MCLC: portrait of Deng as reformer

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: portrait of Deng as reformer
***********************************************************

Source: Sinosphere Blog, NYT (11/9/13):
http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/09/portrait-of-deng-as-reformer
-in-1978-plenum-ignores-history

Portrait of Deng as Reformer in 1978 Plenum Ignores History
By CHRIS BUCKLEY 

China’s Communist Party leader, Xi Jinping, wants the late Deng Xiaoping’s
magic. Mr. Xi will lay out proposals for economic rejuvenation at a
leadership conference that started Saturday, and state-run media have
likened the event to a historic meeting in 1978 when, they say, Mr. Deng
began an era of market “reform and opening up.”

But anyone looking for inspiration and instruction from Mr. Deng should
beware: the conventional account of the 1978 meeting is a compound of
selective memories, and a deceptive guide to how China’s steps to economic
transformation really happened.

“To put a halo on this meeting as a conference of reform and opening up is
to concoct a myth,” Bao Tong, a former aide to ousted party secretary Zhao
Ziyang, a central figure in the tumult of the 1980s, said in an interview
with a Chinese researcher published in 2008.

The party’s widely repeated version of history depicts Mr. Deng as seizing
control at the Third Plenum, or meeting, of the 11th Central Committee in
late 1978. Inspired by Mr. Deng, the accounts suggest, the officials
started China on market reforms, jettisoned the ideological debris of Mao
Zedong’s era, and sidelined the old-guard party secretary, Hua Guofeng,
who had defended Mao, resisted economic change, and stood in the way of
rehabilitating officials purged by Mao.

Since that time, Third Plenums of successive Central Committees have held
a special place in China’s political calendar. They come every five years
or so, and are when leaders lay down their priorities. The first such
plenum in a leader’s tenure is especially important, as this meeting is
for Mr. Xi. And party propaganda has invited flattering comparisons with
the famous conference of 1978.

But scholars who have studied that time using interviews, documents and
memoirs offer an account of change that is more halting and less
clear-cut. Mr. Deng emerges less a masterly visionary and more a canny
politician, reacting to events and shifting his views step by step.

“The official view of the Third Plenum, too often echoed in foreign
studies, exaggerates the meeting,” said Frederick Teiwes, an emeritus
professor of government at the University of Sydney, and Warren Sun, a
historian at Monash University in Australia, in emailed remarks they
prepared together. They are writing a book about that era.

“It ignores Hua’s achievements in moving the country away from Maoist
orthodoxies and refocusing on the economy, underplays initial reform
efforts before the Plenum, and oversimplifies a complex process that saw
Deng emerge as paramount leader over the next two year,” the professors
wrote.

The word “market” did not appear in the official communiqué from the 1978
meeting; the word “reform” appeared twice. Only some six years later did
the slogan “reform and opening up” become widely used, Professors Teiwes
and Sun said.

The drama in 1978 was played out at a work conference that preceded the
formal Central Committee meeting; the two gatherings together are usually
called the Third Plenum of that year. The assembled officials were
supposed to discuss economic policy, but some began to urge leaders to
confront the aftermath of Mao’s era and politically rehabilitate officials
who were purged by him.

Neither Mr. Deng nor Mr. Hua instigated this shift. They had agreed
beforehand that the meeting should focus on improving the economy, and Mr.
Deng was abroad when the demands for rehabilitation burst out in the
meeting sessions.

“In reality, the meeting slipped out of control,” Mr. Bao, the former
party aide, said in his 2008 interview. “Both Hua Guofeng and Deng
Xiaoping were taken by surprise.”

After he returned from abroad, Mr. Deng supported rehabilitating fallen
cadres, but set limits and did not want to damage Mao’s standing, said Han
Gang, a historian at East China Normal University in Shanghai who is
writing a study of that period. “He wanted to focus on the future, and
didn’t want to dwell on the details of the past,” Mr. Han said.

The 1978 meeting endorsed adjustments in state planning to rejuvenate the
economy, but changes were already underway. Mr. Hua has been depicted in
earlier official accounts as a hapless defender of Maoist orthodoxy. But
he recognized the need for change, although he faced damaging criticism
for adjusting too slowly to shifting ideological winds, said Professors
Teiwes and Sun.

On the other hand, Mr. Deng gradually embraced the idea of market-driven
economic growth, rather than adjustments within a state plan, Professor
Han said. Before the Third Plenum, Mr. Deng and Mr. Hua shared similar
views on the need to speed up economic growth and import more technology.

“The shift occurred incrementally,” Professor Han said.

“It wasn’t as if suddenly at the Third Plenum he was seized by inspiration
to reform,” he said of Mr. Deng. “To date market economic reform thinking
to that meeting is too early.”

In fact, a document provisionally endorsed by the 1978 meeting explicitly
opposed the “household responsibility system,” which became the watershed
change that freed farmers from the grip of communes. That change allocated
land to farmers and allowed them to contract production, so they could
keep any surplus to eat or to sell.

Mr. Deng and other leaders took years to come around to clearly supporting
the policy; effectively ending the communes, an emblem of Mao’s socialism,
did not come easily. Decisive momentum for the household policy came only
in 1981, Professors Teiwes and Sun said.

The 1978 meeting marked Mr. Deng’s growing pre-eminence in the leadership,
although he never formally took the formal title of party chief. Mr. Hua
was effectively removed from office in late 1980, when impatience and
dissatisfaction with him came to a head.

The lessons from the 1978 meeting and Mr. Deng’s “groping” journey towards
embracing market-driven reforms should discourage heady expectations for
Mr. Xi’s own Third Plenum, Professor Han said.

“Many people have a mindset of expectations that they put on a high-level
decision-making meeting or a document,” he said. “But in reality in China
making a sudden major change is very difficult. It takes time.”