The History of China: Third Edition by David Curtis Wright

Author:David Curtis Wright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ABC-CLIO, LLC
Published: 2020-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

8

Deng’s China

News of the arrest of the Gang of Four was greeted with widespread jubilation in China, not so much because the Chinese people knew a great deal about each member but because it seemed to portend a final stop to the endless and exhausting mass movements that Mao and the radicals so loved to promote. In the summer of 1977, all four members were expelled from the party, and meanwhile Deng Xiaoping was making a comeback. In early 1977, he was allowed to return to Beijing, and he quickly emerged as the party’s dominant personality, effectively shunting Hua Guofeng aside. It simply did not matter anymore that Mao had apparently designated Hua as his successor; people were fed up with Mao and his antics. Deng was soon leading the charge against the radicals and moved, along with the fellow moderate Hu Yaobang, to purge the party of its extremists. The pendulum had swung the other way, and now the radicals who had joined the party during the heady days of the Cultural Revolution were subject to summary expulsion. Deng and his supporters then launched an enormously popular program of reform in China.

Deng detested the personality cult that Mao and his devotees had fostered, and he quickly dismantled it. Huge statues of Mao were pulled down all over China, and Deng rejected all attempts to create a similar personality cult around himself. Deng wanted to change China, but he would do it from behind the scenes, without the heroically high profile of Chairman Mao, the Great Helmsman. In August 1977, Deng stated in a major party speech that Mao had actually made mistakes. On this occasion he also propounded the famous principle “seek truth from facts” (which was originally a methodological and epistemological approach taken by Qing philologists). By this he meant that the Chinese Communists should henceforth be less concerned about ideological purity and doctrinal rigidity and be more flexible and pragmatic in their thinking: whatever worked was good, and whatever did not was bad. Deng’s star was rising, and by the end of the year he and his fellow moderates Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang had been admitted to the Politburo. Deng, labeled a capitalist roader during the Cultural Revolution, was now emerging as China’s preeminent leader. Political developments turned on a dime in the People’s Republic.

To the relief of China’s population, Deng announced that there would be no more mass movements and that the nation would henceforth concentrate on building its economy and improving the lives of its citizens. Deng allowed, even encouraged, individual enterprise and found nothing wrong with material incentives. Diehard conservative Communists stewed about his restoration of “capitalism” in China, but their day was now gone and they could do nothing about it but rant among themselves. Deng was doing for China what Mao would never do—providing a peaceful, orderly environment in which stable economic development could take place. To the relief of hundreds of millions of peasants, the last vestiges of the communes and agricultural cooperatives were disbanded in the countryside in the early 1980s.

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