Deng Xiaoping and the Chinese Revolution

A Political Biography

David Goodman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134831210
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

To the outside world Deng Xiaoping represents a contradiction - he is both China's most successful moderniser, and the `Butcher of Beijing', China's supreme leader who must take responsibility for the events surrounding Tiananmen Square in June 1989. However, Deng the politition has no such contradiction: only the Chinese Communist Party can bring modernisation to China. For Deng any threat to the Communist Party is a threat to the project of China's modernisation. This book attempts to reach beyond the spectacular economic success of recent years to understand Deng's own particular role and the sources of his political power. Deng Xiaoping was involved with the communist movement before there was even a Communitst Party of China and his entire career has been shaped by both the party and the network of relationships and people within it. David Goodman explores the way in which Deng has survived being purged three times via his contacts with key politicians, Zhou Enlai in Paris in the early 1920s and Mao Zedong from 1933 to the early 1960s. His close relationship with the military from the Sino-Japanese War of 1937 through to the present day, has also enabled him to survive difficult political periods. Indeed, Deng's wartime experience, in the Taihang Mountains, plays a central but often overlooked role in his later career, particularly as a source of political support. David Goodman has been able to draw on the substantial documentary sources that have become available from China since 1989 as well as the analysis of Deng's political life that has proliferated inside the People's Republic in recent years. In addition, there is included a catalogue and analysis of the speeches and writings of Deng Xiaoping since 1938, that will prove to be an invaluable reference aid to his years of influence and power. The result is a balanced evaluation of Deng the politician that provides fresh insights into the career of one of the twentieth centuy's greatest political survivors.

1 Deng Xiaoping, communism and revolution

In China, the period after the 3rd plenum of the 11th Central Committee of the CCP in December 1978 is usually regarded as both the era of reform and of Deng Xiaoping. However, during that time Deng was never Chairman or General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), President of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) or Premier. Though he had been General Secretary and (twice) Acting Premier of the State Council before the Cultural Revolution, he did not resume those positions in the 1970s or 1980s. Indeed, after 8 November 1989, when his request to retire was officially approved by the 5th plenum of the 13th Central Committee, he held no formal position at all. His leadership of the CCP, the PRC and of reform was derived from the way he was regarded as China’s ‘paramount leader’ practically after Hua Guofeng stepped down from the Chairmanship of the CCP in 1980, but in effect after the 3rd plenum.¹

Deng Xiaoping remained better known, both inside and outside China, than those who were more formally appointed to positions of authority and few doubt that through the late 1970s, 1980s and into the 1990s he was the single most important individual in China. Together with Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, Deng is usually regarded, with reason, as one of the key figures in the evolution of communism in China. Whatever else he may have achieved, more than anyone else it was he who was responsible for reversing the political and economic lunacy of Mao’s later years, and for starting the process of bringing China into the twentieth century.

There are two radically different images of Deng Xiaoping in the West. One is as a communist modernizer acceptable to the capitalist world: an image that first emerged during the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the years before Gorbachev, Yeltsin, the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, the CCP under his leadership abandoned the political straitjacket Mao had imposed on the PRC during the Cultural Revolution, decided on a programme of modernization and instituted considerable political reforms. At times it even seemed that the CCP was prepared to abandon any pretence of communism. Both reform and modernization were based to a large extent on foreign economic involvement in China. There was an urgent need for China to improve its image abroad and its foreign relations. Deng Xiaoping was a key player in those efforts, speaking at the United Nations and touring the world, visiting the United States, Japan, Western Europe and South-east Asia at the head of government delegations. Appearing on television in a ten-gallon hat when in Houston did his and China’s cause no harm at all. A short man with a round face, he projected a comfortable image like that of everyone’s favourite uncle. For the United States government, China under Deng seemed an appropriate ally in its strategic moves against the Soviet Union, and it was fully prepared to play the China Card. In 1979 Deng was even nominated as Time magazine’s Man of the Year, the first time a communist had been so honoured.²

The second image of Deng is less comfortable to the West. In 1989 the CCP under Deng’s leadership suppressed popular demonstrations throughout China, often quite brutally. This confrontation, between the population on the one hand and the CCP and the government of China on the other, came to a head on 4 June with the forced clearing of Tiananmen Square (where the demonstrations had been concentrated) by armed troops of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the subsequent considerable loss of life. Deng Xiaoping’s responsibility was not something attributed to him by an outraged Western public opinion, it was a responsibility he publicly welcomed in order to ensure, in his view, that modernization could and would continue: turmoil had been developing into a ‘counter-revolutionary rebellion’ which had to be brought into line. In Deng’s own words, ‘This was the storm that was bound to happen…it was just a matter of time and scale. It has turned out in our favour…’³ Once again television has undoubtedly had a role to play, for the events unfolded under the eyes of the international media whose reporters had gathered in Beijing, originally for the historic visit of President Gorbachev in May.

This political biography provides an explanation of the relationship between those two images of Deng. Both tend to over-simplification, as must necessarily be the case, and as indeed is any assumed contradiction between them. In the West there is a tendency to believe that in general the drive for economic modernization is accompanied by the emergence of liberal politics. This may eventually happen in China but it does not of course mean that those who advocated economic modernization in the post-Mao era were necessarily going to be political liberals in any meaningful sense other than preferring to emphasize economic growth rather than class conflict in the programme of the CCP.

Deng Xiaoping was a committed communist for all his adult life, and for part of his adolescence. However, this was probably as much an organizational and social commitment as one including ideological concerns. At the age of 16 in France he became involved with the people and organizations who were soon to form the Communist Party of China, and some of whom within a very short period of time were to wield considerable influence within its leadership. From then on the CCP not only organized his life, it was his life. The CCP took him to Moscow to train as a political organizer and back to China. At its direction, he travelled all over the country before the CCP came to power in 1949, working and fighting for the communist cause. Though the CCP may not have formally decided whom he was to marry, it certainly determined his marriage choices and his divorce, and there is more than a suggestion in his daughter’s biography that CCP colleagues acted as match-maker for all three of his marriages.⁴

After 1949 Deng’s commitment led not only to high office—particularly membership of the CCP’s Political Bureau and to be General Secretary of the party as early as the mid-1950s—but also to persecution and vilification. In 1966, at the start of the Cultural Revolution, he was dismissed and castigated as China’s ‘Number Two Person in Authority Taking the Capitalist Road’—the second most important ‘capitalist reader’ after Liu Shaoqi in opposition to Mao Zedong. In 1976 in Mao’s last days when opposed by the Gang of Four, he was again criticized and removed from the leadership. Though on the second occasion he was cushioned from the worst effects of dismissal through support and assistance provided by supporters, notably Ye Jianying and the Guangdong-based military command, during the Cultural Revolution he had not been so lucky. None the less, on both occasions, as when he had been disciplined in 1933, Deng accepted the need for party discipline to be maintained through the process of criticism and self-criticism—though not necessarily the conclusions of that criticism. He accepted party discipline as stoically as possible and waited for the opportunity to re-present his case.

Deng Xiaoping was also a committed modernizer and nationalist, determined to make China both economically strong and politically powerful in international terms. In that endeavour he is often misleadingly characterized as a pragmatist. It is certainly true that he was no slave to dogma, and he clearly did not believe that all the truths of the successful road to socialist development were to be found in the works of Marx, Lenin or Mao. Though he always, including into the 1990s, urged China to follow Mao Zedong and Mao Zedong Thought,⁵ he was not the communist politics equivalent of a ‘black-letter lawyer’: it was the spirit of what Mao said that Deng regarded as important, the direction in which Mao wanted to see China go, not the written word.

After Mao’s death and the arrest of the Gang of Four, Deng’s interpretation of the epistemology of Mao Zedong Thought was precisely a major obstacle delaying his otherwise inevitable recall. For some time Mao Zedong’s personally selected successor, Hua Guofeng, had campaigned behind the slogan of ‘The Two Whatevers’—‘We should do whatever Chairman Mao said or wrote.’ Deng in his enforced political exile was quite emphatic that this was too inflexible and the wrong approach to Mao Zedong Thought, and the correct approach—at least in Deng’s view—was the subject of a speech to the 3rd plenum of the 10th Central Committee soon after his recall in July 1977.⁶

Indeed, Deng repeatedly emphasized that even his own speeches and writings were time- and situation-specific. One of his more famous comments is, ‘It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, so long as it catches mice.’ Despite its immediacy and accessibility, any deeper meaning is not clear. To some this phrase has been taken as a manifestation of Deng’s inherent pragmatism and it was the subject of some enquiry even within China. However, when asked by fellow senior party leader Bo Yibo what he had meant by it, Deng provided two separate explanations. The first was that he could not recall exactly what he had meant; the other was that it did not matter since it had been a statement suited to the conditions at that time (1962) and not transferable.⁷

Some commentators have suggested in consequence that Deng never had any principles or political vision at all, and by extension this was one major reason why he was unlikely to have opposed Mao before the Cultural Revolution in the ways that were claimed at that time. In this interpretation of Deng’s political behaviour, he was ‘organization man’ who saw his duty as one of serving the party and its leader, and to implement the ideas of others within the leadership.⁸ However, the case can also be made that Deng did have a relatively clear vision—if neither very structured nor particularly sophisticated—of the ways in which China’s modernization should proceed, and particularly of the ways the CCP should operate in that process. It was those ideas that provided the opportunities and excuses for his opponents within the CCP to remove him from office. It was a vision of socialist development which had its origins with Mao Zedong in the early 1930s in Jiangxi, which is where Deng first came into contact with him. Later these were the policies developed and implemented by the CCP in Yan’an. It reached its first large-scale manifestation for Deng and his own leadership during the Sino-Japanese War in the Taihang region as he attempted to adapt the Yan’an experience to the conditions he found there.

In Jiangxi during the 1930s Mao had attempted to build a revolution in China from the countryside into the cities and from the bottom up. At that time Mao was not hidebound by dogma or over-impatient with the revolutionary cause. He realized it would take time to transform China and that what was required at each stage of the revolution would be maximum popular participation and support, as well as a sound economic base. Thus, for example, in the process of land reform not all the peasants should be dispossessed of land. Only the very richest should be made an example of and even then they too should be allowed to benefit from the land reform. The overwhelming majority—including middle peasants, who might be quite wealthy in relative terms—should certainly not feel threatened by CCP campaigns. In these ways Mao, and later Deng, had hoped to maximize both popular support and economic production. These principles, entailing slow but steady change, lay at the heart of Mao’s later appeal to what was characterized during the 1940s as ‘New Democracy’ as the CCP prepared for national power under conditions of war. Indeed, they were even applied after 1949 for a while, until first Mao’s impatience and men his personality became the main determinants of Chinese politics.

In short, Deng was pragmatic, rather than a pragmatist: a committed revolutionary throughout his political career, attempting to ensure that the CCP achieved power and China’s modernization. For Deng Xiaoping, communism was an organizational as much as, if not more than, an intellectual response to the problems China has faced in the twentieth century. What was required was a united China, strong leadership, and the energy of the Chinese people, all of which could only be provided, in Deng’s opinion, by the CCP. It may well be mat this vision was, and indeed remains, fatally flawed: none the less, it remained Deng’s vision.

The Chinese tradition of biography is not the same as that which has become established in the West. Rather than a measured evaluation its purpose has largely been didactic, the results may often tend to hagiography, and the methodological basis which is an essential part of Western biography is absent. Anecdotes and even rumour have traditionally been the essential staple of Chinese biographies. The Western tradition relies on personal memoirs; interviews with relatives, friends, and those involved with the subject in a professional capacity; and on documents, personal and public. Usually, too, it is considered good manners to wait until the subject is dead.

As the Bibliography in this book indicates, the publication of sources and documents within the PRC during the second half of the 1980s and into the 1990s has greatly facilitated the task of biography. Personal memoirs of Deng Xiaoping abound (though not all are reliable) and it has even proved possible to conduct a few interviews in China, though not with Deng himself. His daughter, Deng Rong, even published the first volume of a projected two-part biography—My Father Deng Xiaoping—in August 1993. Indeed, generally after his retirement in 1989, the Deng-publication industry began to develop in ways which those familiar with Western politicians would more usually associate with a drive for political power rather than retirement. However, as Pye amongst others points out, such an interpretation would be to misunderstand a crucial cultural difference: in China’s traditional political culture, real power kept a very low profile and a high profile indicated weakness.⁹

This is a political biography for practical as well as intellectual reasons. Despite the available research on Deng Xiaoping both within and outside the PRC, very little of Deng’s personality is recorded or indeed probably recordable at the moment. Indeed, the lack of political distance from the subject is a major problem even in writing a political biography. It is, for example, often difficult to identify the extent of Deng’s personal input and involvement in an activity or policy initiative. Though this becomes an acute methodological problem during the reform era, when there is a tendency within China for Deng to be credited with everything, it is a general problem in tracing his entire career. As a rule of thumb, an attempt has been made to identify Deng’s personal involvement in events, but to assume no particular connection if no appropriate evidence is available. In terms of personality, the documentary evidence is somewhat limited, providing what information it does on Deng’s activities and speeches but almost nothing on his feelings and attitudes, most of which have to be inferred from his actions. As even his daughter acknowledged in her book—which will undoubtedly remain the major source for some time of personal anecdotes about her father—Deng himself explicitly discouraged his own biography—official or otherwise.

However, this is also a political biography because Deng’s life is of interest for the light it throws on the evolution and dynamics of China’s politics, particularly within the CCP. Although Deng was not a major figure in the CCP leadership until the 1940s, he was involved in the party’s formative processes. After 1949 the story of his life is virtually the story of China’s politics. Moreover, the dramatic rises and falls in Deng’s political fortune not only require explanation, they clearly are more generally instructive about the processes of politics in the PRC. There are few political systems—particularly those dominated by communist parties—which permit one individual found guilty of political ‘crimes’ on three separate occasions not only to live, but to bounce back repeatedly, and eventually to become the ‘paramount leader’.

The emphasis on political biography means that most of this book is concerned with Deng’s life after 1937, the period when he was a central influence in the CCP and in China’s politics. It ignores almost all of his early life before the age of 16 when he was growing up and a student in Sichuan. However, it does not ignore the years between 1920, when Deng went to France, and 1937, for those were the formative years in which his later political career was grounded. During those years he was a party official and political organizer, and, like the history of the party he served, he had his ups and downs, the latter including a demotion in 1933 and the Long March. It was during these early years that he formed two of the key personal associations that were to determine the rest of his career, and indeed ensure his political survival: with Zhou Enlai first, whom he met in France; and then in and after 1931 with Mao Zedong.

A third crucial relationship, or perhaps more accurately set of relationships, was forged in the years after 1937 when Deng became an essential part of the CCP’s military and political leadership in the Taihang region. There he teamed up with another Sichuanese, Liu Bocheng, to lead the 129th Division of the Eighth Route Army, one of the three key communist military forces in the Sino-Japanese War. From their base in the Taihang Mountains, they established further base areas and eventually the Shanxi-Hebei-Shandong-Henan (or JinJiLuYu) Border Region, a communist area of government during the later civil war. In the process Deng and Liu together also created one of the PLA’s most successful armies— that later became the PLA’s 2nd Field Army. Deng’s role, as political commissar, was particularly important because this was a poor region, the recruits were physically weak, and the army as it grew was poorly equipped.

Between 1937 and 1952 Deng developed a close relationship with the CCP military which became an important and recurrent theme in his subsequent career, particularly during and after the Cultural Revolution. During the late 1940s and the civil war between the CCP and Nationalist Party, he played a leading role in two military engagements that led directly to CCP success in 1949. The first was when the army led by Liu Bocheng and Deng broke through the enemy lines which had them pinned down in the north and swept into Central China. The second was the decisive Huai-Hai Campaign when the CCP forces finally defeated the Nationalist armies protecting the Yangtze and the Nationalist capital at Nanjing. For Deng and Liu Bocheng this led on to the occupation of the South-west Region. However, the importance of Deng’s Taihang and later military experience is not simply that it provided him with military credentials and status. These years also provided Deng with his first substantial and sustained experience of the party’s problems in mobilizing the population and providing government, as well as a whole series of personnel networks with cadres who were to play leading roles in CCP politics well into the 1990s.

The remainder of this chapter contains the essential background to Deng’s political biography. It provides an introductory overview of the politics of the CCP and the PRC, before returning to a consideration of Deng’s position in CCP history. One section of the overview deals with the CCP’s path to power before 1949 and another with the PRC during the era of Mao-dominated politics, while a third examines the important characteristics of inner-party conflict within the CCP and their consequences for China’s politics. The final section focuses more precisely on how those characteristics have helped determine Deng’s career and indeed his place in CCP history and politics.

THE CCP AND THE PATH TO POWER

At the time Deng Xiaoping left China for Europe in 1920, discussions were under way that eventually led to the foundation of the CCP. The collapse of the imperial system under the weight of foreign encroachment and internal problems rapidly led to the breakdown of central authority in China. Increasingly power came to be wielded by local warlords rather than any central government. In the intellectual ferment that was the May 4th Movement—so called because on 4 May 1919 students in Beijing staged a nationalist demonstration against the decision of the Versailles Treaty which instead of repatriating Germany’s former colony in Shandong simply passed it on to Japan despite China’s support for the allies in the First World War—it was inevitable that some Chinese should look for national salvation to the new communist state in Russia. Apart from anything else, quite quickly after coming to power in Russia, the Bolsheviks made encouraging noises to the ‘oppressed peoples of the East’ to unite against imperial aggression and colonialism. They promised to restore any Chinese lands ceded to the Tsars and to share ownership of the Trans-Siberian Railway, a branch of which ran through Mongolia to Beijing. They also offered organization, finance and advice through the Comintern, the Communist International, brought into existence by Lenin explicitly to establish communist parties worldwide.

Various Marxist discussion groups had already been established in China, though the most important was undoubtedly that based Beijing University, whe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Deng Xiaoping
• 1 Deng Xiaoping, Communism and Revolution
• 2 Childhood, Youth and Travel,1904–1937
• 3 Military Service, 1937–1952
• 4 Party Affairs and Leadership, 1952–1960
• 5 Reconstruction and Mao, 1960–1966
• 6 Modernization and Conflict, 1969–1978
• 7 The Foundations of Reform, 1979–1984
• 8 Reaction, Readjustment and Retirement, 1985 and After
• 9 Comrade Deng
• 10 Deng Xiaoping in His Own Words
• Notes
• Bibliography