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January 25 - February 17, 2021
This material has been reviewed by the CIA to prevent the disclosure of classified information.
France also affected his taste: for the rest of his life, Deng enjoyed drinking wine and coffee and eating cheese and bread. More important, by the time he left France at age twenty-one, Deng had become a hardened and experienced revolutionary leader, and his personal identity had become inseparable from that of the party and his Communist comrades. From that time until his death seven decades later, Deng's life was focused on the Chinese Communist Party.
Deng, as political commissar in the smaller base in the Taihang Mountains located closer to Japanese lines, had little time for theory. He was responsible for practical issues in dealing with the local population.
It was well known in high circles that Mao did not like Zhou, but he needed him.
For Deng, the issue in 1975 was how to retain Mao's support while restoring order and setting China on a path for growth. To help himself stay on Mao's good side, Deng paid great attention to his favorite themes. He repeatedly praised Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought and avoided criticism of the Cultural Revolution.
Officials were still afraid that if they neglected leftist politics in favor of production they might later be in trouble. Indeed, the Gang of Four was then criticizing Deng for making just such an error.
When Marshal Ye declined, writing to Mao on July 1 that he was too old and that Deng should lead the daily work of the party, Mao immediately approved. On July 2 Marshal Ye wrote the official document announcing that Deng would now, in addition to leading the government as de facto premier and the military as vice chairman of the CMC, lead the daily work of the party. Topping it all off, around this time Mao also gave him a new assignment in the area of foreign policy: Deng was to become the first Chinese Communist official to make a state visit to a Western country.
Deng was not yet talking about reform, but while building the party structure that could later carry out reform he was also beginning to consider the content of future reforms. To do this he needed to expand his personal brain trust—writers, theorists, and strategists operating outside the regular bureaucracy who could help him think through the big issues. Shortly after Mao asked Deng to take over leadership of the daily work of the party, Deng sought and received Mao's approval to expand his personal brain trust into a formal party structure, the Political Research Office.
Although the Political Research Office was much smaller than the U.S. White House and was not responsible for implementation, it shared a similar purpose—to act, in effect, as an inner cabinet, a small group of independent advisers directly responsible to Deng who could help him define an overall strategy and draft public announcements.
When Mao reviewed the drafts of that speech prepared for republication, he suggested some changes, which Deng made. When Deng returned the revised draft to Mao, his cover letter suggested that because the speech had implications for their current domestic and international work, it might be useful to publish it soon, even before volume 5 as a whole was published.8 Mao returned the draft once again with the comment that it should be sent to the Politburo members for discussion. Not surprisingly, the Gang of Four objected to its republication, and Mao never approved its distribution to the
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The criticism of Zhou Rongxin was even more severe than the criticism of Deng. In December 1975 Zhou Rongxin was subject to continuous criticism until he fell ill and had to be taken to the hospital. Even so, he was taken from the hospital and subjected to more than fifty additional criticism sessions. Finally, at a criticism meeting on the morning of April 12, 1976, Zhou Rongxin fainted and before dawn the next day, at age fifty-nine, he passed away.57 For a time, Chinese educational reform also died.
Kang Sheng, the master internal spy who had done the dirty work for Mao in arranging the killing of hundreds of officials accused of betraying the revolution,
Other posters expressed support for Deng Xiaoping, and some people placed little bottles on the street, because the Chinese word for “little bottle” is pronounced “xiao ping.”
Jiang Qing told her Western biographer Roxane Witke, “Sex is engaging in the first rounds, but what sustains interest in the long run is power.”
The confrontation between Hua and the Gang of Four would be told and retold as a great struggle between good and evil—between the party pursuing the correct path and a gang plotting against the party. Like many stories recorded in Chinese historical documents, the victor was seen as virtuous and the loser as villainous. But this time, as in 1949, there was genuine and widespread popular support for the victor.
“Practice Is the Sole Criterion for Judging Truth,” with the protective byline “specially invited commentators.” On May 12, People's Daily and the PLA newspaper Jiefangjun bao reprinted it, and it was quickly picked up and reprinted in many regional papers as well. The article argued that the only way to evaluate truth was by the broad social experience of the people. Marxism is not an unchanging body of thinking; instead Marxism must continually be reinterpreted as a result of experience. The basic principle of Marxism encompasses the combination of theory and practice. Under certain
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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.
In the following months, as the debate heated up over the two articles, it increasingly became a political struggle between those who praised “Practice Is the Sole Criterion” and believed that Deng would be the best top leader, and those who upheld the “two whatevers” and supported Hua Guofeng. A showdown seemed inevitable.
officials explored the possibility of setting up in Bao'an county, Guangdong province, across the border from Hong Kong, an export processing zone—a place where materials could be brought from abroad to be manufactured by Chinese laborers and then exported without any tariffs or other restrictions. Within a few months, the State Council formally approved the establishment of such an area, which later would become the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone (SEZ).
In the small group discussions, speaker after speaker related his personal experiences in dealing with the disastrous food shortages and supported the need for more national inputs to solve the problem once and for all. For many leaders, these discussions provided a personal catharsis, as they acknowledged publicly the failures they had not yet faced so directly, failures that had caused the vast suffering and deaths that they had seen personally. Even if they laid primary blame on higher officials, they could not completely escape responsibility; for many officials it was a trauma from which
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Plenums are identified by the number of the party congress that they follow, but the changes wrought by the Third Plenum of the 11th Congress were so momentous that when a Chinese person says simply, “the Third Plenum,” listeners know exactly to which third plenum he or she is referring. In the minds of the Chinese public, the Third Plenum marked the beginning of “Deng's reform and opening” that was to transform China. Although reform and opening had in fact begun under Hua, they were realized under the leadership of Deng.
On the afternoon of August 22, 1977, just three days after Deng officially returned to work as a member of the Politburo Standing Committee, he met Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. Deng wanted to accomplish some things in his few years in office, and the timing of this meeting reflected the high priority he gave to normalizing relations with the United States. Hua Guofeng, China's chairman and premier, met Vance the day after Deng did, but American officials understood that the key visit was with Deng.
He knew that Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan had relied heavily on U.S. science, technology, and education to achieve modernization. He had found that many of the patents for goods produced in Europe were held by U.S. individuals and companies, so that even technological help from Europe would require cooperation with the United States. Normalization of Sino-American relations was thus an important first step in building a relationship with the United States that would enable China to modernize.
In these two statements, Kissinger and Ford both indicated that the United States was ready to accept the Japanese formula for normalization that would keep only unofficial American representatives in Taiwan. Deng claimed that, at present, the United States was occupying Taiwan, which was a part of China, and so was blocking Taiwan's unification with the mainland. Further, he said that the U.S. request for China not to use force to absorb Taiwan amounted to interference in the internal affairs of another country. In answer to Vance's assertion that the United States was concerned about the
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In their negotiations, the Chinese normally prefer to start with general principles, then move on to the details. At the second meeting with Woodcock on July 14, Huang Hua said that instead of dealing with one issue at a time, the Chinese side preferred that the United States first put all the major issues on the table so that the two sides could examine the whole package.
Fellow passengers report that during the long flight, Deng spent most of his time alert and sober, not reading, not talking, but deep in thought. On some level, Deng must have felt overjoyed—he had not only successfully established formal relations with the United States, but also, on a more personal level, had returned triumphantly from a third purge to become the preeminent leader of China, and was about to become the first Chinese Communist leader to be a state guest of the United States.
When Brzezinski said that the Chinese and French civilizations both think of themselves as superior to all others, Deng said, “Let us put it this way. In East Asia, Chinese food is best. In Europe, French food is best.”
Deng wanted for his team those who could contribute to the four modernizations. In particular, Deng was looking for officials capable of dealing with modern issues of foreign trade, finance, and technology and this in turn meant recruiting and promoting those with higher educational levels and with knowledge of science, technology, and management. As obvious as this may seem to leaders in many modern societies, in China at the time this represented a fundamental change. During Mao's era, being “red” had been more important than being “expert.”
Deng had given the issue of how to handle Mao's legacy serious thought from at least 1956, when he was present at the 20th Party Congress in Moscow where Khrushchev had denounced Stalin. Over the years, Deng had had ample opportunity to contemplate the issue, especially during his three and a half years of rusticating in Jiangxi province during the Cultural Revolution. As a young man, he had expressed tremendous admiration for Mao, and for decades he had dedicated himself to serving Mao, only to be twice cast aside by him and subjected to humiliating public attacks. Deng's eldest son had been
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In a country where discipline at the top still depended on personal authority, Deng, like many other high party officials, believed that it was sometimes necessary to sacrifice the pawns to ensure continued respect for the king and his throne.
Thus in order to avoid massive unemployment, families were allowed to form “household enterprises” (getihu) in which the entrepreneur himself worked. Marx's statement in Das Kapital about a capitalist with eight employees exploiting his workers was interpreted to mean that working entrepreneurs who employed no more than seven others were not capitalists.
Because the markets were constantly changing, calculation of the different types of taxes eventually became so complicated that Beijing agreed that Guangdong would make an annual lump sum payment of taxes.
Four years after Mao gave his rousing speech, tens of millions of peasants were starving, and twenty-five years after his speech, the collectives were dissolved. By contrast, four years after Deng's cautious, reasoned explanation to his writers, most of China's farming was being done by individual households, and agricultural production was rising rapidly. Twenty-five years after Deng's speech, the system he installed was still going strong.
Chinese officials have complained that foreign assistance from human rights groups is motivated by a desire to weaken China. And when foreigners criticize the Chinese for failing to give the Tibetans more autonomy, some Chinese officials snap back that their policies have been more humane than those the United States used in assimilating and destroying its own Native American communities.
Panchen Lama (another Tibetan religious leader)
As soon as the Chinese took Lang Son on March 6, the Chinese declared victory and began withdrawing. As they withdrew, they destroyed as much of the Vietnamese infrastructure as possible. Deng had pledged that the fighting would not last longer than the thirty-three days of attack on India in 1962, and the withdrawal from Vietnam took place on March 16, twenty-nine days after the invasion began.
Deng's talks on military matters, there are twenty-six selections from his talks during 1978 and 1979, but only a few passing references to China's attack on Vietnam—not one of his talks deal with it directly.34 Some Chinese have called the attack on Vietnam “China's last war.” Given the lack of public discussion, it might better be called “China's forgotten war.”
Deng never gave any indication that he ever considered forming a military alliance with the United States, for like Mao before him, he wanted China to remain completely independent on security matters.
“The main goal of our reform is to guarantee the efficiency of the executive organs without too many other interferences. . . . Do not yield to the feelings for democracy. . . . Democracy is only a means [to an end].
This marked the first time since the Communists' 1949 takeover of the government that protestors had demanded access to Zhongnanhai.
During the Gorbachev visit, the number of students in the square grew daily. On May 18, the Ministry of State Security estimated that despite the rain, some 1.2 million people were in Tiananmen Square.
the crackdown in Beijing struck a nerve because it was interpreted as an assault on the American myth that economic, intellectual, and political freedoms will always triumph. Many foreigners came to see Deng as a villainous enemy of freedom who crushed the heroic students who were standing up for what they believed in.
Differences between the two countries were caused, Deng said, by the United States, which “on a large-scale has impinged upon Chinese interests. . . . It is up to the person who tied the knot to untie it. . . . It is up to the United States to cease adding fuel to the fire.” Deng went on to explain that the People's Republic of China was founded as a result of twenty-two years of war, with over 20 million lives lost, and no force could substitute for the Chinese Communist Party in governing China. This was a stern message from someone who felt that the fate of his country was at risk and that
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On February 25, some ten thousand selected party members assembled at the Great Hall of the People for a memorial service. Jiang Zemin fought back tears as he delivered the eulogy.75 The service was broadcast on television, and reports on Deng's life dominated the media for the following several days. In line with Deng's wishes, his corneas were donated for eye research, his internal organs donated for medical research, and his body cremated.
