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Deng did not see his role as coming up with new ideas. He saw his job as managing the disruptive process of devising and implementing a new system.
Deng, the implementer, had always been more practical and realistic than Mao, the philosopher, poet, and dreamer, but Mao valued Deng and others like Lin Biao in part because they would freely express their views to him, while speaking little in public.
Deng never broke off relations with any of his children, and none of them ever broke off relations with him. He also maintained close friendships with the household help—the driver, the cook, the orderly, and the director of his personal office, Wang Ruilin. Indeed, Wang Ruilin, except when separated from Deng from 1966 to 1972, served as Deng's office director from 1952, when Wang was just twenty years old, until Deng's death in 1997. He was regarded by Deng as more like a family member than a comrade.
Ever since his guerrilla days, he had believed in fighting small battles that he was sure to win, as a way of encouraging his troops as they prepared for larger battles.
The report gave the necessary praise for Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, but boldly stated that political theory could not be used as a substitute for science.
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.”
Indeed it is reported that when Wang Zhen cautiously asked Marshal Ye's views of the Gang of Four, Ye, concerned about the possibility of bugging, replied by opening the four fingers of his right hand and moving the thumb down to the palm, indicating they should wait until Mao had passed away. Even if that story is apocryphal, it is believed by many people in Beijing and is consistent with Marshal Ye's actions.
Mao himself admitted he made errors; anyone who does things makes mistakes. If what a person did was 70 percent correct, that is very good. If after my death people say that what I did was 70 percent correct, Deng said, that would be quite good.
We must create within the party an atmosphere of respect for knowledge and respect for trained personnel. The erroneous attitude of not respecting intellectuals must be opposed. All work, be it mental or manual, is labor.
Although he did not use the term, in fact he believed in a meritocratic elite.
“In the past … I too stressed the advantages of having secondary school students do physical labor for two years after graduation. Facts have shown, however, that after a couple of years of labor, the students have forgotten half of what they learned at school. This is a waste of time.”
When told of the problem during a visit to Guangdong in 1977, Deng explained that the solution lay not in tightening border security with more fencing and more border patrols but in improving the economy of Guangdong so young people would not feel that they had to flee to Hong Kong to find jobs.
“Our nation's system . . . is basically taken from the Soviet Union. It is backward, deals with issues superficially, duplicates structures, and advances bureaucratism. . . . If we can't grow faster than the capitalist countries then we can't show the superiority of our system.”
He counseled again, as he had many times before: look first at the big picture, then think about the smaller pictures; seek first to understand the broader truth, then consider the specific truths.
The strange arrangement of giving Deng authority without formal recognition worked because everyone knew what was going on, and because Deng himself was more interested in real power than in any formal job title.
Like Mao and Zhou, Deng possessed an instinctive national loyalty, a strategic vision, and an underlying toughness in pursuing national interests.
Deng, like players of the Chinese board game weiqi (in Japanese, go), thought of these developments in terms of countries staking out different locations and winning by surrounding the enemy.
Deng, like Mao and Zhou Enlai, thought in terms of decades.
For anyone about to turn age seventy-five, the journey was a formidable feat. The photo of a healthy-looking Deng pausing as he neared the end of his climb, with his pants rolled up and holding his walking stick, was widely circulated.
Sounding like a factory manager with a military background, he said, “Meetings should be small and short, and they should not be held at all unless the participants have prepared. . . . If you don't have anything to say, save your breath. . . . The only reason to hold meetings and to speak at them is to solve problems. . . . There should be collective leadership in settling major issues. But when it comes to particular jobs or to decisions affecting a particular sphere, individual responsibility must be clearly defined and each person should be held responsible for the work entrusted to him.”
If Mao were like an emperor above the clouds, reading history and novels and issuing edicts, Deng was more like a commanding general, checking carefully to see that his battle plans were properly staffed and implemented.
Deng rarely met visitors during his three hours of morning reading, but for twenty to thirty minutes in the middle of the morning he would take a brisk walk around the garden next to his house. After lunch at home, he generally continued reading materials but sometimes would ask various officials to meet him in his home office.
In his advanced age, Deng found several ways to conserve his strength. He conducted most business through written documents, avoiding taxing meetings. Most of his phone calls were handled by Wang Ruilin. Deng required no oral briefings before meetings with foreign dignitaries, although his staff would see that he knew about some of the latest activities of the visitors.
Deng believed that economic growth would strengthen the authority of the party and his personal stature, and this assessment proved correct.
He was determined to expand markets and he personally had no ideological objections to private enterprise; he accepted competition as a driving force in commerce. But he aimed as well to keep the Chinese Communist Party firmly in control, to constrain the markets to ensure that they served public purposes, to prevent capitalists from dominating Chinese politics, to retain public ownership of land, to keep a large role for state-owned enterprises, and to maintain state economic planning.
In typical Deng fashion, he accepted the name change and avoided arguments, but in fact he barged ahead; he did not stop Guangdong from continuing its broad experiments.
In his pursuit of economic modernization, Deng liked to say that he was groping for stones as he crossed the river. But in fact, from his five decades of experience, he had developed some strong convictions about how to get across that particular river.
“My father,” Deng's younger son, Deng Zhifang, told an American acquaintance, “thinks Gorbachev is an idiot.” Gorbachev, his father had explained, set out to change the political system first. That was a misguided policy because “he won't have the power to fix the economic problems and the people will remove him.”
Deng Xiaoping, like Hua Guofeng, was at heart a builder who wanted to see rapid progress. He admired project managers who under adverse circumstances had been able to complete important projects that provided visible signs of progress. Deng, who had little patience with detailed calculations, considered the cautious balancers necessary, but annoying.
Deng recalled that he was aware many people were then opposed to contracting down to the household and had even labeled it “capitalism,” but rather than attack them he had waited until the results were proven; gradually people recognized that the new strategy was working, and within several years, the experiments became national policy.
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.
As long as they relied on their own labor and did not exploit the labor of others, they would still be considered workers, not capitalists, and so, Deng said, they should be allowed to open a shop, repair station, or some other “household enterprise.”
But how should one draw the line between heads of household enterprises and capitalists? In volume 4 of Das Kapital, Marx describes the case of an employer who had eight employees and was exploiting the labor of others. Practical Beijing politicians, then, suggested that as long as the household had no more than seven employees and the household head himself (or herself) worked, the leader of the household enterprise would be classified as a “worker.”
Deng had scored another victory by using his basic approach to reform: Don't argue; try it. If it works, let it spread.
Once again, Deng had been confronted by a party consensus with which he disagreed and his approach was vintage Deng: “Don't argue, just push ahead.”
In June 1984 Deng began using the term “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” a grand but marvelously vague expression that perfectly fit Deng's basic approach: stretch the acceptable ideological framework to allow the country to pursue policies that worked.
“Practice Is the Sole Criterion for Judging Truth”
asked his assistant to collect his speeches, reports, and other documents from the last ten years; he then stayed home for three months to read through these documents, concluding in the end that he had made no errors of principle.
Deng Nan, Deng's daughter, reminded her father that he had written some thoughts when they visited this same spot eight years earlier. Deng responded by reciting from memory his words at the time—“Shenzhen's development and experience prove that our policy of establishing the Special Economic Zones was correct”—which
He repeated the lessons he had been giving everywhere: continue reform and opening, keep a lean government, train young people, talk less, and do more.
Leaders should find ways to encourage people to express their opinions, but once a decision is made, people should follow the collective decision.
In line with Deng's wishes, his corneas were donated for eye research, his internal organs donated for medical research, and his body cremated.
Rather, Deng was the general manager who provided overall leadership during the transformation. He helped package the ideas and present them to his team of colleagues and to the public at a pace and in a way they could accept.
