Teng's New Long March

Peking's leaders take a great leap outward to modernization

Deputy Premier Teng Hsiao-p'ing flew home to Peking last week after completing a dramatic ten-day tour of Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Burma. Meanwhile, in Canton, a British-made Hovercraft from Hong Kong skimmed into the harbor with a load of 63 tourists, inaugurating the first regularly scheduled passenger sea service from the British colony to China since the Communists took power three decades ago. In California, six Chinese scholars arrived at Stanford University, the first cadre of 700 students and researchers that Peking intends to send to the U.S. within the next twelve months. At the United Nations, China was allowed technical assistance it had requested, worth $10 million to $15 million, to train Chinese in languages and in agricultural and scientific technology. A consortium of West German companies is negotiating a $14 billion deal with Peking to build in Hopei province what would be the world's largest steelmaking complex. Britain's government agreed to negotiate the possible purchase by Peking of 30 Harrier vertical-takeoff jet bombers at $6.6 million each.

All these unprecedented events were part of an extraordinary Great Leap Outward. Departing from the rigid xenophobia of the late Chairman Mao Tse-tung. the Peking government has embarked on a policy of winning new friends, discrediting and, if possible, isolating the Soviet Union and, above all, acquiring the capital, technology and expertise to transform China into a superpower by the year 2000. Scuttling Mao's sacred precept of national self-sufficiency, China's leader have called for "a New Long March," toward modernization. There are mythic overtones to that phrase: Mao's original Long March of 1934-35, from Kiangsi to remote Shensi province, was the crucible that forged the Communist Party in China.

The principal architect of this new policy is Teng, who has clearly emerged as China's strongman, overshadowing Mao's titular successor as Chairman, Hua Kuo-feng. Teng has given supreme priority to reversing the disruptive effects of Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which was zealously pursued for more than ten years by Mao's wife, Chiang Ch'ing, and her radical colleagues. Twice toppled from power by the radicals, in 1966 and 1976, Teng has stepped from the political shadows, not only to supervise the disgracing of Chiang's Gang of Four, but to see his pragmatic goals adopted as the party's approved road.

While Teng has not directly attacked the memory of the Great Helmsman, a gradual process of de-Maoification is under way in China. Last week, for example, the Peking daily Kwangming Jih Pao published an article arguing that a well-known polemic launching the Cultural Revolution--clearly inspired by Mao, if not written by him--was "counterrevolutionary" and a "signal to practice fascist dictatorship." Meanwhile, the memory of Teng's protector, pragmatic Premier Chou Enlai, is increasingly honored, and something of a cult of personality seems to be developing about Teng himself.

In pursuit of modernization, China is now willing to accept the aid of the capitalist West. Last week alone, the Chinese negotiated a series of deals with the Western world that would have been inconceivable under Mao. At the Canton Trade Fair, Peking's main foreign trade showcase, the Chinese sold approximately $1 billion in goods to foreign countries, while their purchases amounted to about $600 million. According to the National Council for U.S.-China Trade, American businessmen sold the Chinese some $83 million in commodities, mostly industrial chemicals, and bought $62 million worth of textiles and arts and crafts, doubling the previous record of $75 million at the fair last year. The U.S. will probably sell the Chinese $700 million worth of products in all this year, mainly wheat, cotton and soybeans. To pay for some of their imports, the Chinese have devised "compensation trade" schemes, buying machinery with the products that will eventually roll off assembly lines. In a move that is heretical by Marxist, let alone Maoist, standards, Peking has also authorized capitalist use of cheap Chinese labor. In exchange for modern U.S. equipment for Chinese factories, Peking has concluded agreements with two American firms, which will employ Chinese workers who are paid about $25 a month, to make women's sportswear and men's corduroy suits.

Not since the Western enclaves of Shanghai and other major cities emptied overnight after the 1949 Communist victory have the Chinese people been exposed to as many foreigners and foreign ideas. Chinese scientists, economic planners, bureaucrats and army officers are being dispatched abroad in ever greater numbers; if Peking has its way, tens of thousands of Chinese students will be roaming university campuses throughout the non-Communist world within a decade. The country's leaders themselves are being seen more and more abroad. In Rumania, Hua even took part in a peasant dance with Rumanian youths, which produced predictable sniffs of disapproval in Moscow.

Soon Western tourists will be swarming into China, occupying the six or seven Inter-Continental Hotels that are to be designed, constructed and operated by Americans. In Peking, officials are planning to revive an institution that once stood as a symbol of Western cultural imperialism: a foreign-run university with a foreign faculty teaching technical subjects to 10,000 Chinese students--in English.

Teng's New Long March is moving ahead under the ubiquitous slogan STRIVE FOR THE FOUR MODERNIZATIONS! The four: industry, agriculture, science and technology, and national defense. The goals that the Peking leadership has set for China are truly herculean--perhaps too much so for a country that is still recovering from the shocks and turmoils of Mao's last years. Thus many Sinologists wonder whether the ambitions of Teng and his pragmatic followers may not eventually prove to be as chimerical as those of Mao's 1958 Great Leap Forward, when peasants were urged to smelt iron and steel in backyard furnaces. Among the problems that modernization faces:

INDUSTRY. Peking has been overambitious, some specialists believe, in seeking the most sophisticated Western technology. After Teng's visit to Japan last month, one Japanese official observed that it made no sense for the Chinese leader to demand "our best all the time" when China's technology is so low. TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott, who traveled in China earlier this month with visiting Energy Secretary James Schlesinger, heard officials repeatedly bemoan their country's lagging development and saw enough examples firsthand to make the claims believable. Oil-drill bits being produced in Shanghai today, for example, are comparable in quality to those used in

Texas 40 years ago. A generator plant in Harbin has to make do with lathes, punch presses and milling machines built two and three decades ago in Eastern Europe. Energy remains so scarce (on a per capita basis, China produces about the same amount of electricity as Zaire) and transportation bottlenecks are so commonplace that many factories are forced to close down three days out of ten. Japan builds 94 cars per worker per year; in China, in less efficient auto plants, the comparable figures are one car, one worker. Steel, the essential building block for heavy industry, remains a precious metal in the People's Republic. The production goal for 1985 is 60 million tons, but that target may prove elusive because of labor troubles, dependence on low-quality coal and iron ore and a long history of poor planning.

Industrial productivity is abysmally low, partly because of meager wages and poor incentives for the workers. Though Peking authorized bonus and wage increases last fall for workers who produce more, inflation has already eaten away most of their gains.

AGRICULTURE. In the countryside, where at least 700 million Chinese live, the gamble for modernization may be even more crucial than in industry. Squeezing more productivity out of already intensely cultivated farm land is a daunting task, in spite of constantly increasing use of fertilizer. The Chinese leadership has set a production goal of 400 million tons of rice, wheat and other grains by 1985. Still, one leading Western specialist in Chinese agriculture declared last week that "there is absolutely no way" for China to meet that target. For almost two years, China has been buying grain from the U.S., Canada, Argentina and Australia at the rate of about 8 million tons a year, which must be paid for out of the foreign exchange the Chinese need to buy arms and technology.

The peasants' often negative attitude toward work worries the planners. The Chinese press has urged peasants to raise their own pigs and produce and sell them for profit on free markets in country towns. Peking is even considering tampering with the centerpiece of Mao's rural revolution: the agricultural commune. Yugoslav journalists in Peking have reported that China will set up six to twelve agroindustrial centers, modeled after a profit-making cooperative near Belgrade that handles all aspects of food production and distribution.

SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY. China lacks the skilled manpower to handle any sudden influx of high-technology industry. Reason: during the Cultural Revolution, Maoist educators let universities and research institutes languish and emphasized for the masses grassroots schools that combined limited technical training with heavy doses of ideology.

Today there are only about 630,000 university students in a population of nearly 1 billion. The post-Mao leaders reopened schools and reinstated college entrance exams, but the intellectual caliber of students remains very low. Of the 5.7 million university applicants judged qualified to take the entrance tests last year, only 278,000 were admitted. At the same time, many teachers who were persecuted by the ferocious Red Guards in 1966 are understandably hesitant to cooperate in what may prove to be ephemeral new policies.

Says John Deutsch, a U.S. Department of Energy specialist who visited China with Schlesinger: "For a decade during the Cultural Revolution, quantum mechanics was not taught in universities in this country because it was considered theoretical rather than practical and because it was supposedly 'invented by foreigners.' " Though such obscurantism is no longer official policy, there remains a woeful lack of teachers and teaching aids. During Schlesmger's tour of the Harbin Polytechnic Institute, Correspondent Talbott saw one class assembling primitive watches and another studying the inner workings of antique radios made with vacuum tubes rather than transistors.

DEFENSE. China's military force is hardly a match for the Soviet Union's 43 divisions and 100,000 crack KGB troops that confront the Chinese along a 4,500-mile frontier. China's air force relies on the aging MiG-21 as its front-line interceptor and on the ancient TU-16 and the Il-28 as its penetration bombers; its nuclear warheads are mounted on intermediate missiles with a range of no more than 4,000 miles. Its navy, though the world's third largest, is equally antiquated: its two nuclear-powered submarines carry no missiles. In a major conflict, little advantage could be gained from hundreds of bomb shelters carved out all over China on Mao's command to "dig tunnels deep, store grain everywhere, and never seek hegemony." China's ability to fight off even a limited Soviet thrust is questionable. Indeed, if China buys modern weapons from Europe, or possibly the U.S., the 190 divisions of the People's Liberation Army may have to wait a long time to be outfitted. Says Georgetown University Military Analyst Edward N. Luttwak: "The total inventory of American ground weapons of the Army and Marines, of the active forces and reserves, would not be enough to equip the Chinese army with modern weapons."

Some China watchers wonder how the country, even with generous infusions of foreign credit, can hope to achieve the four modernizations simultaneously. Sooner or later, the experts believe, the Peking leadership will have to set some tough priorities, which inevitably means disappointing some claimants to the country's limited resources and risking an angry backlash. Beyond that, Teng and his cohort face a psychological problem in inspiring the masses. Having suffered through years of polemical warfare, many workers have become cynical about the system and are immune to exhortations and slogans. Middle-level officials, on whom Teng counts to translate his policies into action, constitute yet another obstacle to change. Many of these essential managers survived decades of turmoil by playing it safe. Some are still doing so, faithfully repeating Teng's modernization slogans while avoiding the decisive actions required if the plan is to succeed. Even Teng's most fervent supporters are afraid that the four modernizations program will survive only as long as its septuagenarian founder. Though it appears unlikely that his pragmatic goals will be abandoned, there is evidence that Hua and others in the Politburo have accepted them with less zeal and enthusiasm than Teng would like.

The rapid changes being introduced have apparently discomfited some and angered others whose families were touched by the purge of radicals (experts believe 25% of all Communist Party officials were affected). If the modernization drive should falter in the 1980s because of a huge crop failure, an unexpected drop in oil production or an inability to pay for Western technology, a radical counterforce might re-emerge in China. In that case, the dissidents would only have to look back to Mao's writings for an extensive critique of Teng's policies. Mao would also remind them: "To rebel is justified."

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