Southern tour (1992)
남순강화 (1992)
The talks and remarks Deng Xiaoping, then without formal office, gave in Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Guangzhou and Shanghai between 18 January and 21 February 1992. Restarting the reforms stalled since 1989, he declared that a planned economy was not equivalent to socialism nor a market economy to capitalism, opening the way for the Fourteenth Congress in October to set the “socialist market economic system” as the goal of reform.
In depth
After 1989 the conservatives slowed reform and warned against “peaceful evolution”, and the Soviet collapse of 1991 deepened the doubts of elders such as Chen Yun. With Beijing media rebutting the “Huangfu Ping” articles in Shanghai’s Liberation Daily, the 87-year-old Deng left Beijing by train without reporters on 17 January. In Shenzhen he said that those who saw the zones as a road to capitalism “lacked basic knowledge”, and urged bolder experiment: “We must not act like women with bound feet.” He said:
The proportion of planning to market forces is not the essential difference between socialism and capitalism. A planned economy is not equivalent to socialism, because there is planning under capitalism too; a market economy is not capitalism, because there are markets under socialism too.
In Zhuhai he told military leaders including Yang Shangkun, Liu Huaqing and Yang Baibing that those who did not promote reform should step down; held without Jiang Zemin’s knowledge, the meeting was taken as a form of pressure. The tour was at first ignored by the central media and reported first in Hong Kong, and Shenzhen Special Zone Daily published a detailed account on 26 March. When the army declared it would “escort and protect” reform, Jiang’s leadership changed course, and in October the Fourteenth Congress made the socialist market economy the goal. Sayings such as “development is the hard truth” and the “cat theory” spread widely, but the development model the tour accelerated did not resolve the coastal-inland gap or corruption, nor did it revive political reform.