by Wendy Liu
For Those Whose Concept of China Has Frozen in the 1970s and for Anyone
Who Would Like to Know About Today's China.
2. China's Redness Began to Lighten...
China's redness began, yes began, to officially lighten towards the end of 1978, the
start of a new era in the history of modern China. The great turning point was of
course the convening of the famous Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee
of the Communist Party of China. The "Third Plenum" repudiated the ultra Maoist
notion of "Whateverism," discarded the slogan of "Class struggle is the key
lin," announced the shift of the work of the Party to the building of "socialist
modernization" and implementation of the policy of "reform and opening up,"
established for the first time the leadership with "Deng Xiaoping at the core," and
\laid the foundation for China to pursue the "Four Modernizations program" -
modernization of industry, agriculture, science & technology, and national defense.
The Third Plenum not only ended officially the red, miserable and cruel proletarian
class struggles that had gone on in China since the 50s and culminated in the 60s and
70s, more importantly it embodied an act of "xuan ya le ma" a Chinese proverb, reining
in the horse on the brink of the precipice, by the Communist Party of China for its
own sake as well as for that of the Chinese nation, thus ushering in the most earthshaking
changes within a society the world had yet to see.
Also that year, a group of courageous peasants in the central China province of
Anhui secretly experimented with a "responsibility system" with households contracting
the collective land to grow crops, sell the grain and keep the surplus for themselves.
The experiment was so successful that it spread like wild fire. The system was soon
sanctioned by China's central government, promoted and adopted officially throughout rural
China. Few in the outside world realized it at that time, but the new household contract
system in fact was the first major breakaway of China from the strait-jacket of its
socialist economy. The practice of the household contract system in fact dismantled the
rural commune method of collective farming established since the mid 1950s. The
significance of the development could only be matched by the size of the population it
benefited: when 90% of China's population lived in the rural areas then. No one had
imagined it or planned it, but the peasants of China were the vanguard in China's economic
reforms, or capitalism, in the late 70s. So successful was the rural reform that
China's National Day celebration parade in Tiananmen Square a couple of years later
started with a float featuring the great household contract system!
In the following year, 1979, the great reformer Deng Xiaoping authorized the opening
of the first four special economic zones in China's southeast coastal cities and
gave them the green light to experiment with market economy and to introduce advanced
management, technology and capital from Hong Kong and from the rest of the world.
Deng's famous catch phrase of pragmatism from the 60s, for which he had been severely
criticized, was catching up again in China: "It doesn't matter if a cat is black or
white as long as it catches mice." It was also in1979 that the world heard for
the first time the new Deng brand of socialism: "market socialism." It was Deng of
all the Chinese leaders who put forward that year the idea that socialism, which had
always been identified with a state-owned and centrally planned economy, should
also be able to develop market economy. Socialism and market?! Market socialism?!
No matter how strange or discordant the two words sounded together, it was
exciting, it was trailblazing, and it couldn't be as red as the conventional socialism!
Again in 1979, the historic Mao-Nixon meeting of seven years earlier finally bore
fruits in the "normalization" of Sino-US diplomatic relations, which kicked off a
"China Fever" around the world. And this former Young Pioneer, now an aspiring member
of China's foreign affairs sector, had the honor to work for the visiting U.S. Vice
President Walter Mondale and his delegation. To millions of ordinary Chinese,
the normalization of diplomatic relations with the US, a country viewed for years
as the public enemy number one in the world, and the sight of the Chinese and
the American flags flown side by side, told how much their country was changing.
The same year, however, also saw the death of the Democracy Wall, a wall on the side
of a main street in Beijing, where representatives of the political-reform-minded Red
Guard generation made their voices heard by putting up Chinese brush-written posters
of commentaries and opinions as well as their pamphlets. A famous piece of writing
on the Wall was one titled "China's Five Modernizations" by Wei Jingsheng who argued
that China needed another modernization in addition to the four, that of ideology.
It is regretful that the Chinese government with Deng Xiaoping now at its helm, newly
out of the Cultural Revolutionary turbulence and fresh onto the road of reform, saw those
posters as a potential hot-bed for yet another Red-Guard type rebellion and put an end to
it.
(To be
continued...)
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