Deng Xiaoping
Deng Xiaoping
and the transformation of China (Ezra Vogel)
Deng Xiaoping
and the transformation of China
By Ezra Vogel
Winner of the Lionel Gelber Prize
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
An Economist Best Book of the Year | A Financial Times Book of the Year | A Wall Street Journal Book of the Year | A Washington Post Book of the Year | A Bloomberg News Book of the Year | An Esquire China Book of the Year | A Gates Notes Top Read of the Year
Perhaps no one in the twentieth century had a greater long-term impact on world history than Deng Xiaoping. And no scholar of contemporary East Asian history and culture is better qualified than Ezra Vogel to disentangle the many contradictions embodied in the life and legacy of China’s boldest strategist.
Once described by Mao Zedong as a “needle inside a ball of cotton,” Deng was the pragmatic yet disciplined driving force behind China’s radical transformation in the late twentieth century. He confronted the damage wrought by the Cultural Revolution, dissolved Mao’s cult of personality, and loosened the economic and social policies that had stunted China’s growth. Obsessed with modernization and technology, Deng opened trade relations with the West, which lifted hundreds of millions of his countrymen out of poverty. Yet at the same time he answered to his authoritarian roots, most notably when he ordered the crackdown in June 1989 at Tiananmen Square.
Deng’s youthful commitment to the Communist Party was cemented in Paris in the early 1920s, among a group of Chinese student-workers that also included Zhou Enlai. Deng returned home in 1927 to join the Chinese Revolution on the ground floor. In the fifty years of his tumultuous rise to power, he endured accusations, purges, and even exile before becoming China’s preeminent leader from 1978 to 1989 and again in 1992. When he reached the top, Deng saw an opportunity to creatively destroy much of the economic system he had helped build for five decades as a loyal follower of Mao—and he did not hesitate.
https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674725867
Learn from Deng's diplomacy
Vision, courage and wisdom are needed to arrive at the best solutions to international crises and maintain regional peace
This year marks the 110th anniversary of the birth of Deng Xiaoping. Although seventeen years have elapsed since Deng's passing away in 1997, China is still forging ahead in the overall direction of reform and opening-up to the outside world that Deng charted for China after he became the paramount leader at the end of the 1970s.
Although China is now facing a very different international situation and different challenges compared with those when Deng was the paramount leader, China's current diplomacy can still learn a lot from Deng's wisdom.
First, China should draw inspiration from Deng and avoid any arms race or military confrontation. Toward the middle of the 1980s, Deng concluded that, while the rivalry between the United States and the then Soviet Union was as tense as ever, a new world war was not likely to happen any time soon, if at all. Therefore, Deng decided that, while China still needed to achieve modernization of its national defense, it should devote as many resources as possible to develop its economy, rather than wasting precious resources on building up its military. One of the important decisions in this regard was to reduce the number of military personnel by one million.
This decision spared large resources for the country's economic development. Had China done otherwise, it would not have achieved its rapid economic development and profound improvement in the living standards of the Chinese people.
China should continue to make development its top priority and stand firmly for peace and development, not only in China, but in the world at large.
Second, Deng insisted that China should never seek hegemony. This policy of seeking no hegemony is still guiding China today. Even though China has become the second-largest economy in the world, and is expected to surpass the United States as the largest economy, possibly this decade, it does not seek hegemony or expansion.
Heeding Deng's wisdom, China should not seek to impose its own values or ways of thinking on other countries, and should treat all countries in the world as equals and with respect. China should not make the mistake of "overreaching" in its foreign policies as the US has done many times in recent years.
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2014-08/21/content_18461596.htm
Revisiting Deng and the socialist market economy
China has come a very long way since Deng Xiaoping articulated his vision of a reformed and modern China in December 1978. More than 35 years after the historical Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China in December 1978, "socialist market economy" has become a frequently used phrase in modern economic and development literature.
Introduced by Deng in reforming modes of production and organization of economic institutions in China, the concept has survived the test of time. China is well on its way to catching up with the world's largest economy, the United States. It is also the world's leading economy in terms of several international economic and business indicators.
The remarkable aspect of the "socialist market economy" is in its effort to reconcile what used to seem irreconcilable. For some people, socialism and markets are still mutually antithetical. It was more so at the time when Deng introduced it to the world, sharply divided as it was between the ideological poles of state-driven socialist planning systems and market-driven economic frameworks.
Deng understood the importance of economic gains in incentivizing output, and was decisive in urging farmers to respond to such incentives. The boldness of the decision could hardly be overstated in a country where agricultural crises and food shortages were not distant memories, and whose large population was vulnerable to supply shocks. Along with the boldness, Deng's economic vision was characterized by surprising clarity in the sequencing of reforms.
Agriculture came first, followed by loosening of controls on foreign investment and creation of gigantic-scale manufacturing units. Indeed, there was no holding back of China once the first phase of economic reforms was over. Deng's successors took forward his legacy by allowing the market to respond to pricing signals and never letting go of opportunities to encourage investment.
The socialist character of the Chinese economy is evident in the limitations it imposes on unchecked functioning of the market in several spheres. Typical neo-classically managed economies would minimize possibilities of market failures by institutionalizing regulators. Autonomous regulators, arguably independent in their functioning from state influence, would attempt to coordinate market movements in various sectors of the economy.
China is no stranger to regulators and regulations, except that unlike the more prevalent Anglo-Saxon regulation models, it has unshakable faith in the ability of the State to regulate. State regulation has resulted in calibrated fashioning of the market in China "Opening-up" has been gradual with the authorities carefully taking note of policy repercussions, if any, before enlarging their scope. The calibrated preference is visible even today as China experiments with new generation reforms in latest laboratories like the Shanghai Free Trade Zone.
China's has not been an entirely unblemished story. High economic growth has had its side effects. These include widening of economic and regional disparities and a heavy toll on sustainable indicators through depletion of water resources, and massive carbon emission and pollution.
China's success and the more undesirable consequences of that success have influenced modern development discourse. While China's success in building infrastructure, reducing poverty and upgrading slums have become almost mythical, the income inequality and pollution indices have also become yardsticks in different contexts.
How to explain the social and economic costs of China's growth on the way to building up of socialist market economy?
It is important to remember that the experiment of guiding the market with socialist oversight and outreach is an unprecedented project. Being top-down in order, it is also vulnerable to setbacks dealt by local characteristics. This probably explains why Guangdong province succeeded in creating exemplary special economic zones while Hainan province didn't.
Market forces are genies that once uncorked can produce spectacular results. The qualitative aspects of these results become known much later.
Almost two decades after the launch of reform and opening-up, Chinese authorities responded to widening regional disparities by proposing specific development plans for its relatively underdeveloped western region. But the western region will still take a lot of time and efforts to catch up with the eastern and southern parts of the country. Businesses and markets do not always respond to even the most favorable of incentives, unless they can see enabling conditions, which are far more in China's coastal provinces than its hinterland.
The socialist aspect of the economic policy has helped China take quick action wherever gaps have emerged. On many occasions, the socialist State and its organs have encouraged and helped businesses. But a pro-business outlook is not necessarily pro-market. There are probably sectors and areas where several businesses have prospered because of their ability to use State organs to their advantage.
Nonetheless, these are areas where markets have not matured because of lack of competition. China's socialist market economy continues to experience the tension, but it needs to encourage more competition.
The author is a senior research fellow and head of Partnerships & Programmes at the Institute of South Asian Studies, National University of Singapore.
(China Daily 08/20/2014 page9)
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2014-08/20/content_18455806.htm
Scholars explore Deng's impact
For many foreign scholars, their research into former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, normally starts with the reform and opening-up he initiated in 1978, after which China underwent a wide spectrum of social changes. Ranging from Deng’s life and thought to the history of reform in China, the overseas studies of this former Chinese leader have undeniably shed new light on not only his own political, economic, cultural, military, and, diplomatic thought, but also on his important theories including the “One Country, Two Systems” policy that successfully enabled Hong Kong’s smooth return to the Motherland.
The character of Deng, which many overseas China watchers conventionally highlight in their studies of his life and influence, commonly portray him as “typically pragmatic” in comparison with other former leaders of the Communist Party of China, such as Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai.
Likewise in terms of historical status, Deng has always been highly regarded as a major designer of China’s reform and opening-up among many foreign scholars. At a Los Angeles-based seminar evaluating Deng’s achievements of running the country in 1993, all the participants appraised Deng as one of the most successful contemporary reformers and an effective peacekeeper and loyal friend to other communist countries. In addition, British scholar Tony Walker wrote an article for the Financial Times in the United Kingdom after Deng died in 1997, stating that Deng had written himself into history as both the founding father of China’s modernization and one of the most influential leaders in the world’s economic history.
Being the core notion and a landmark practice of Deng Xiaoping Theory, reform and opening-up was also greatly appreciated by most foreign scholars for being “peaceful and progressive reform”. It featured progressive and interim policy changes instead of revolutionary rhetoric and methods, Gerrit W. Gong, a US scholar, wrote in an article titled “China’s Fourth Revolution”.
More importantly, Deng’s reform policy comprehensively covered nearly all respects of China’s social economic system and economic structure, in regards to its type, scale, and even depth.
However, two entirely opposite viewpoints have been brought forward by many scholars as regards the relation of Deng Xiaoping Theory with Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought. In general, one side insists that Deng’s theory denies and deviates from Marxism and Mao Zedong Thought, while the other prefers to believe the existence of interior connections between the three.
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/opinion/2014-08/22/content_18468940.htm
Carry on institutional reform
Following the path set out by Deng Xiaoping, the country must eliminate entrenched bureaucracy and over-concentration of power
By directing China's reform and opening-up since 1978 and innovating socialism with Chinese characteristics, the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping made a breakthrough in improving the institutional building of modern China, leading the country from the rule of man to the rule of law.
An important lesson Deng heeded from the decade-long "cultural revolution" (1966-76) was the State institutions' vital role in running the country, for "institutional problems can eventually affect China's State system and the purity of its ruling party".
Therefore, at the Central Working Conference of the Communist Party of China in 1978, Deng made an insightful comment regarding the missteps made by the Party prior to and during the "cultural revolution": "The past mistakes indeed owed to some individual leaders' thoughts and working styles, but the imperfect organizational schemes and structure played bigger roles." This signaled stable State institutions having overall importance and featuring fundamentality in national governance.
As Deng pointed out, despite the advantages of China's socialism, its concrete implementation such as the State leadership, working system, and even the organizational layout are far from flawless. Based on this viewpoint, he embarked on the nation's institutional reform and attached greater importance to the leadership level.
In this regard, in his speech on "Reform of the Party and State's Leadership System" in 1980, Deng pinpointed the major flaws that the Party and State leadership should correct - entrenched bureaucracy, over-concentration of power, life tenure in office, and abuse of privileges.
In particular, he was resolute and insistent in abolishing the life tenure tradition and replaced it with a new system under which officials at all levels have to abide by the recruitment, promotion, rotation rules and specific tenures for different posts. Similarly, more reform moves were implemented by Deng to optimize China's economic, cultural, and social system during his leadership.
Of course, any institutional reforms or improvements in China should be based on a distinctive socialist approach. It was made clear in Deng's opening remarks at the 12th Party Congress in 1982: "We should take our own path toward socialism with Chinese characteristics...on the footing of independence and self-reliance in the past and future."
However, sticking to China's own path of socialism does not necessarily mean that China should shut its door to the rest of the world. Deng once stated that China should be encouraged to selectively absorb the advanced management methods adopted by other states, including Western capitalist countries. For instance, an important consensus of talent selection in the capitalist world is that any eligible individuals shall be employed or promoted, regardless of their rank and seniority. "In comparison, our cadres' selection and the promotion system has lagged behind," Deng said.
But he also said, to establish socialism with Chinese characteristics, the country should avoid blindly copying the Western political systems. In regards to the reform of political system, Deng stressed that Western regimes' style of democracy and the separation of the three powers do not apply to China. China has to stick to the political system with Chinese characteristics, in which adherence to the leadership of the Communist Party of China, rule for the people, and rule of law are three integral parts.
Deng Xiaoping pinned high hopes on constantly improving the social system, and believed that socialism will one day surpass capitalism as "the best system across the globe".
Deng's confidence originated from the enormous advantages of socialism. He believed the shortcomings in the Party and State's concrete systems hindered socialism functioning well, so China needs to improve and develop socialism to fully prove socialism's superiorities.
As Deng predicted in 1992, it would take at least another three decades for China to establish a more mature, better institutionalized system.
To date, Deng's visionary anticipation is within easy reach of comprehensive implementation by the Party leadership headed by General Secretary Xi Jinping. In addition, the Third Plenary Session of the 18th CPC Central Committee passed the Decision on Major Issues Concerning Comprehensively Deepening Reform, which clearly stipulates that "the reform of Party building must evolve on the effort to raise the level of governance to be scientific, democratic and in line with the law", and that reform should attain decisive achievements by 2020.
Hence, Deng's proactive thoughts on China's institutional reform over three decades ago have been embodied in the specific political measures adopted by the Decision in promoting the modernization of the State's governance systems and governing capabilities and will naturally help realize the Chinese dream of national rejuvenation.
The author is a professor of politics at the Chinese Academy of Governance.
(China Daily 08/19/2014 page8)