I don’t think Deng will be remembered (at least not in China) for the Tienanmen massacre or for his economic policies. If you look at it coldly, mowing down a few thousand students really constitutes one of the milder purges in recent Chinese history. Compare that with the tens of thousands who were executed during the “anti-corruption campaign” just four or five years previously, not to mention the millions who died during the farm collectivization of the 1950s or the Cultural Revolution ten years later, and you realize that the only thing special about Tienanmen is that American cameras were present. Deng’s economic policies were nothing special either; they were just the continuation of Liu Shao-chi’s policies of the mid-1950s, which had been interrupted first by the Great Leap Forward, then by the split with the USSR, then by the Cultural Revolution. The only reason why Deng gets credit for China’s free-enterprise incentives and current economic growth is that he was the only one of Liu’s team who didn’t die during the twenty years of upheaval.
And that fact points to one of two things that I think Deng will be remembered for. He was probably China’s first real politician, in the modern Western sense. His power was based not on sucking up to some emperor, not on military conquest, not on ideological zeal, not on personal wealth or connections, but on his own ability to read the political situation and to surf the choppy waves of revolutionary turbulence. He rose to power with Liu Shao-chi, was purged with him at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, but somehow managed to surface again in the early 1970s (leaving his former boss to rot in prison); he was purged again in 1976 by the Gang of Four, but two years later he was the star of the Communist Party congress that put an end to the legacy of the Cultural Revolution. Like Khrushchev in Russia, Deng marks the point in the Chinese revolution where even the leaders lost faith in the socialist ideal, and from that point forward it was just politics as usual – and this (1978) was possibly the first time that had ever happened in China. The only other person like Deng was Zhou Enlai, who had the same sort of survival skills and who did for foreign policy what Deng did for domestic statecraft. Between the two of them, China developed into a nation-state on the Western model.
But there is one big difference between the Chinese nation-state and the general Western idea of the nation-state, and this is the other thing that Deng may well be remembered for. All of modern American and European economic history proclaims that free enterprise can only work in the context of political democracy. No enlightened dictator or overweaning bureaucracy can allocate resources as efficiently as a free market can, and the only way to keep the political mitts out of the economy is to subject them to the control of the ballot box, and to churn them every four years or so. (“Politicians, like diapers, should be changed often, and for the same reason.”) Political decisions, like economic ones, should be based on the sum of all selfish interests in the society; whenever one side falls out of step with this principle, the result is economic decline, social decay and chaos. Nazi Germany, Franco’s Spain, and communist Eastern Europe are all sorry examples of this law at work.
Deng, in effect, said that’s crap. Of course, every dictator has said the same thing: My country is so disorganized that only my guiding hand can focus the people on economic development. But Deng appears to have taken to heart what Singapore’s prime minister Lee Kuan Yew said, in justification of his own authoritarian powers – that democracy is a purely Western phenomenon that cannot be transplanted to Asia, and that the optimum political support for Asian capitalism is not democracy but technocracy, leadership by the economically and technically educated. The model for Europe and America may be Greek democracy, but the model for Asia is the Confucian aristocracy of the educated man. Freedom of expression is less important, in Asia, than obedience to enlightened authority. All of Deng’s purges, from the tanks of Tienanmen Square to the less well-publicized campaigns against dissidents in the press, the universities, and the party, can be viewed in the light of this philosophy.
The authoritarian model failed in Korea, where democracy appears to have unleashed a lot of economic creativity, as it’s supposed to do. But it has certainly succeeded in Singapore, and so far it’s been doing quite well in China too. The real test will be to see whether the capitalist Confucians of the Communist Party can discipline themselves well enough to control official corruption. If China’s economic expansion continues at its present vigorous pace and lifts its people to prosperity, without being corroded away by graft and without collapsing under the weight of its own bureaucracy, then Deng will have created an entirely new form of socio-political organization – exactly what Mao tried, and failed, to do.
Austin, March 1997
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Copyright © 1997 T. Mark James