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Deng: Seeking Middle Ground
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11763 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1987 |
1,753 Words |
| Author
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Harold C. Hinton
Harold C. Hinton is a professor of political science and
international affairs at the Institute for Sino-Soviet
Studies, George Washington University. His latest book is
Korea under New Leadership: The Fifth Republic. Several of his
books will be published soon, including China's Long Ascent:
The Foreign Policy of a Dissatisfied Power. |
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,
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