Looking to 2001

Congress shuns past leader

The usual portrait of Mao Tse-tung was nowhere in sight as China's Communist Party opened its Twelfth National Congress last week in Peking's Great Hall of the People. The old slogans proclaiming "class struggle" and "world revolution" were missing, and no bands played The East Is Red, a paean to Mao frequently sung during the Cultural Revolution. Instead, the congress, China's first since 1977, was a celebration for Vice Chairman Deng Xiaoping, 78, who, since his rise to power after Mao's death in 1976, has urged the country to replace Mao's revolutionary tenets with more pragmatic and moderate ideas. As Chairman Hu Yaobang, 67, told the 1,700 delegates, "The party has absolutely broken the fetters of dogmatism and personality cult."

The diminutive Deng greeted delegates by calling last week's gathering the party's "most important meeting since the Seventh National Congress" of 1945, which confirmed Mao's undisputed leadership. Deng promised a continuation of the open-door policy China has been pursuing in the past four years. Said he: "We should learn from foreign countries and draw on their experience." Deng also issued China's traditional warning that it would "firmly resist corrosion by decadent ideas from abroad and never permit the bourgeois way of life to spread in our country."

Deng has come a long way since Mao's death. Considered a "capitalist reader," he was in political limbo during most of the last decade of Mao's rule. But Deng shrewdly turned the tables on his leftist adversaries after Mao's widow and her followers, known as the Gang of Four, were arrested. In 1981 he maneuvered to have Mao's successor, Hua Guofeng, demoted to a vice chairmanship while Deng's protege Hu became chairman.

To consolidate his grip, Deng has asked the congress to change the party's constitution. His aim is to weaken and maybe abolish the 23-member Politburo, which is still burdened by Mao loyalists. Deng would strengthen the Secretariat of the party's Central Committee, a smaller and less unwieldy body, which is already staffed by Deng proteges. For the oldtimers, including Deng himself and Vice Chairman Marshal Ye Jianying (an octogenarian who needed a nurse to wipe his face as he salivated on the dais last week), Deng expects the party to create a new Central Advisory Commission of elder statesmen to oversee the day-to-day leadership of Hu and Premier Zhao Ziyang. If Deng succeeds, he will have stage-managed a remarkably smooth transition of leadership for a Communist country.

In a four-hour report to delegates, Chairman Hu declared that China's top priority for the remainder of the century was economic modernization. Brimming with confidence, he called for the quadrupling of China's gross national product to $1.4 trillion by the year 2000. (The U.S.'s current G.N.P.: $2.9 trillion.) Although China's economic system will remain socialist, Hu urged greater reliance on foreign technology and market mechanisms. One capitalistic idea known as the "responsibility system" already allows peasants to increase their pay by doing extra work, and allows farmers to keep or sell production in excess of assigned quotas. Citing broad popular support for the scheme, Hu called for its continuation.

To some delegates, all the talk about economic modernization had an ominous sound, since Hu and Deng are believed to be preparing a broad shake-up of the party leadership throughout China in the name of modernization. As one party stalwart explained, "About 10% of the membership is no longer up to the grade." That could spell trouble for some 3.9 million party functionaries and officials who, in Deng's view, have failed to support his ambitious dream of a stable and modern China. qed

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