by Adi Ignatius
However, it must be noted that parliamentary democracies exist primarily in developed nations and emerging ones. Some of the developing countries practiced parliamentary politics early on but could not fully realize its potential, and problems developed: the government had trouble exercising its authority, society was not stable enough, military coups were staged using these problems as an excuse. This also shows that parliamentary democracy, which is modern, advanced, civilized, and mature, must have certain necessary conditions and that not just any nation can adopt and use it well.
Given current conditions in China, we must establish that the final goal of political reform is the realization of this advanced political system. If we don’t move toward this goal, it will be impossible to resolve the abnormal conditions in China’s market economy: issues such as an unhealthy market, profiting from power, rampant social corruption, and a widening gap between rich and poor. Nor will the rule of law ever materialize. In order to resolve these problems, we must in concrete terms conduct political reform with this as our goal.
On the other hand, given the reality in China, we need a relatively long period of transition. The experiences of other Asian nations are worthy of our attention in this regard. For example, territories and nations such as Taiwan and South Korea have gradually made the transition from their old systems to a parliamentary system, and have had positive experiences that we would benefit from studying.
In China, for the sake of a smoother transition, at least for a while, we should maintain the ruling position of the Communist Party—while changing how the Party rules. It might still be the right approach.
This would be a good starting point: first, because it would help maintain stability in society and create a good environment for economic, social, and cultural development, and second, it would facilitate a smooth transition to a more mature, civilized, and democratic political system as economic, social, and cultural conditions change. In other words, we should not rush to copy wholesale [a new political system] all at once. However, we must march toward this goal, and absolutely should not move in the opposite direction. We must refrain from perverse actions that don’t facilitate, or are even subversive to, achieving this goal.
How long this transition lasts must be determined by social developments. It is critical that the leadership of the Communist Party adhere to this belief. Then it can respond skillfully to circumstances as they arise, gradually, step-by-step, according to the right priorities.
If the final destination is a parliamentary democracy, the ruling Party must achieve two breakthroughs. One is to allow other political parties and a free press to exist. This can happen gradually, but it must be pursued.
The second breakthrough is having democracy within the Party: that is, the Party needs to adopt democratic procedures and use democratic means to reform itself.
In the past, during the war years and the early years of the republic, there was a need to emphasize centralization and discipline. However, it would be impossible to make the transition from a revolutionary Party to a governing Party, and to lead society’s transition to a system of parliamentary politics if the Party doesn’t practice a thorough democratic system within itself. The existence of legitimate differences of opinion must be allowed within the Party. Even Chairman Mao said that the minority should be protected in the Party. Different opinions must be allowed to exist, and different factions should be made legitimate. In debates and competitions, different sides within the Party should all observe the same rules.
It would be wrong if our Party never makes the transition from a state that was suitable in a time of war to a state more suitable to a democratic society. This breakthrough must occur. Of course, there will be the issue of the nationalization of the military. More important, the reform of the legal system and an independent judiciary should take precedence.
Our hope is for the ruling position of the Communist Party to be maintained for a considerable period of time, so that the transition can be made under its leadership and preparation made in an orderly manner. As for how long the Communist Party keeps its ruling position, this should be determined by the consequences of society’s political openness and the competition between the Communist Party and other political powers. If we take the initiative and do this well, the ruling position of the Communist Party could be maintained for a very long time. However, this ruling position must not be maintained by using the constitution to monopolize this status. Rather, the Party must be made to compete for it. I believe that this is ultimately a worldwide trend that we cannot defy.
If we act with initiative, it will be beneficial to the Party, society, and the people. Any other approach will be harmful. The trend is irrefutable, that the fittest will survive. As Sun Yat-sen said, “Worldwide trends are enormous and powerful; those who follow them prosper, and those who resist them perish.”
I believe the time has come for us to tackle this issue seriously.
Zhao Ziyang’s political career ended with the Tiananmen incident of 1989, but the debate over China’s reform continued. A resurgence of the Anti-Liberalization Campaign that Zhao had feared would follow the crackdown in Tiananmen did not materialize. But the Party suffered serious damage to its reputation and was condemned by the world for its excessive military reaction.
Deng Xiaoping’s alliance with Party elders to topple Zhao resulted in disarray in the new leadership group and brought the reform movement to a standstill. The result was a slump in real GDP growth in the two years following the Tiananmen incident, the most dramatic slowdown since 1976. Deng saw his legacy endangered and the possibility that all the gains made by the economic reforms would go to waste. He could not let this happen.
Deng’s last important political action was his renowned “southern tour” of the Special Economic Zones in 1992, a move that revitalized the economic reform programs. The trip was timed to force the upcoming 14th Party Congress later that year to reaffirm further reforms. Those who had maneuvered to ditch economic reform were pushed into compliance by Deng’s southern tour. They had watched the Soviet Union collapse; they had lost the trust of the Chinese people after the Tiananmen Massacre and had been powerless to improve the economy. However, the year 1992 marked the end of the debate over the transformation to a free market economy. The outcome has been the transformation of China into a twenty-first-century economic powerhouse, with a renewed insistence on authoritarian autocracy.
Still under house arrest, Zhao Ziyang died on January 17, 2005.
Epilogue
Bao Pu
To understand the extraordinary political journey of Zhao Ziyang, it is important to know exactly what he was up against when he reached Beijing’s highest echelons in 1980.
The dominant players in his circle were the “Communist Party elders,” men who had been swept aside by Mao Zedong for their reluctance to embrace his radical programs. Having been deprived of their political clout by Mao for nearly two decades, the elders were anxious to seize power and use their remaining years to shape post-Mao China.
The most powerful among them was Deng Xiaoping. Deng had just the right experience to manage the two factions who emerged at the top. As a political conservative, he had the support of Party elders desperate to save the Party from ruin. As a liberal on economic issues—purged not once but twice by Mao—Deng was credible among those who wanted to break from the old days of collectivization. The division among Party leaders over the direction of reform required one top leader to settle disputes. With his combination of seniority, competence, and backing from military heavies, Deng emerged as the paramount leader, filling the void in an authoritarian system that had lost its Great Helmsman.
Another influential elder was Chen Yun, who was even more senior than Deng and was a founder of the Party. He had won enduring respect for having quickly stabilized the nation’s war-torn economy in the 1950s, when he was Vice Premier.
When this group came to power, it was clear what would dominate the
agenda: economic recovery and an end to China’s isolation from the world. In December 1978, at the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee, the Party issued a resolution to shift its emphasis from “class struggle” to “economic development.” This brought an end to the Party’s obsession with destroying “class enemies,” which had persisted for thirty years. The Mao era was at an end, and the era of reform was under way.
New political stars began to emerge. Hu Yaobang took over as Director of the Organization Department in December 1977, with power over Party personnel decisions. He immediately began reinstating the victims of Mao’s purges; their gratitude turned into solid political support for Deng Xiaoping, who had promoted Hu.
Another new star was Zhao Ziyang. Two years earlier, Deng had sent Zhao to his own home province of Sichuan, which was then on the brink of agricultural disaster. Zhao, who already had years of experience administering Guangdong Province, restructured Sichuan’s rural economy. In just a few years, he dramatically raised agricultural production and average incomes in this province of 100 million people, where it was officially revealed that 10 million had died of starvation from Mao’s Great Leap Forward. Though his policies seemed to border on “capitalist,” their success made Zhao’s early reputation.
Despite his many years in provincial bureaucracies, Zhao possessed the political skill of not standing out too much, which helped him rise to the top without causing much commotion or upsetting hard-liners. His quick ascendance began in August 1977 at the 11th Party Congress, when he became an alternate member of the Politburo.
Deng quickly consolidated power by naming Hu Yaobang as Chairman of the Party and Zhao Ziyang its Vice Chairman and Premier of the State Council. Deng’s influence now hovered over the Party and state administrations.
Deng’s two rising stars began getting to work. Hu’s success rehabilitating disgraced Party members, coupled with Zhao’s gains from his agricultural innovations, allowed Deng to assert his control both within the Party and among the people. He also became the first Chinese communist leader to win widespread praise from abroad. The new catchphrase in China was “reform.” With the help of the Party’s propaganda machine, reform became the embodiment of all hope and all things good.
There was only one problem: no one could agree on exactly what form this reform should take. The pragmatists cared little for Marxist dogma. They knew from experience that incentives and market elements worked. Party elders such as Chen Yun, however, believed that the Communist Party should remain loyal to its founding ideology and pursue Soviet-style socialism. For them economic reform just meant recovering from the disasters inflicted by Mao. Among these conservatives, there were also personal reasons for opposing reform. Li Xiannian, who had managed economic affairs for a significant term during Mao’s era, saw reform as an implicit criticism of his past work and feared being marginalized. And career bureaucrats—the fabric of China’s administration—who had been trained for decades to believe that “capitalism” was the supreme evil, now felt disoriented and threatened by the new political culture.
All of this meant that China’s reformers would not have an easy ride. When Zhao became Premier in 1980, he was still new to Beijing’s high politics. The first major issue he had to handle was the 1981 economic “readjustment,” which had been launched by conservative elder Chen Yun. Zhao had no choice but to head the effort, but in that role he quickly grasped the weaknesses of the central planning system, which had managed economic affairs by assigning quotas throughout the land. He tried to move quickly with reforms.
It was a rocky period. Deng had made it clear that he wanted “no squabbling” at the top. Though the intention of his words wasn’t spelled out, they clearly meant that Deng hoped to do as he wished without interference. But when Deng’s beloved Special Economic Zones were starting to look overly capitalist, Chen Yun in 1982 launched a “Strike Hard Campaign Against Economic Crimes” that indirectly was aimed at neutralizing the liberal policies the zones allowed. Chen had found a way to exert his will without political “squabbling,” and Deng had not detected the ploy. Under these conditions both Hu and Zhao felt compelled to go along with Chen.
By this time, Zhao knew he was operating in a political minefield but pressed ahead in his effort to modernize the economy. It didn’t hurt that the idea of allowing food imports, for one, was actually proposed by Chen Yun himself, who was eager to break from the Maoist policy of total self-reliance. China quickly became one of the world’s major grain importers. With the pressure off domestic grain production, the state could relax restrictions and quotas that in the past had condemned 800 million peasants to poverty. China then decided to spread to the rest of the nation the rural reforms that Zhao had launched in Sichuan and others had launched in Anhui. Though the policy was resisted by a few provincial administrators, the gains were so immediate that most regions quickly adopted them voluntarily. In contrast with Mao’s ruthless campaign to force communes on rural China, the dismantling of this same system was done without coercion.
Progress continued along the coast, too. The Special Economic Zones in the east continued to develop. But because they were set up as isolated laboratories for reform, Deng was able to avoid broad and costly political debates among Party leaders about whether they passed the test of being “socialist.”
With the necessary conditions for further reform in place, what was most needed was a clear sense of direction from the central leadership. As the new Premier, Zhao concluded that the main economic imperative was to tackle China’s chronic inefficiency. Zhao may have been insulated within the world’s largest communist bureaucracy, but he realized that, to make progress, China had to abandon its planned economy in favor of a free market. It was the triumph of good sense.
But to make this happen in a government that still had considerable conservative opposition, Zhao had to twist orthodox doctrine, invent euphemisms for his policies, and keep pressing for Deng’s support while ignoring the complaints of other powerful elders. He was always vulnerable to the reality that his ideas were obvious contradictions of the Party’s official line.
Opponents such as conservative ideologues Hu Qiaomu and Deng Liqun tried to exploit this vulnerability and were a constant source of irritation for reformers such as Hu and Zhao. The major force keeping these attacks at bay on the “theoretical front” was Deng Xiaoping, who couldn’t care less about doctrine. When Zhao became Party General Secretary, he exercised his power to finally finish off the leftist institutions from which these attacks originated.
China’s transformation to a market economy passed the point of no return sometime in the 1980s. Politically, however, the Party never abandoned its authoritarian ways. The elimination of Mao’s “class struggle” was a breakthrough on one level, but it gave people a false impression that somehow the political system or the Party’s leadership style had changed. In fact, the problems of authoritarian rule persist to this day. Without a change, China cannot escape them: a lack of accountability and a Party that is always above the law.
This all but ensures that the government will continue to face episodes of rebellion. The Party has fretted throughout its history about how tolerant it should be in dealing with criticism. In 1957, Mao urged intellectuals to speak out in the Hundred Flowers Campaign, then cracked down on those who did so a year later with the Anti-Rightist Campaign (which Deng carried out). In 1979, Deng continued to suppress the critics. He shut down the “Democracy Wall” movement, in which thousands of intellectuals and young people had posted calls for political freedom on a wall in Beijing. He later sanctioned a 1983 drive against “Spiritual Pollution,” meaning primarily foreign influences, and he proposed the 1986–87 Anti–Bourgeois Liberalization Campaign.
When Hu Yaobang failed to carry out that campaign, Deng dismissed him. A major force for political reform was thus gone. Hu had seemed intent on trying to create a more tolerant, open Party. But as Deng’s displeasure with Hu grew, Party elders exploited the rift.
With Deng’s sanction, they tried to curtail the powers of other reform-minded officials. They even attempted to replace Hu with one of their own.
On this issue, however, Deng stood firm. Although he had removed Hu, he was not about to let an opponent of economic reform, someone like Deng Liqun, succeed Hu. So he promoted Zhao to General Secretary. He did consent to the promotion to the premiership of Li Peng, whose mentor was conservative elder Chen Yun. But he did not trust Li to run the economy, and so to ensure that Zhao would still call the shots in that sphere, Deng created the Central Economic and Financial Leading Group and put Zhao in charge.
It was not the first time Deng had bypassed official institutions, nor would it be the last. In January 1987, he designated an ad hoc “Five-Person Group” to take over from the Politburo Standing Committee upon Hu’s dismissal. Then he appointed a “Seven-Person Group” to appoint officials in preparation for the leadership changes at the 13th Party Congress. Though Deng was able to maneuver past some of the recalcitrant elders, he had also planted the seed for future turmoil. In the end, Premier Li was not willing to submit to a reduced role. And an increasingly volatile economic situation helped him to cause trouble.
The decisive blow was an outbreak of high inflation in 1988, exacerbated by an ill-fated and (by Zhao’s own admission) ill-conceived attempt to make a bold breakthrough in reforming the pricing system. The government made a fatal error by announcing price hikes before executing them. The public reacted with panic buying and bank runs. The apparent severity of the situation caused Zhao to abruptly abandon price reform.
