Dan Blumenthal
The Cultural Revolution, Mao Zedong’s last grand scheme, was finally petering out, having ravaged the People’s Republic of China. Many of the country’s top political and intellectual leaders had been purged: persecuted, “sent down” to work camps in rural areas, or even killed. It was December 1978. At the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee, held at the Jingxi Hotel in Beijing, Deng Xiaoping, survivor of many purges, returned to power, outwitting his main political rival, Hua Guofeng.
Since the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, which preceded it, China’s economy and international standing had declined. Living standards were lower than on the eve of the takeover by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. To its north, the PRC faced a hostile Soviet Union; to its south, Vietnam was gaining hegemony over mainland southeast Asia, including Laos and Cambodia. Deng maintained that the “correct path” to socialist modernization was a set of sweeping economic reforms: China would let foreign capital and technology pour into the country, permit free-enterprise competition with state-owned enterprises, and introduce other, limited capitalist measures.
“Capitalist tools in socialist hands,” China’s leaders called the plan. They were not espousing economic liberalism, they insisted, or changing China’s governing ideology. Despite limitations that the latter imposed, the great Chinese economic boom soon began. Since the Third Plenum, China’s GDP has grown over 9 percent per year on average; its share of world GDP, 3 percent in the 1970s, had risen to 20 percent in 2015. Raising itself from abject poverty, it is now the world’s second-largest market.
The main challenge for Deng and his comrades was to put aside Mao’s “continuous revolution” without appearing to jettison the revered leader. In China after Mao, Frank Dikötter, a Dutch historian at the University of Hong Kong, explains how they pulled it off.
The seeds of China’s reform period after Mao had been planted in “On the Ten Major Relationships,” a secret speech Mao gave in 1956. In the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev had just denounced his predecessor Joseph Stalin, dead less than three years. Shocked, Mao concluded that China needed to modernize faster if he was to avoid a similar posthumous verdict. China must follow its own plan of socialist development, he maintained.
Drawing on Mao’s speech, Deng and Zhou Enlai translated it into the “Four Modernizations”: industry, agriculture, science and technology, and defense. Deng asked Mao for permission to publish “Ten Major Relationships” so that the cadre could have the benefit of his theoretical guidance, and the People’s Daily ran it in 1976. So Mao succeeded: Rather than discard him as Khrushchev had discarded Stalin, Deng went to him for his stamp of approval for the plan of “reform and opening.”
The CCP never abandoned Mao’s legacy. It tries to “reinterpret” his ideology to manage contemporary challenges and use his words to explain changes in policy and strategic direction. To disown him would be to question the Communist Party and invite a death sentence, as the Chinese leaders learned from their Russian counterparts.
Dikötter, who has written more than a dozen books about China since the communist revolution, is a commanding narrator of the story: of Mao’s maneuvering to secure his legacy, and of Deng’s to save the party. Dikötter armed himself with over 600 official CCP documents from a dozen municipal and provincial archives before they closed after the onset of the Covid pandemic. He found the memoir of Li Rui, who was imprisoned for 20 years after serving as Mao’s personal secretary. Li was a member of the Central Committee after his release. As a member of that committee, he was able to record high-level conversations. The historical value of his memoir would be hard to overstate.
China after Mao offers a rare window into the thinking and machinations of the CCP, the world’s largest ruling party and relentlessly opaque. Dikötter uncovers such hitherto unknown incidents as a conversation between General Secretary Zhao Ziyang and Erich Honecker, the East German head of state. Zhao was one of the most reform-minded of China’s leaders and spent his dying days under house arrest for daring to suggest compromise with the student leaders at Tiananmen Square in 1989.
But even Zhou would not abide serious political reform. He told Honecker that the Chinese people would raise their living standards but in the end “acknowledge the superiority of socialism,” Dikötter writes. Then, Zhou added, “we can reduce the scope of liberalization further and further.”
How right he turned out to be. Under Xi Jinping, the Chinese people know less freedom than they did just a decade ago. Dikötter makes a compelling case that economic reform was chiefly a political instrument in the hands of China’s hardened socialist true believers. The Communist Party would not budge on the question of any ideological opening.
Today, four decades after Deng’s reforms began, China still ties its economy to socialist five-year plans. The party still owns all of China’s land as well as most of its banks, large enterprises, and raw materials.
Even Xi’s approach to technology is cast in socialist terms. The State Council has even designated data a factor of production, alongside land, labor, capital, and technology. Party leaders “firmly believe in the superiority of the socialist system,” Dikötter notes. Their task from 1978 until now has been to build it better.
The plan to develop and use capitalist tools while maintaining authoritarian control was replete with risks for the latter. As the Maoist chokehold eased, democracy movements and protests gained momentum. Even before Tiananmen Square, Deng blamed the growing demand for political freedom on the continued existence of “imperialism and hegemony” — on the U.S. and the West — and reminded the party faithful not to get carried away. He issued “four cardinal principles” to guide party leaders even as they wielded capitalist tools: China must follow the socialist road, be run by dictatorship of the proletariat, be led by the CCP, and follow Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.
Workers expressed discontent over the increasingly uneven distribution of the tremendous wealth created during China’s rapid economic growth. Students demanded political reforms based on liberal values. That combination brought tensions to a boiling point in April and May 1989 as students massed for demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. Dikötter recounts the decision-making process, at the highest levels of the CCP, that led Deng and his premier, Li Peng, to send in the army to fire on the protesters, killing hundreds to thousands.
The shock of Tiananmen was part of what the scholar and national-security official Rush Doshi calls a “trifecta,” the other two parts being the collapse of the Soviet Union and the overwhelming U.S. victory in the Gulf War. Doshi describes the internal reforms that the CCP enacted even as it formulated a new approach to geopolitics. Before he passed from the scene, Deng left his successor, Jiang Zemin, a strategic guideline based on his assessment of U.S. hostility, the new geopolitical condition of unipolarity, and “hegemonism.” Deng judged that the protesters at Tiananmen aimed to overthrow the PRC and the socialist system and that Washington had been determined to help the “counterrevolutionaries.” That dark assessment of U.S. motives came despite the soft and reassuring approach by George H. W. Bush’s national-security adviser Brent Scowcroft, who infamously toasted China’s leaders and told them to ride out the political uproar that Tiananmen had sparked in the West.
It is now popular in Washington to pronounce on the advent of a new cold war, but in the mind of Beijing the first cold war never ended. According to the PRC’s hard-line leaders, the capitalist-imperialist West began aiming at the Chinese socialist system with new fervor after the collapse of Soviet communism. The CCP was determined to build up its external power to blunt the attack. Deng believed that “the West” wanted “unrest” in China” and that “the imperialists,” as he told the CCP Central Committee, “want socialist countries to change their nature.”
The CCP needed a strategy to survive the pressure. In a speech to the Central Committee in 1989, Deng summarized what would become gospel, the CCP’s “strategic guideline.” It served as the basis of China’s grand strategy for the next 20 years. Deng told his audience to “observe the situation coolly,” hold their ground, “act calmly,” and be patient so that they could “quietly immerse” themselves in “practical work to accomplish something — something for China.”
“Hide our capabilities” and “bide our time,” this guidance was called in the West: The party was to “struggle” against hegemonism while maintaining China’s autonomy and freedom of maneuver. China would increase its power but, in Jiang’s words, “draw in” its “claws.” China still has a dynamic economy and an impressive technological base, but Xi is ridding it of many capitalist features, having decided that further economic reform would threaten the socialist system.
Xi admires Marx but favors Lenin. To Xi’s mind, the revolution that will eventually topple the capitalist-imperialists (the Americans) needs more of a push. At the most recent CCP Congress, in October 2022, he used his two-hour speech to prepare the party faithful for a long and protracted struggle. The CCP and its socialism would prevail, he promised, but he warned that the U.S. and the West in general would fight to hold its dominance on the world stage. China must use the “gravitational pull” of its massive economy to weaponize supply chains and make the U.S. and other adversaries more dependent on it than it is on them.
The People’s Liberation Army, which is now used to intimidate China’s neighbors, must modernize and reform faster, Xi says. China must “catch up and surpass” the U.S. in technology and science. Beijing must use its “discourse power” to convince parts of the West that it can play a constructive role in international affairs and to convince many neutral countries that the global political and security architecture it offers is more just and effective than the West’s.
All of this was made possible thanks to Deng’s reforms. Dikötter dispels the idea that they were ever undertaken as anything but a means for the CCP to maintain power and prove that a socialist system could outcompete a capitalist one. Far from celebrating the end of the Soviet–American rivalry, China concluded that the U.S. would continue to wage the same cold war, which the CCP has been planning to win ever since. The U.S. has woken up to the contours of this new struggle but responded with sporadic focus. The most pressing geopolitical question of our time is whether America will develop and follow a strategy to win what for Beijing has been an ongoing but for Washington is a new cold war.
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