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Joseph Fewsmith has written the best book in English on the economic debates of the era: The Dilemmas of Reform in China.
I have found that China Vitae in particular is a very useful English-language website on Chinese officials who are still alive.
“If you think governing Hong Kong is hard, you ought to try governing China.”
The average per capita income of Chinese peasants, who made up 80 percent of the population, was then only US$40 per year. The amount of grain produced per person had fallen below what it had been in 1957.
He realized what some free-market economists did not, that one could not solve problems simply by opening markets; one had to build institutions gradually.
Three times Deng had been purged, in the Jiangxi Soviet, in 1966 in the Cultural Revolution when he was subjected to blistering criticism, and in 1976.
The huge size of the military strained the budget; more than six million people were serving in the military, over 20 percent more than in 1966.
By 2010 as steel plants with modern technology were being duplicated in various localities, China, without political mobilization, would produce 600 million tons per year, almost thirty times what it had produced in 1975.
At that time, however, it was still taboo to openly praise capitalism, because doing so would raise questions about the value of China's sacrifices over many years and even about whether the Chinese Communist Party should remain in power. Instead Marxism-Leninism and Maoism remained the official creed for justifying high-level decision-making.
Most participants believed that to grow economically China needed to return to the sober planning of the 1950s before the Great Leap Forward and of the early 1960s during the recovery from the Leap. Participants believed that China should rely on a planning system because of its huge population, shortage of land, and its limited resources. Whereas less crowded countries with smaller populations could enjoy the benefits of lavish consumption despite the waste that comes from open markets, party leaders believed China had to establish priorities and control profits and wasteful consumption.
During the Cultural Revolution, one out of every 250 scientific personnel at the CAS, where the vast majority of high-level scientists were concentrated, had been persecuted to death; in the CAS Shanghai branch the figure was one out of every 150 scientists.
Rarely was Deng as passionate as he was at this meeting on science. Not only did he interrupt frequently but he fervently argued that scientific research must take the lead among the four modernizations.
During the Cultural Revolution, Mao had allowed Jiang Qing to keep a tight grip on all cultural affairs: no dramas were performed except her model Peking operas, virtually all periodicals ceased publication, and only a handful of short stories and novels were printed. Bookstores sold collections of Mao's works, tales of revolutionary heroes, a small number of school textbooks, and a few books on elementary technology. But there were virtually no customers.
On July 21, 1968, Mao had directed that universities shorten the time they took to educate students and enroll instead peasants and workers who, after receiving their training, would return to the production line. In June 1970, it was announced that workers, farmers, and soldiers, rather than academics, should take charge of the universities.
Perhaps most important to Mao, Hua Guofeng, a beneficiary of the Cultural Revolution, could be counted on not to denounce it. Unlike Deng, Hua did not have his own base of support and so his claim to leadership would depend entirely on his selection by Mao. Mao could be confident that Hua would uphold his reputation and his legacy.
The selection of Hua Guofeng as premier and first vice chairman meant that for the first time Hua had a higher political rank than any of the Gang of Four.
When he met former president Nixon on February 23, he had said, referring to the six factories and two schools dear to his heart, “I've only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Beijing.”
The scholar Joseph Levenson describes the fate of Confucianism in the late imperial period: when it lost its vitality, Confucianism was still celebrated in the temples and museums, which people visited to pay homage, but it had lost its connection to people's daily lives. Similarly, after Mao's death and the arrest of the Gang of Four, Mao was still enshrined, and multitudes continued to visit the Mao Mausoleum in the center of Tiananmen Square. But radical Maoism, with its mass movements and class warfare, was no longer a part of the daily experience of the Chinese people.
his interregnum, which lasted from Mao's death in September 1976 until the Third Plenum in December 1978, Hua in fact not only arrested the Gang of Four but abandoned radical Maoism, reduced the roles of ideology and political campaigns, focused on modernization more than class struggle, and regularized the scheduling of party meetings that had been held irregularly under Mao. Hua also sent delegation after delegation abroad to learn about modern technology. He—not Deng—launched China's special economic zones, which experimented with efforts to bring in foreign direct investment. Hua did try
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Mao's dominance of the top positions in the party, the military, and the government during his twenty-seven-year rule had made it more difficult for others to challenge him, but the core of Mao's power remained personal. His authority came not from his official positions, but from his extraordinary success in leading the revolution to military victory, his mastery of the uses of power, his grandiose visions, and the hope and awe he inspired in his people—with the help of a disciplined party and a controlled media.
For Hua to provide overall national leadership for a new era, he needed to convene a party congress, much as Mao had done in 1956 (the 8th Party Congress); Lin Biao had done in 1969 (the 9th Party Congress); and Mao had done yet again in 1973, after Lin Biao's demise (the 10th Party Congress). It takes many months to formulate economic plans, achieve consensus on policies in major spheres, and prepare the documents needed for a party congress. Hua began the work almost immediately after Mao's death and convened the 11th Party Congress on August 12–18, 1977. The Fifth National People's Congress
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In 1957 Deng had been Mao's right-hand man in implementing the attack on intellectuals, but he did not instinctively dislike them as Mao did. Mao, who denigrated them as “bourgeois intellectuals,” time and again found ways to humiliate them and to send them to be educated by performing physical labor. Deng never had an opportunity to study at a university, but he had once been on track to receive a higher education and made his best effort to enter a French university. His wife had studied physics at China's premier university, Peking University, and three of his five children had also studied
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Some 5,780,000 people who had reached college age within the last decade, many of whom were still working in the countryside, took the test that fall, but there were then only 273,000 slots at the universities. In 1977 and 1978, then, only some 5.8 percent of those who took the examinations could actually be enrolled.61 For the first time since the Communists ruled China, class background was not a factor in selecting those to be admitted to university. Enrollment was entirely based on merit as measured by examination scores.
In Chinese Communist circles, it is taboo to criticize a leader openly and directly. But beneficiaries of the Cultural Revolution generally supported Hua Guofeng, and targets of the Cultural Revolution generally supported Deng Xiaoping.
During the Deng era, an estimated 200 million people migrated to towns and cities, movement that has since continued at a rapid pace. It is estimated that by 2015, scarcely two decades after Deng's retirement, an estimated 700 million people, more than half the population, will be urban.
Paradoxically, the open mobility that began with the Deng era had a far more revolutionary influence on the structure of society than the so-called Mao revolution that had imposed rigid social barriers. The transition from a predominantly rural to a predominantly urban society and the spread of a common national culture are among the most fundamental changes that have occurred in Chinese society since the country's unification in 221 B.C.
He believed some corruption was unavoidable. As he said, “When you open the door, flies will get in.”
Given these dramatic success stories, it is perhaps no surprise that in the view of Deng and his successors, the legal rights of individuals who had formerly occupied the land should not stand in the way of what they consider to be good for the greatest number of people.
