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support and would, one way or another, “die.” Fear of counterrevolution
haunted Mao throughout his life, and the collapse of communist party states
was ultimately the common fate of nearly all such regimes around the world.
Only the PRC, along with Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam, managed to sur-
vive. The core of Deng Xiaoping’s political line was to regain popular support
for CCP rule by delivering rapid improvements in China’s standards of living.
Since the quest for the economic development that was to accomplish this
relegitimation of CCP rule required major shifts in PRC foreign relations, we
can say that the intertwined goals of improved living standards and regime
legitimization drove those foreign policy shifts to a significant extent.
An episode during the mid-1978 debates on borrowing foreign money and
importing foreign machinery exemplified the close link between inputs from
the West and the CCP’s efforts to forge a new social compact with the Chinese
people. After agreeing that money should be borrowed to purchase and im-
port Western industrial machinery, Deng Xiaoping proposed that fabric and
clothing should be leading sectors in this process. Cloth was in short supply
and available only in very limited quantities and with ration coupons, yet it
was a basic necessity of life. Rapid expansion in cloth and clothing supply
would, Deng suggested, quickly demonstrate to China’s people the advan-
tages of China’s new course, winning popular support for the radical depar-
tures from the ideological verities of the pervious thirty years.^7 This episode
exemplifies the core link between the opening to the outside world and the
effort to relegitimize CCP rule of China. Drawing on the capital, technology,
machinery and equipment, and managerial know-how of the advanced capi-
talist countries would fuel rapid economic growth, leading to improved living
standards for the Chinese people and their continuing acceptance of CCP
rule—while making the PRC a powerful country.
Within a very few years of Mao Zedong’s death, a new cohort of CCP
leaders, led and represented by Deng Xiaoping, liberated the Chinese people
from highly repressive policies of the Mao era. Mao’s totalitarian effort to
transform the minds and habits of the Chinese people into human material
appropriate to the construction of a communist society via a regimen of in-
doctrination, class struggle, criticism and self-criticism, small group study,
and terror was abandoned. Facing strong opposition to this radical break
with Marxist-Leninist ideology from more conservative members of his
very broad reform coalition, Deng formulated his famous dictum: It doesn’t
matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it can catch mice. The “mice” were
wealth and power.^8
China’s new direction slowly but ultimately vastly expanded the scope of
personal freedom for individual Chinese. The scope of permissible speech
gradually expanded. People less and less feared that their spoken words
would land them in trouble. Published views were more tightly constrained,
but there too the scope of free discussion gradually expanded. The “work