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Deng: Seeking Middle Ground
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11763 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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4 / 1987 |
1,753 Words |
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Harold C. Hinton
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A Marxist-Leninist party is the most effective machine ever devised for creating and perpetuating totalitarian political power. The Chinese Communist Party, the largest political party in the world, is essentially no different from others of its category. Ideology can be reinterpreted, even explained away if necessary, but the power of the party and its control over its people, once acquired, can last forever.
To most senior Chinese communists, the year 1956 appears in retrospect as a brief but golden age. Mao Tse-tung was more equal than his colleagues but not yet rampant. The Communist Party apparatus (or bureaucracy) basically ruled the country. Its patron was Mao's heir apparent, Liu Shaoqi, and its working head was the dynamic if diminutive Deng Xiaoping. Premier Zhou Enlai, an extraordinarily capable and flexible leader, effectively underpinned party rule with his state bureaucracy. China had largely shaken off Soviet tutelage, but Sino-Soviet relations were not yet in a state of conflict.
Beginning the following year, Mao, for complex reasons of his own, upset this relatively happy applecart. He dragged his colleagues and spurred his countrymen into one frantic and disastrous "mass campaign," the Great Leap Forward, and then, after a pause for recovery, into another, the Cultural Revolution. After the unadmitted collapse of the Cultural Revolution in late 1968, Zhou Enlai, with the able support of Deng Xiaoping after 1973, skillfully put the country and its foreign relations more or less together again. But Zhou and Mao both died in 1976, and their positions, or at least their titles, passed to an interim successor, Hua Guofeng, who showed intermittent Maoist tendencies.
It was with relief that the non-Maoist 1956-model conservatives in the party leadership united around Deng, Zhou's intended successor, at the end of 1978, to begin the process of getting rid of Hua and to contain or purge the Maoists remaining at the upper and middle levels of the party.
Opposition to Deng
Deng then became China's de facto strong man, and the conservatives soon began to oppose him, although with less dramatic results than those that had followed from their earlier opposition to Mao. Deng was accumulating too much power for their taste and was clearly planning to be succeeded by two of his chosen lieutenants, party General Secretary Hu Yaobang, who was regarded by the conservatives as unfit to hold office, and Premier Zhao Ziyang. In addition, Deng began to show a strong experimental tendency, for example by decollectivizing agriculture and by expanding a policy of "opening" China to the outside world that Hua had initiated; this, too, troubled the conservatives.
There were three foci of conservative resistance to Deng: the senior military leadership (or much of it), some top economic planners led by Chen Yun who favored a centralized economy run more or less along Soviet lines, and certain ideologically inclined (Marxist-Leninist, not Maoist) party members led by Peng Zhen, Deng's former colleague on the party Secretariat. These three groups tried to put together a coalition that could contain Deng, or at least his more unconventional initiatives, without necessarily ousting him. Fortunately for them, Deng is a much less powerful and violent opponent than Mao was in his
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