the fall 2004Fourth Plenum of the Sixteenth Central Committee approached. Jiang wasrumored to want to serve his full five-year term, until 2007, as chair of theCentral Military Commission (CMC). References to Deng Xiaoping voluntarilyresigning the same position appeared in the press, as did a story about an enter-tainer believed to be romantically involved with Jiang, asking an exorbitant feefor performing in a poor city. Jiang’s supporters responded in kind. In the end,Jiang relinquished the position. In what was regarded as another defeat forJiang, his protégé, Zeng Qinghong, failed to receive the vice-chairship of theCMC. Though the “two centers” of power no longer existed, Shanghai–CYLrivalries continued. Hu’s desire to weaken the Shanghai faction’s power isbelieved to be the underlying reason that Shanghai party leader and politburomember Chen Liangyu was indicted on corruption charges and removed fromoffice. Chen’s replacement, Xi Jinping, was not associated with the Shanghaigang. Nor, however, had he any experience with Hu’s CYL faction. Since Xi’sfather was close to both Deng Xiaoping and Hu Yaobang, the younger Xi isconsidered a princeling.

With Hu Jintao and his premier, Wen Jiabao, certain to receive approvalfor a second five-year term, attention during the run-up to the SeventeenthParty Congress focused on the selection of those who would succeed them in2012. Hu was believed to favor Li Keqiang, who had been active in CYL workand, like Hu, was born in Anhui province. Surprisingly, Xi Jinping wasselected before Li, and subsequently confirmed as vice president at theEleventh National People’s Congress in March. This positioned Xi to take overas president in 2012. Xi’s appointment to vice-chair of the Central MilitaryCommission in 2010 solidified his prospects. Li, who was chosen next, wasnamed vice-premier and is likely to replace Wen Jiabao as premier in 2012.

Insofar as factional affiliations can be ascertained, the princeling groupexpanded its membership relative to those affiliated with the CYL andShanghai groups. Apart from Xi and Li, there was little generational turnoveras compared with the Sixteenth Party Congress (see Table 6.2); the averageage of the new standing committee is sixty-two years. Hu also failed toget a phrase associated with him, the ‘harmonious society’ included in theparagraph of the party constitution that speaks of Marxism–Leninism,Mao Zedong thought, Deng Xiaoping theory, and the important thought ofthe Three Represents, with the delegates voting to include ‘the scientificoutlook on development’ instead. The harmonious society was prominentlymentioned elsewhere, and it remains an important slogan.

Members of the new politburo are disproportionally from east China, ashas been the case for several decades. They represent more diverse educational


The “Fourth Generation” Assumes Power 143

TABLE 6.2

China’s Top Leaders: Politburo Standing Committee,Elected October 2007.

Name Date of Birth Place of Birth Higher Education

Hu Jintao 1942 Anhui Engineering

Wu Bangguo 1941 Anhui EngineeringWen Jiabao 1945 Tianjin EngineeringJia Qinglin 1940 Hebei EngineeringLi Changchun 1944 Liaoning EngineeringXi Jinping 1953 Shaanxi LawLi Keqiang 1955 Anhui EconomicsHe Guoqiang 1943 Hunan EngineeringZhou Yongkang 1942 Jiangsu Engineering

Source: Adapted from data in Beijing Review, November 1, 2007.

backgrounds, as opposed to the engineering degrees of predecessor generation.Many have studied in Western countries and Japan, whereas previous leaders,if they had studied abroad at all, were likely to have done so in the SovietUnion or one of its client states.

In choosing the top officials of party and government, a fundamentalmotivation is believed to be to guard against any one leader or faction fromdominating all the others. While a collective leadership has the advantage ofpreventing dictatorship, the need to obtain consensus will probably inhibit anybold initiatives to implement the reforms that all parties agree are needed.Political infighting in the run-up to the party congress took the form ofpressing Hu to deal with familiar issues centering on official corruption andsocial injustice, for which conservatives and progressives had differentsolutions. Reiterating familiar positions, conservatives argued that the socialistcause was being abandoned and urged policies that would alleviate thegrievances of the workers and the peasants. Progressives countered thatincomplete reforms were the underlying causes of social unrest and politicalcrises and urged more reform.

Hu appears to be trying to find a middle ground between the two.Questioning single-party rule, or advocating Western-style multipartyelections, remains dangerous, but suggestions for reform have included insti-tuting formal checks on the party’s power through a strengthened legalsystem and freer media. As the Eighteenth Party Congress approached,doubts emerged about the abilities of both Xi and Li. During a visit toMexico in 2009, Xi accused Western politicians of interfering in the PRC’sdomestic affairs, leading a number of Chinese to express concerns about hisdiplomatic qualities. Xi’s failure to receive the vice-chairship of the CMC atthe fall 2009 party plenum reinforced the impression that there are doubtsabout his competence.



It is feared that Li has neither Wen Jiabao’s human touch nor the courageof Zhu Rongji. Tasked with the difficult job of downsizing the State Councilfrom twenty-eight to twenty-one ministries, with five new superministries tocoordinate their activities, he has made little progress. The administration ofHu and Wen has been characterized as showing greater concern with thedisadvantaged rural and inland areas, in contrast to the Jiang era’s focus onurban industrial development. Although the party continues to welcomecapitalists, Hu Jintao’s messages have been populist, emphasizing the need toaddress the decline in rural living standards and for cadres to pay attention tothe needs of the people. Hu ended the annual, late-summer gathering of high-level officials and their families at the seaside resort of Beidaihe, citing itsexpense, and announced that his visits to the provinces were no longer to beaccompanied by costly ceremonies. When the wife of a migrant laborer com-plained that her husband’s wages had not been paid, Hu arranged for him toget the money immediately. He also ordered an investigation into the death ofa journalist after charges that the authorities had tried to cover it up. Wen con-versed with AIDS victims, a group shunned by most people, and even shooktheir hands. These occasions were accompanied by maximum publicity.

Evoking Sun Yat-sen’s ideology (see Chapter 3), Hu announced a NewThree Principles of the People: that “power must be used for the sake of thepeople; [officials’] sentiments must be tied to those of the people; and materialbenefits must be sought in the interests of the people.” This is not to beachieved through a multiparty system or checks and balances among thebranches of government but through intraparty democracy. The expectation isthat if the quality of party and government personnel is improved throughbetter recruitment, training, and promotion procedures, people will regaintheir trust in the authorities. Hu and Wen have stressed the need to establishthe rule of law, though not where the party’s vital interests are concerned,and to reduce corruption. Although they have encouraged the media to be apartner in this endeavor, restrictions on the media have actually been tightened (see Chapter 12).

Moreover, there has been no effort to expand voting rights. Attitudestoward NGOs remain hostile, even when the organization’s raison d’etreappears to be as innocuous as, for example, a women’s legal research andservice center. One NGO leader lamented that party and government view allnongovernmental organizations as antigovernment organizations. Whilechampioning reform, Hu has made it clear that reform cannot be allowed tochallenge the party’s leadership and the party’s definition of stability—both ofwhich appear to be easily challenged.

Party and government’s intentions aside, many things appear to be beyond itscontrol. There are fears that the State Council has become less effective incontrolling the provinces, major cities, and even key state-owned enterprises.Should Li Keqiang prove an inadequate premier, there could be further erosion ofstate control. One study indicates that the central government’s attempts to recen-tralize authority have resulted in an intensification of efforts at collusion amonglocal governments that compromises the original intention behind policies.


Conclusions 145

Local governments have developed coping strategies that can sidetrack orsabotage state policies, or impose their own interpretation of the policies. Forexample, when inspection teams come to check on family planning, the countygovernment will notify township governments, providing such details as thedirection the teams appear to be taking, and the license plate numbers oftheir vehicles. Village heads then dispatch cadres to monitor all the roads tothe village. When the cadres see the inspection team coming, they notify thevillage, and children born in violation of family planning regulations aremoved away until the team has left. The same procedure occurs when coalmines are ordered closed for safety violations.

CONCLUSIONSBoth the legitimacy and the organizational efficiency of the CCP have erodedbadly, particularly in the years since the death of Mao Zedong. Given the pass-ing away of iconic revolutionary leaders and the routinization of governingprocedures and social rituals, some of this was probably inevitable. However,some of these changes could not have been so easily predicted, most notablythe alienation of large numbers of people from the leadership caused by suchupheavals as the antirightist campaign, Great Leap Forward, and CulturalRevolution. Deng Xiaoping’s reform movement caused a further, and morerapid, erosion of both the party’s organizational efficiency and its legitimacy.

More than two decades of limited, piecemeal reforms weakened theintegrity of the previous system while not replacing it with one that mostpeople think functions better. The previous system had been quite efficient atequitably distributing the products of scarcity; the new system has been lessefficient at distributing the new wealth. It generated prosperity in some areas,but at the cost of producing great inequalities of income and status. Stabilityand predictability were undermined, leading to popular doubts about thecompetence of the party to manage either the economy or the political system.The June 1989 demonstrations were simply the most visible of a series ofsocial disruptions caused by partial reform.

The Deng leadership staked its legitimacy on an ambitious economicprogram. After several years of relative success, especially in the countryside,problems generated by the program threatened to overwhelm it. Jiang Zemin,in turn, staked his legitimacy on a massive effort to restructure the economyand end corruption. His success in both was limited, since the consequences ofthese reforms had sufficiently adverse short-term effects for so many peoplethat they could not be fully implemented. Deng’s reforms appeared to be suf-fering from the law of diminishing marginal returns: The “easy” reforms—those that might be described as tinkering with the system without cuttingdeeply into the vested interests of powerful social and political groups—had allbeen tried. Although a thoroughgoing structural reform is regarded as crucialto future development, popular enthusiasm for further reform is low. Toomany people fear the consequences; surveys indicate that most people preferthe Maoist iron rice bowl to an uncertain future. Hu Jintao’s plans to improve



the quality of party and government services and to move China towardthe well-off society envisioned in Jiang Zemin’s valedictory report are praise-worthy, but accomplishments thus far are meager. Critics charge that Hu andWen represent a new style, not a new policy.

The current situation may be only transitional. A rapidly expandingeconomy and the Hu–Wen strategy of putting people first may overcome thedangerous contradictions in Chinese society. However, this depends on theleadership’s ability to deal with seemingly intractable problems, such as reduc-ing the wealth gap and corruption, as well as on their success in keepingeconomic growth rates high.

It is also possible that the apparent present erosion of central control willcontinue, with provinces and other subnational units increasingly able tobargain with Beijing for resources as well as increasingly able to followpolicies guided by their own needs rather than those of the country as a whole.This greater degree of pluralism may foreshadow the beginnings of a moredemocratic system if it is properly managed and guided. Indeed, some analystsperceive that China is developing the prerequisites for a civil society (seeChapter 1), in which well-informed citizens generate independent social forcesthat exert pressure on the state for positive change.

Others are skeptical. Initially, it was assumed that rising prosperity wouldcreate a middle class and that the middle class would in turn provide the basisfor democratization. At least so far, this does not seem to be happening.Chinese economist He Qinglian dismisses the middle class as an “academicbubble” that will not make significant demands on party and government.Since the people who might qualify as middle class have attained their statusthrough relying on rich and influential powerholders, they dare not challengethe structure to which they are beholden. Moreover, given the widening dis-parity in incomes between the richest and poorest segments of society, it isdebatable how much the middle class is growing. He Qinglian’s analysis seesthe development of a social pyramid, wherein a large number of poor supporta small number of rich, rather than the diamond-shaped distribution ofincome that characterizes a middle-class society. Even the size of the middleclass is uncertain: Depending on the definition, estimates range from 3.5 percentof the population to 18 percent. Official figures placed it at 6.15 percent,based on a family of three whose annual income is between 60,000 and500,000 yuan ($7,230 and $60,240);.

Nor, at least so far, has a new entrepreneurial class provided a catalyst fordemocratization. Studies show that businesspersons perceive a harmony ofinterests between themselves and party/government; they seek to be partnerswith these institutions rather than challenge their decisions. Moreover, thisattitude strengthens as the level of economic development rises.

Those who are skeptical that the PRC is moving toward pluralism andcivil society point out that the greater willingness of people’s congresses tochallenge the writ of the leadership represents, at best, incremental change ona modest scale: an occasional outspoken speech; a minor, albeit highly publi-cized, rejection of a proposal; or a less-than-unanimous vote of approval.


Suggestions for Further Reading 147

People’s congresses, they note, are still at the rubber-stamp end of the spectrumof legislative types. The private organizations that exist are organized alongfamily lines. People accomplish their goals through a web of personal relation-ships rather than through organizations founded on the basis of equality andconsent-based rules.

The Seventeenth Party Congress may have achieved a successful transferof power, but a successful transfer of power does not necessarily mean that thepolity itself is successful. Though hopeful signs are present, there has also beena resurgence in some of the elements of traditional society that do not bodewell for modernization. These include clan power, personalism, and socialstratification. The considerable efforts of Hu and Wen notwithstanding,cadres are becoming more distant and oppressive rather than espousing theMaoist ideal of “sharing weal and woe” with the common people. A folksaying describes the relationship between the officials and the people duringthe 1950s through the 1970s as one of “fish and water,” during the 1980s as“oil and water,” and during the 1990s as “fire and water”—that is, havingdeteriorated from supportive to separate to explosive. Skeptics see the PRCevolving toward a socialist society with Confucian characteristics or, some-times, a Confucian society with socialist characteristics, rather than advancingtoward civil society. In a variation on this theme, dissident writer Cao Jinqingenvisions a China moving away from socialism but toward a uniquely Chinesestyle of bureaucratism rather than toward Western-style liberal capitalism.

This would seem to reinforce the China-is-China-is-China and communistneo-traditional analyses of PRC politics rather than the pluralist paradigm.There is also a possibility that rather than continue along a relatively peacefulpath of greater legislative and popular assertiveness, or back toward a lessethical variant of traditional Chinese bureaucratism, the state could degene-rate into chaos and a return to the China characterized by Sun Yat-sen as asheet of loose sand.

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READINGZhiyue Bo, China’s Elite Politics: Political Transition and Power Balancing (Singapore:

World Scientific, 2007).Xin Wang, “Divergent Identities, Convergent Interests: The Rising Middle-Income

Stratum in China and Its Civic Awareness,” Journal of Contemporary China(February 2008): 53–69.

Jessica C. Teets, Stanley Rosen, and Peter Hays Gries, “Political Change, Contestation,and Pluralization in China Today,” in Peter Hays Gries and Stanley Rosen, eds.,Chinese Politics: State, Society, and the Market. (London: Routledge, 2010), pp. 1–21.

Ziyang Zhao, Prisoner of the State (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2009).Xueguang Zhou, “The Institutional Logic of Collusion Among Local Governments in

China,” Modern China (Winter 2010): 47–78.


prc politics in the post-mao era: 1976–2008

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