Reform and opening: the Deng Xiaoping era

The two whatevers and the criterion of truth

Hua Guofeng’s legitimacy after arresting the Gang of Four derived from Mao’s nomination. The People’s Daily editorial of February 1977 declared “we will resolutely uphold whatever decisions Chairman Mao made and unswervingly follow whatever instructions he gave”, which meant keeping the verdicts of the Cultural Revolution and Deng’s exclusion. Deng replied in an April letter that Mao Zedong Thought must be understood “completely and accurately”, and returned in July. The article “Practice is the sole criterion of truth”, organised by Hu Yaobang in May 1978, set off a national debate that rallied the veterans and provincial leaders to Deng. Source 1 · Source 2

The central work conference of November–December 1978 went beyond its planned agricultural agenda to reverse the verdict on the 1976 Tiananmen incident, rehabilitate Peng Dehuai, Tao Zhu and others, and return Chen Yun to the Politburo Standing Committee. Deng’s closing speech of 13 December, “Emancipate the mind, seek truth from facts and unite as one in looking to the future”, became the keynote of the Third Plenum that followed. The plenum abandoned “class struggle as the key link” and moved the party’s focus to socialist modernisation; Hua kept his titles but power had passed. Source 3 · Source 4

Rehabilitation and the Resolution on History

From 1978 Hu Yaobang’s Organisation Department reviewed the unjust cases of the Cultural Revolution and before. Liu Shaoqi was rehabilitated in 1980 with a state funeral; all but a handful of the 550,000 rightists of 1957, those implicated in the “61 renegades” and “Inner Mongolian People’s Party” cases, and twenty million people wearing landlord and rich-peasant “hats” lost their labels. The process, called “bringing order out of chaos”, created the social base of reform. Source 4 · Source 5

How to judge Mao remained. After four thousand cadres had debated it in 1980–1981, the “Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People’s Republic”, adopted by the Sixth Plenum in June 1981, classed the Cultural Revolution as a comprehensive error Mao had “launched and led” and the Great Leap as a leftist error, while concluding that Mao’s merits were primary and his faults secondary and that Mao Zedong Thought was the “crystallisation of collective wisdom”. Deng refused a Khrushchev-style total negation — “to discard Chairman Mao’s banner would be to negate the party’s whole history”. At the same plenum Hua Guofeng stepped down as chairman and Hu Yaobang succeeded him. Source 6 · Source 7

The countryside: from Xiaogang to the end of the communes

Reform began with the peasants. In the drought of 1978 eighteen households at Xiaogang in Fengyang, Anhui, risked punishment by putting their thumbprints to a contract dividing the land, and the next year’s harvest multiplied. Wan Li, Anhui’s first secretary, looked away and backed them with the provincial “six articles”, and Zhao Ziyang in Sichuan permitted the same experiment; “for rice look for Wan Li, for grain look for Ziyang”, people said. Source 8 · Source 9

The centre at first confined contracting to poor mountain areas, then allowed it step by step in “Document 75” of 1980 and the “No. 1 Document” of 1982; in 1983 the separation of government from commune dissolved the communes. With higher procurement prices, farm output grew more than seven per cent a year from 1978 to 1984 and grain rose from 300 to 400 million tonnes. Township and village enterprises absorbed surplus rural labour and became a pillar of 1980s growth. Land remained collectively owned, with only cultivation rights given to households. Source 8 · Source 10

Opening: the special zones and the “windows”

In 1979 Guangdong’s first secretary Xi Zhongxun asked the centre for the freedom to “take one step ahead” as a remedy for the flight to Hong Kong, and Deng answered with the name “special zone” and the words “the centre has no money; cut your own road”. In August 1980 Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Shantou and Xiamen became special economic zones. Processing for Hong Kong capital, paid transfer of land-use rights, contract labour and foreign investment were allowed for the first time, and the fishing town of Shenzhen became a city of a million within a decade. Source 11 · Source 12

The zones were contested. Chen Yun and the planners suspected them as a “revival of the concessions”, and the Guangdong smuggling cases of 1982 and the Hainan car-import scandal of 1985 gave critics ammunition. Deng’s first southern tour in January 1984 confirmed that “the experience of Shenzhen is correct” and opened fourteen more coastal cities; in 1988 Hainan became a province and a zone. Chen Yun stood for the “birdcage economy” — the bird of the market flying inside the cage of the plan — and Deng for the pragmatism of “crossing the river by feeling for stones”. Source 13 · Source 14

The political boundary: Democracy Wall and the four cardinal principles

From November 1978 posters appeared on the wall at Xidan in Beijing. At first they voiced grievances from the Cultural Revolution and demands to reverse the verdict on the 1976 Tiananmen incident, and Deng called them “a good thing” and used them in the plenum’s debates. But in December the electrician Wei Jingsheng’s “The Fifth Modernisation — Democracy” argued that Deng’s four modernisations were hollow without democracy and that Deng himself could become a dictator. Unofficial journals such as Explorations and April Fifth Forum followed. Source 15 · Source 16

On 30 March 1979 Deng proclaimed at a theory conference the “four cardinal principles” — the socialist road, the dictatorship of the proletariat, party leadership, and Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought; Wei Jingsheng was arrested the next day and sentenced to fifteen years in October. Democracy Wall was closed in December, and the 1980 constitutional revision removed the right to “speak out freely and put up big-character posters”. The four principles thereafter set the political limit of reform, grounding the campaigns against “spiritual pollution” in 1983 and “bourgeois liberalisation” in 1987. Source 17 · Source 18

Urban reform and the turbulence of the late 1980s

The “Decision on Reform of the Economic Structure” of October 1984 moved reform to the cities. State enterprises were given retained profits and managerial autonomy, a dual-track system in which plan and market prices coexisted was introduced, and individual and private businesses were allowed. Under Premier Zhao Ziyang growth exceeded ten per cent a year from 1985 to 1988, but the dual track bred “official profiteering” — cadres arbitraging between the two prices — and corruption, and inflation climbed. Source 10 · Source 19

When student protests stirred by Fang Lizhi’s lectures spread from Hefei to Shanghai and Beijing at the end of 1986, the elders held Hu Yaobang responsible and forced his resignation in January 1987; Zhao Ziyang became general secretary. At the Thirteenth Congress that year Zhao advanced the theory of the “primary stage of socialism” and political reforms such as separating party and government. In summer 1988 the price “breakthrough” Deng pushed set off panic buying and bank runs and was withdrawn, and under the austerity of “rectification” the reformers and conservatives entered 1989 deeply divided. Source 20 · Source 19

The 1992 southern tour and the “socialist market economy”

After the crackdown of June 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the conservatives slowed reform while warning of “peaceful evolution” — subversion by the West — and the debate over whether a measure was “surnamed socialist or capitalist” revived. In January–February 1992 the 88-year-old Deng, holding no office, toured Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shanghai declaring that “without reform there is only a dead end” and that “planning and markets are not what distinguish socialism from capitalism”. Source 21 · Source 22

The talks became known first through the Hong Kong and Guangdong press, and with the support of the army and the provinces the Jiang Zemin leadership adopted them. In October 1992 the Fourteenth Congress made the “socialist market economy” the goal of reform, and a decade of rapid growth, state-enterprise reform and WTO accession in 2001 followed. Reform and opening lifted some 800 million people out of poverty by the World Bank’s measure but left inequality, corruption, environmental damage and the absence of political reform. Deng’s road — reform the economy, hold the polity — has been contrasted ever since with Gorbachev’s. Source 10 · Source 23