Visionary of a New China
China? There lies a sleeping giant. Let him sleep, for when he wakes he will move the world.
--Napoleon Bonaparte
The project is vast, daring, and unique in history. How could there be a precedent for turning 1 billion people so sharply in their course, for leading one-quarter of mankind quickstep out of dogmatic isolation into the late 20th century and the life of the rest of the planet? The People's Republic of China, separated so long from the outer world by an instinctive xenophobia and an admixture of reclusive Maoism, in 1978 began its Great Leap Outward, or what Peking's propagandists call the New Long March. The Chinese, their primitive economy threadbare and their morale exhausted by the years of Mao Tse-tung's disastrous Cultural Revolution, hope to have arrived by the year 2000 at a state of relative modernity, and become a world economic and military power. They may not arrive, or arrive on time, but their setting off is an extraordinary spectacle of national ambition.
The Chinese venture acquired a fascinating new dimension at year's end. The U.S. and the People's Republic ended seven years of gingerly courtship that began with the Nixon-Kissinger initiatives. In simultaneous communiques from Peking and Washington, Chairman and Premier Hua Kuo-feng and President Carter announced that the two countries would exchange ambassadors and begin normal diplomatic relations. The normalization opens potentially lucrative avenues of trade and new perspectives on world politics, even though it will be a long time before Peking joins Washington and Moscow as a capital of first-rank global power.
The motive force behind the campaign to get the world's oldest continuous civilization to the 21st century on schedule is not Mao's titular successor, Hua Kuo-feng, 57, but Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-p'ing, who also holds the titles of Vice Chairman of the Communist Party and Army Chief of Staff. Although he ranks only third in the Peking Politburo (after Hua and ailing Marshal Yeh Chien-ying, 80, the figurehead Chief of State), Teng is the principal architect of what has become known in Chinese rhetoric as the Four Modernizations--an attempt simultaneously to improve agriculture, industry, science and technology, and defense. Because of the tremendous enterprise he has launched to propel the nation into the modern world, Teng Hsiao-p'ing (pronounced dung sheow ping) is TIME'S Man of the Year for 1978.
Tough, abrasive, resilient, Teng, 74, has made more political comebacks than Richard Nixon. Twice, at Mao's behest, he was purged by his radical enemies, and his last rehabilitation was only 17 months ago. Teng commands a broad power base among the senior officers of the People's Liberation Army as well as wide support among China's bureaucrats, technocrats and the intelligentsia. The last two were precisely those elements of Chinese society that, like Teng, were the chief victims of the Cultural Revolution. Besides his constituency, Teng has extraordinary energy and executive skills. As a party member for more than 50 years and a veteran of Mao's original Long March, he also possesses a moral authority that no other Chinese leader can command, an authority based partly on his refusal to bow before the political winds of the past two decades.
Teng works in a wary, complementary partnership with Hua. The Hua-Teng relationship has a kind of model in the roles and personalities of Mao and of Chou Enlai, who was Teng's sponsor and protector. While Mao was a visionary and Hua remains his dogmatist and disciple, Chou, like Teng, was a flexible realist. There is still undoubtedly personal as well as ideological conflict between Teng and Hua. Hua, for example, approved Teng's second purging, but now apparently endorses the Four Modernizations. In a sense, Hua may play chairman of the board to Teng's chief executive officer.
Other men attracted greater attention than Teng Hsiao-p'ing in this varied and violent year (see story page 40). After an uncertain apprenticeship that saw his popularity rating drop to 30% in the polls, President Jimmy Carter was able to recoup through his foreign policy victories. At his Camp David summit, Carter appeared for a while to have achieved a miracle for the Middle East--a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. But at year's end the negotiations were frustratingly stalled. Poland's Karol Cardinal Wojtyla, the athletic, scholarly Archbishop of Cracow, became the first non-Italian Pope in 4% centuries; in tribute to his gentle predecessor, Albino Cardinal Luciani, who held the keys of St. Peter for little more than a month, he took the name John Paul II. In California a retired industrialist, Howard Jarvis, saw the state's voters approve his tax-slashing Proposition 13--a symbol of widespread middle-class anger at Big Government. A crazed cult prophet, Jim Jones, imposed a poisonous "white night" of murder and suicide on his followers that left 913 dead in the jungles of Guyana.
War, peace and terrorism dominated the headlines. Lebanon's capital was a battleground once more, as Syrian forces in Beirut tried to crush militant right-wing Christian armies. Cambodia and Viet Nam set about invalidating the domino theory (if Viet Nam goes Communist, the rest of Southeast Asia will go too) by slashing at each other's throats in border war instead of pursuing a common ideological expansion. The Shah of Iran's 37-year reign was shaken by week upon week of riots. In Italy, the Red Brigades kidnaped former Premier Aldo Moro, held him for 54 days, then shot him dead and left his body in the back of a car on a Rome street. In the Soviet Union, human rights campaigners Anatoli Shcharansky, Yuri Orlov and Alexander Ginzburg went into the Gulag.
A humanly happier, if ethically problematic, event occurred in England. The first baby ever conceived outside the human body was born 8% months after doctors there united sperm and egg in a laboratory petri dish and then implanted the embryo in the mother's womb.
Yet these events were not nearly as significant as the Chinese decision to join the rest of the world. The Peking People's Daily cheered on the modernization drive in evangelical rhythms: "The Chinese people's march toward the great goal of the Four Modernizations echoes from the foothills of the Yenshan Mountains to the shores of the Yellow Sea to all corners of the world and has aroused worldwide attention. We are setting out to conquer on our New Long March the mountains, seas, plains, oilfields and mines of our motherland. We want to scale the heights of science and technology. We want to develop normal trade relations with other countries of the world."
To accomplish the journey, Teng and his backers have embarked on what sometimes looks suspiciously like a capitalist road. The new doctrinal slogan might be formulated thus: "Let one hundred business deals blossom, let one hundred foreign investors contend." Although very few Chinese have acquired much individual freedom as part of the new enterprise, they are discarding, without ceremony, much of their old ideological baggage. Gone is the once sacred Maoist principle of national self-reliance and independence from outside resources. Chinese managers have heretically embraced such impure capitalist devices as meritocratic promotions and other special treatment for their best and brightest. A people that has traditionally regarded all foreigners as barbarians has opened its gates to the outer world; 530,000 tourists visited the Middle Kingdom last year. So did thousands of capitalists dowsing for new markets and investments in this promising territory. Perhaps the two most startling pieces of symbolic revisionism: the Chinese are planning to construct a golf course on the outskirts of Peking, and have given Coca-Cola exclusive rights to sell in the People's Republic.
After dwelling so long beyond the world's gaze, the Chinese suddenly seemed everywhere, bargaining intensely, cutting deals, eager to learn how the rest of mankind makes things work. In August, Hua visited Eastern Europe, where he gaily danced a hora with Rumanian youths. That spectacle on their European front did not amuse the Soviets, who keep 43 of their best combat divisions tied down along their 4,500-mile border with China. Teng went to Japan to ratify a peace and friendship treaty, pledging amid champagne toasts to "let bygones be bygones." He then flew to Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, signing scientific exchange agreements and preaching endlessly against Soviet "hegemonism" (imperialism). Later this month, Teng will visit the U.S. to give dramatic personal confirmation of the new Chinese-American relations.
On their junkets, Chinese delegations carried elaborate shopping lists whose extravagance may far exceed the limits of the Chinese budget. Although China's international credit rating is excellent, the country has never dealt in the lofty sums now being discussed. The Chinese hope to finance their modernizations through development of oil exports, through joint ventures in which they pay off their debts in goods manufactured in foreign-built mainland factories, and through their immense human resources: manpower and discipline. One shadow over the New Long March, however, is doubt that the primitive Chinese economy can rouse itself to meet the price. One freewheeling guess is that the Four Modernizations could cost $800 billion by 1985 The Chinese consumer market may be a long time in developing. Despite all the current capitalist visions of the new market opening up on the mainland, it may be years before the Chinese can afford to pay for all they want. Among other things, Chinese oil reserves, on which Peking heavily counts to earn cash, are afflicted by a number of serious technical problems including a high wax content and great difficulty in extraction owing to geological structure.
But the Chinese are proceeding with ambitious vision. In February, Japan and China signed a private trade agreement worth $20 billion: China will export oil to Japan in exchange for Japanese steel and factories. In a ceremony last month at Peking's Great Hall of the People, Teng attended the signing of a seven-year, $13.5 billion trade and cooperation agreement with France Its projects include French help in developing Chinese telecommunications satellites and TV broadcasting, the modernization and extension of a steel complex, and the construction of power stations, a magnesium plant and other facilities. Most important, France landed an order for two 900-megawatt nuclear power plants at nearly $1 billion each.
The Chinese went to the Swedes for cooperation in mining, railroads and telecommunications, to the British for $315 million worth of coal-mining equipment, to the Danes for help in improving Shanghai and other ports. They browsed in Sweden, France and England for modern weaponry with which to rearm their badly equipped military forces. They will probably make only a few selective purchases at first, because of their shortage of capital. Chinese and Americans kept up brisk negotiations. Coastal States Gas Corp., a U.S. firm, agreed to buy 3.6 million bbl. of Chinese crude, the first shipment to arrive early this year. In accordance with its aim to double annual steel production, to 60 million tons in 1985, China signed an agreement with Bethlehem Steel for the development of an iron mine at Shuichang, in Hopei province.
The wa11 that has so long imprisoned China in its immense, opaque privacy collapsed so fast that some imaginations projected a regretful vision of the Middle Kingdom overrun by Instamatics and McDonald's. (In fact, the Chinese have consulted McDonald's executives about possible fast-food techniques for use in China.) Inter-Continental Hotels plans to build within three years a chain of 1,000-room hotels, complete with swimming pools and saunas, in Peking Canton, Shanghai and other major cities. Hyatt International has proposed the construction of hotels with a total capacity of 10,000 rooms. Pan American and several other airlines have entered bidding for landing rights in China to bring in the tourist trade on a major scale.
The Chinese are taking crash courses in foreign languages. More than 1 million copies of Radio Peking's English course have been sold in the capital. Some 10,000 Chinese students will be dispatched to study overseas, a development that will exert a profound, lasting effect on Chinese culture as the students return. Some of the cultural juxtapositions are startling: Haute Couture Designer Pierre
Cardin went to China and received permission to stage two fashion shows there in March. When Teng went to Japan his wife and the wives of four other officials on the trip were turned out in trimly cut silk jackets and pants, an elegant change from the monochrome Mao suits that were for years the Chinese woman's revolutionary uniform.
Chinese stage shows and movies are in rapid transformation. The Peking Cinema College reopened this year after having been suspended for twelve years The country's first X-rated film, a Japanese movie about prostitution, was shown to Chinese audiences and even defended by the Kwangming Daily, which said that it greatly enlightened and educated the Chinese audience." The newspaper went on to argue that young people must be freed from the straitjacket of the Cultural Revolution. "The great spiritual wealth created by mankind was strange to them " it said. "They never heard of such names as Boccaccio, Michelangelo, Hugo and Mozart. Young people's minds were locked up in airtight cells. Now the prison has been smashed."
In a brief, astonishing display of what that liberty might produce, posters that attacked Mao, praised Teng and alluded favorably to the economic achievements of Taiwan went up at the end of November Peking's "democracy wall." In remarkably open conversations with foreign newsmen, citizens of the capital asked searching questions about nonsocialist political systems, evincing particular interest in that of the U.S. Finally, a wall poster addressed to Jimmy Carter appeared on democracy wall. "We should like to ask you to pay attention to the state of human rights in China," it said. "The Chinese people do not want to repeat the tragic life of the Soviet people in the Gulag Archipelago. This will be a real test for your promise on human rights." The poster concluded with greetings to "your wife and family," and was signed "The Human Rights Group." Authorities removed the poster within a few hours, an indication that its message was unsanctioned Liberalization has its carefully defined limits. The phenomenon of democracy wall, for all its air of spontaneity, had a quality of official orchestration about it
None of China's new international gregariousness should obscure the bleak totalitarianism with which it maintains internal discipline. The discipline may be eased at times, but the mechanisms of control, especially through the Pao-wei forces, the secret police, remain at government disposal. In a report in November, Amnesty International, the human rights organization based in London recorded a number of legal outrages A teacher named Ho Chun-shu, for example, was said to have been executed at the beginning of 1978 for writing and distributing a "counterrevolutionary pamphlet." Last June, however, China released about 110,000 people who had been jailed since Mao's "antirightist" crack down in 1957.
It is an index of a new Chinese sensitivity to foreign opinion that in November the People's Daily in Peking ran a full page of five articles outlining human rights criticisms and urging that new civ il and criminal codes be adopted to protect those rights. "In some places," said the People's Daily, "the legal rights and interests of citizens are badly infringed. Rations are cut. Private property is tak en away, rural markets are closed down, and legal economic activities are not guaranteed. All of these things can still happen."
What makes this sudden extroversion so fascinating is that China, from its earliest times, has been largely obscured to outside view and comprehension. Under its succession of imperial dynasties, the Chinese defined the world as "all under heaven" and themselves as celestials of the Celestial Empire. "Throughout the ages," wrote Lu Hsuen, "the Chinese have had only two ways of looking at foreigners: up to them as superior beings or down on them as wild animals. They have never been able to treat them as friends as people like themselves." China traditionally looked inward, suffering a foreign presence only when it was too weak to do otherwise. And during the half-century after the first Opium War (1839-42), during the Japanese Occupation of the 1930s and 1940s and during a brief infatuation with the Soviet Union in the 1950s, the Chinese may well have concluded that their prejudices were validated.
Nonetheless, China has felt the hunger to modernize before. Near the end of the Ch'ing dynasty in 1898, under the Emperor Kuang Hsu, the Chinese tried to imitate the Japanese Emperor Meiji's transformation of Japan, from feudalism in the last half of the 19th century. In the early days of Sun Yat-sen's Republican China, an effort to streamline the society with foreign help ended in a bitter failure that eventually turned China toward puritanical socialism. The Chinese, wrote Historian C.P. FitzGerald, "became disillusioned with the false gods of the West They turned restlessly to some other solution."
After the People's Republic was founded in 1949, following a generation-long civil war between Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang and Mao's Communists, China eliminated chronic unemployment and controlled the country's wanton inflation. But there were major disruptions.
Mao's Great Leap Forward (1958-60), with its preposterous backyard pig-iron furnaces and bureaucratic romance of communal farms, left the country in depression and famine. Less than a decade later came the Cultural Revolution, a three-year Maoist spasm of revolutionary zeal against the onset of complacency and bureaucracy. The Cultural Revolution dislocated nearly every institution of Chinese life, many of which still have not recovered. A case can be made that Mao lived too long. The Great Revolutionary died at 82, an enfeebled puppet. His legacy, after the Cultural Revolution, was a ramshackle economy, a badly equipped military and an educational system in which intellect and learning had been superseded by a dank, Orwellian passion for proletarian ideology.
Teng's modernization campaign has its origins in Premier Chou En-lai's report on the work of the government delivered at the Fourth National People's Congress in 1975. It was the Premier's last publicized appearance outside a hospital (he died of cancer a year later). Chou sketched plans to improve China's agriculture by 1980 as part of "the Four Modernizations" that would "turn a poverty-stricken and backward country into a socialist one with the beginnings of prosperity in only 20 years or more." That report (and the Four Modernizations slogan) is widely believed to have been the work of Teng Hsiao-p'ing, the little bureaucratic survivor, tough as a walnut, who was Chou's protege.
It is difficult for Westerners to understand how so vast a population can psychologically reverse itself so quickly. It is like trying to imagine an aircraft carrier turning on a dime. Over the years, of course, the Chinese have been required to perform wrenching changes of allegiance, as friends became enemies and onetime heroes of the revolution underwent their metamorphoses in the character assassins' wall-poster invective that declared dissidents to be "insects," "pests" or "ferocious feudal monsters." The process has bred measures of confusion, sophistication, cynicism and nimbleness in the Chinese.
But the Chinese character instinctively believes that life constantly swings between extremes, that the law is always change, reversal. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the most popular classical and historical novel in China, begins this way: "They say that the momentum of history was ever thus: the empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide." In any case, the Chinese leaders, preparing for a reversal of nearly everything that Mao Tse-tung taught, have proceeded by subtle indirection to prepare the masses for de-Maoification.
Beginning with their arrest in October 1976, members of the radical Gang of Four, led by Mao's widow, Chiang Ch'ing, have been held responsible for everything from crop failures to the shortage of sidewalk cafes. Many of the accusations are justified. But in China now, when a foreigner mentions the Gang of Four, it often happens that the Chinese with whom he is talking will hold up five fingers and say, "Ah, yes, the Gang of Four." The small subversive joke reflects what most Chinese accept: that Mao not only permitted but encouraged the activities of his wife and her radical friends.
In turning toward modernization, Teng and his backers are attempting the delicate task of desanctifying Mao's memory without besmirching it completely. With doctrinal legerdemain, they put forth the line that Mao's philosophy was basically correct, but that it was distorted and misapplied by his onetime heir apparent Lin Piao--now the most vilified historical figure in China--and the Gang. Mao's sponsorship of the Cultural Revolution is excused on the grounds that he was aged, infirm and confused.
In their guardedly complementary roles, Hua and Teng have so far managed to bridge the chasm between the sanctified but turbulent Maoist past and the future. Hua, who owes his career to Mao and honors his memory, pronounces, "Politics is the commander, the soul of everything, and failure to grasp political and ideological work will not do." During a conference not long ago, when Hua expounded Mao's philosophy, Teng retorted, "There are those who, day in and day out, talk of nothing but Mao Tse-tung's thought while failing to grasp even its most fundamental elements: practical experience, the empirical method and the combination of theory with practice."
Neither the Hua nor the Teng faction has an effective majority on the Politburo. Both seem to understand that a doctrinal bloodletting at this time over the debunking of Mao would endanger the overall modernization program, on which both sides basically agree. Thus an apparent compromise has been struck. When posters appeared in Peking describing Mao's rule as "fascist" and "dictatorial," Teng pronounced soothingly, "Some utterances are not in the interest of stability and unity and the Four Modernizations." He told visiting American Columnist Robert Novak: "Every Chinese knows that without Chairman Mao there would have been no new China. In the process of achieving the Four Modernizations, we must be good at comprehensively and accurately grasping and applying Mao Tse-tung thought. There should be liveliness and ease of mind in the political life of our country."
In fact, the Chinese are being conditioned with some care to accept doctrine so heretically un-Maoist that it could have got a person imprisoned or executed a few years ago. One of the first essentials has been to deprogram the deeply rooted suspicion of things foreign. Hence the Kwangming Daily's recent line: "It is completely un-Marxist to adopt the foolish attitude of being complacent and arrogant and of uncritically excluding foreign science, technology and culture. We advocate learning from the strong points of all nations."
Another movement under way is the rehabilitation of persons considered "bourgeois." Kwangtung Radio announced that at Canton's Rubber Plant No. 7, "six former bourgeois owners" discharged during the Cultural Revolution have been rehired and assigned to administrative and production jobs. This is a clear application of Teng's pragmatism: it is a person's technical knowledge that the new China wants, not his political purity.
The Chinese emphasis on efficiency and competence can sometimes sound like an American political campaign against Big Government interference. The provincial radio station in Kansu complained in November: "There are too many inspection groups at company, bureau, municipal and provincial levels." The station objected that the number of slogan banners displayed at factories is often used as the criterion for judging whether the plant is doing well. In addition, "there are too many meetings."
A call has gone out for correct bookkeeping. During the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath, said the People's Daily, leaders were interested only in "political accounts, not economic accounts. As a result, accounting work was greatly weakened and financial management was very confused."
Management of the highest order will be needed to achieve the Four Modernizations. Of these, agriculture probably has the highest priority; it is also the most difficult. The Peking leadership has set a goal of producing 400 million tons of wheat, rice and other grains by 1985 and for achieving substantial agricultural mechanization by 1980. Both goals seem too ambitious. Though land in China is intensively cultivated and Chinese farmers are known for their innovation and diligence, yields lag far behind those of other countries. Peking has conferred with foreign farm experts, including U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland, about new seed varieties, the use of insecticides and the exchange of specialists. While the Chinese have made some progress toward mechanization, they need more than 1 million additional tractors, 320,000 trucks, at least 3 million combine harvesters, new drainage and irrigation machinery and 700,000 technicians for machinery repair and maintenance. The hardware will be difficult to get, since farm equipment is normally bought with surplus capital, which China must ordinarily use to purchase grain from abroad. Result: China is likely to remain a net importer of grain, and the rationing of edible oils and other staples will probably continue.
Foreign investment and technical aid will go far in bringing China's industrial capacity into the 20th century, the goal of the second modernization. Imitating such developing countries as Singapore and South Korea, the People's Republic has invited foreign companies to establish assembly and processing plants inside China. The Chinese work cheap--at about $25 a month, one-fifth of the average wage for an unskilled factory worker in Hong Kong.
But the problems of industrializing a country so primitively equipped are huge. China's gross national product was only $373 billion in 1977, compared to $1.889 trillion for the U.S. The Chinese per capita income was a lamentable $378. A generator plant in Harbin uses lathes, punch presses and milling machines that were built two and three decades ago in Czechoslovakia, East Germany and the Soviet Union. Japan builds 94 cars per worker per year; in China the comparable figures are one car, one worker. Steel, the essential building component for heavy industry, is regarded as a precious metal in China. The production goal for 1985 is 60 million tons; last year it fell just short of the halfway mark. Teng is characteristically candid about the problem. He refers to lo hou (lagging behind). "If you have an ugly face," he says, "there is no use pretending you are handsome. You cannot hide it, so you might just as well admit it."
One of the areas hardest hit by the turbulence of the Cultural Revolution was science/technology; the finest minds were sent to the country to learn egalitarianism and pig farming. Intellectuals until recently were branded as "stinking persons of the ninth category."*
As a result, the Chinese pool of scientists and engineers who kept up to date in their various fields grew perilously small. Teng's modernization drive now aims at rehabilitating scientists who were shunted to other work, at re-establishing research institutes and academies. According to one report, in Szechwan province alone 12,000 scientists and technicians have so far been returned to their old jobs from unrelated professions.
Despite the political depredations of Maoist anti-intellectualism, the Chinese are probably more confident of progress in this area than in any other of the Four Modernizations. The initial Chinese objective is the establishment within five years of a research network for the basic sciences, then a system of modern laboratories that will press on with research into what the Chinese (who have a sort of political fetish for numbers) call the Five Golden Blossoms: atomic science, semiconductors, computer technology, lasers and automation. In March, Vice Premier Fang Yi reported an eight-year timetable for China to begin the launching of space laboratories and probes.
Teng seems to have recognized the tumble-down state of Chinese learning. Today there are only about 630,000 university students in a population of 1 billion. Nationwide examinations for admission to universities were dropped in 1966 as part of the egalitarianism of the Cultural Revolution. Now they have not only been reinstated, but they have become rigorous and uniform. Elite schools have been established and given the best teachers and facilities. Among teachers, ranks and titles have been restored. Salary increases and other perquisites have been adopted. But the intellectual infrastructure of China is still cripplingly weak.
The fourth modernization, that of the military, will be almost as difficult to accomplish. Although it has the world's largest standing army (about 3% million), China's military machine is primitive, at least 20 years behind those of the superpowers. China's most potent bomber is the antiquated TU-16 of 1954. The People's Liberation Army has no antitank missiles, no armored helicopters and no modern battle tanks. Its nuclear warheads are mounted on intermediate-range missiles with a range of no more than 4,000 miles. Although China's navy is the world's third largest (in terms of manpower, not of ships), it is also outdated: its two nuclear-powered submarines, for example, carry no missiles.
China's obsessive military concern remains the U.S.S.R., just as Moscow's prevailing concern is the nature of Peking's goals. Peking's new open door policy toward the rest of the world will make it a stronger and more flexible rival of Moscow in the years to come. By simultaneously cultivating ties with Western --and even Eastern--Europe and with Japan, China is developing flank protection on two sides of its Soviet enemy.
The emerging pattern exasperates Moscow. Among other things, the Soviets profess astonishment that the West is willing to sell weapons to an unreliable China that still speaks of the inevitability of war. At the same time, the Russians seem willing enough to accept the normalization of relations between the U.S. and China, so long as the new friendship does not produce a tacit anti-Soviet alliance. Warns Georgi Arbatov, a Soviet expert on U.S. policy: "You cannot reconcile detente with attempts to make China some sort of military ally of NATO." A Western diplomat also cautioned: "I wonder if an economically and militarily powerful China by the year 2000 would be an unmitigated blessing for American interests. Would a China strong enough to threaten Russia in nuclear terms not constitute any threat to us at all?"
The U.S. normalization of relations with the People's Republic brings to full circle an extraordinary one-century course of American involvement in China. It is a history of passionate infatuation and ruthless exploitation, of missionary zeal and often of tremendous mutual incomprehension. The cycle started with the education in Hartford, Conn., of China's first foreign students in 1872. Eventually, as Dean Acheson wrote, "hardly a town in our land was without its society to collect funds and clothing for Chinese missions ... Thus was nourished the love portion of our love-hate complex that was to infuse so much emotion into our later China policy."
If there was condescending benevolence on America's part, there was also a deep cultural fascination--on both sides. Eventually many Americans seemed to have found in Chinese society forgotten revolutionary hopes transplanted from their own, and many Chinese discovered an unsuspected delight (even Mao finally did) in the mobility and openness of American society, the antithesis of China's own introspective and hierarchical world. In the late 1970s, many Americans are inclined to forget their view of the Chinese, during the Korean War, as a menacing ant-people in quilted jackets swarming across the Yalu River and brainwashing American innocents.
The most fascinating thing about China now is that it is a society facing almost infinite possibilities: No one, perhaps least of all the Chinese, knows how the tremendous experiment will end. Talking to a Japanese political delegation in Tokyo last October about a territorial dispute, Teng remarked: "Let's put it off for ten or 20 years. After that, who knows what kind of system we'll have?"
For the moment, Teng, Hua and their Politburo colleagues seem too intent upon the task of modernization to jeopardize it by making aggressive noises, either to foreigners or to themselves. The consensus among Sinologists is that Teng is indeed the man in charge; he holds enough power to be able to take his revenge on old Radical enemies, but still operates within constraints. "There are still some people in the Politburo who probably don't like the trends," says A. Doak Barnett of the Brookings Institution. "But these same people are also uneasy because of their past complicity, so to speak, in the purges of Teng. I think they will now be very careful in voicing their dissent."
Some Sinologists have long predicted that China would swing away from the ideological conflicts of Mao's last days to some form of pragmatic modernization. "The extreme emphasis on Utopian social goals," says Barnett, "was asking more out of a population than any population can be expected to give." Still, there is a very real danger that the Peking leaders could oversell their program to the Chinese people and thus provoke disillusionment and bitterness if there are no noticeable changes for the better in the next few years.
The Politburo clearly faces very hard decisions on how to allocate what are limited resources, considering the size of the task. If China must import 10 million tons of grain to feed its people by 1981, argues Swarthmore College Sinologist Kenneth Lieberthal, it will be almost impossible for the country to carry out its industrialization program at the speed it foresees. Also at issue will be what happens to the Four Modernizations if Teng dies before they are well under way. The basic Teng-Hua conflict would then be unresolved. In Lieberthal's formulation: "While all current Politburo members desperately want rapid modernization, Teng and his supporters are willing to transform China at a greater cost to the core values of the Chinese Revolution than are Hua and his supporters."
TIME Hong Kong Correspondent Ross H. Munro, who until last December was a resident reporter in Peking for the Toronto Globe and Mail, has a more optimistic perspective:
"Teng can be seen as setting up booby traps for any neo-quasi-Maoists who might try to renege on the commitment to modernization and try to return China to insularity. When Teng is dead, China will still have commitments to foreign creditors that will force it to continue pushing exports and internal economic development. When Teng is dead, there will probably be tens of thousands of bright young men and women in China who have been exposed to foreign teachers and foreign ideas and who will resist any return to xenophobia and romantic Maoism. And there may even be a military that will be unable to function without parts and technology from Hamburg or Los Angeles. Teng is thus beginning to lock China into the non-Communist orbit. If current trends continue for a decade, it is hard to conceive of China extricating itself from the orbit even if the modernization drive falters within the country."
what of Teng himself, the persistent heretic who gives lip service to the ideas of the Great Helmsman but who violates their spirit? Speaking as a historian and not as Carter's National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski offers one answer. "Any large system of thought and practice," he says, "lends itself to so many divergent interpretations that it is possible to be both a continuator and a dismantler of a certain ideological system at the same time. Trotsky and Stalin charged each other with being betrayers of Leninism, and each claimed to be the true inheritor of Leninism. In some respects, both were right in both instances." Perhaps inadvertently, Mao once gave his blessing to this kind of interpretation with his famous quote before the misbegotten Great Leap Forward: "Let a hundred flowers blossom, let a hundred schools of thought contend."
In an essay called The Hedgehog and the Fox, British Social Theorist Isaiah Berlin divided the world's thinkers into two categories, using as his guide an enigmatic fragment from the Greek poet Archilochus: "The fox knows many things; the hedgehog knows one big thing." Mao was quintessential hedgehog, a visionary with one organizing determinist principle to which he insisted the great diverse Chinese reality must conform. Hedgehogs like totalitarian worlds. Foxes can tolerate diversity, variety, change, disorder, the sheer plurality of life. It may be fateful for China's future that Teng Hsiao-p'ing, who languished for years in the shadow of China's hedgehog, is most certainly a fox. -
* The first eight categories being the other loathsome characters to be got rid of: renegades, spies, capitalist readers, landlords, rich peasants, counterrevolutionaries, bad people, rightists.
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