THE OTHER CONTINENT: ASIA 385round him in foreign countries, and wanted to avoid disorder. Gor-
bachëv gave his consent. Deng for his part looked askance on the
Soviet perestroika and had irked Gorbachëv by counselling him not to
hurry with it.^38 Gorbachëv himself was no less disrespectful about the
Chinese reforms. On 29 September 1986 he had confided to his aides:
The Chinese have developed agriculture on a private basis. They
have achieved stunning successes. But there should not be
euphoria as if China had resolved everything. But what next?
They don’t have fertilizers, technology or intensive methods. We
have all of that. But we have to unite that with personal interest.
This is our problem. This is where we can ensure a burst forward.
Ilich [Lenin] tormented himself with how to unite the personal
interest with socialism, and this is what we have to think and
think about.^39In August 1988 he told Chernyaev:
I don’t understand all the fuss as regards China. People come back
from there saying that there’s everything on the shelves in the
shops. The same thing about Yugoslavia. I’m happy that China is
on the rise materially. This is ultimately a support for us as well,
just as we are a support for them. Fine But why such euphoria?
One has to look into the essence of the matter: yes, there’s every-
thing on the shelves in the shops but there’s nobody buying. It’s
a capitalist market. And the law of that market operates in such a
fashion that prices are inflated to the point that everything lies
around on shelves and when the goods go stale they sell them off
cheap.^40This was at best a nonsensical exaggeration. Somehow he had con-
vinced himself that nobody was buying the goods on sale in China’s
urban stores.^41
Deng insisted that there should be no hugging but only a hand-
shake when they met; he wanted to keep the discussion businesslike.
Gorbachëv took the hint and decided to treat him with due concern
for his age.^42 Even so, their exchanges started scratchily on 16 May
- When Gorbachëv asked for a ‘normalization of relations’, Deng
lectured him on the territorial depredations that the Russian Empire
had perpetrated.^43 He declared Russia and Japan to have been historic-
ally the worst threats to China. The Russians had stolen 1.5 million
square kilometres, and this was not forgotten. He also remarked that it
was hopeless to expect more from the classics of Marxism-Leninism