Opening to the Outside World } 361
and willing to lend money and transfer technologies. China should urgently
investigate ways of doing this, Gu stated. Lest some leading cadres object to
Gu Mu’s radical conclusions, very senior supporters of Deng’s opening, Ye
Jianying, Li Xiannian, and Nie Rongzhen, one after the other made state-
ments lauding Gu Mu’s objectivity and clarity of presentation.
At the end of June, Gu Mu submitted a written report to the Politburo out-
lining how China should seek to harness the resources of advanced capital-
ist countries. Deng Xiaoping told the Politburo session convened to discuss
Gu’s proposals that China should move as quickly as possible to implement
all of Gu’s recommendations, including borrowing money from abroad.
A two-month long forum chaired by Li Xiannian on the principles to guide the
Four Modernizations followed. Gu once again reported on his West Europe
mission. At the end of the forum, Li Xiannian announced the beginning of
a new era of openness for China in which it would import technology, capi-
tal, machinery and equipment, and managerial know-how to rapidly achieve
the Four Modernizations. Scholar Ezra Vogel noted that while China’s reform
leaders had embraced the principle of opening to the world by this point, there
was still no discussion of the role of markets in China’s new course.
The core of Deng’s political strategy was to build voluntary constituencies
supporting opening and reform by offering them particularistic arrangements
that allowed them to obtain economic gain not from the central government
but via activities on global and/or domestic markets. In this way, Deng did
not challenge existing and still immensely powerful interests (heavy industry
and the planning agencies). Rather, Deng build around these old, established
interests, gradually building willing proreform constituencies engaged in
opening and reform, while leaving old vested interests intact (at least until
well into the reform process).^15 Nor did this arrangement require large finan-
cial support from the hard-strapped central treasury.
Deng’s dispatch of “investigation missions” abroad in 1978 was a variant of
this voluntary constituency creation. By sending thirteen vice premier–level
officials and hundreds of first secretaries and provincial governors abroad to
“investigate” in 1978, Deng was “emancipating the minds” of these officials,
motivating them to grapple with the immense and still-strange difficulties
of dealing with the governments and businesses of advanced capitalist coun-
tries. Calling forth a cohort of new leading officials willing to undertake this
arduous task, and even the granting of lucrative autonomy to coastal areas
which followed close on the heels of the 1978 investigation missions, were not
the most important of constituency-building efforts by Deng in this period.
Turning land over to individual farming families and authorizing private,
market-based nonfarming activities, including private industrial enterprise,
were probably the most important forms of constituency building in the early
reform period.^16 “Reversing verdicts” on cadres unfairly purged under Mao’s
rule and reinterpreting the “class character” of China’s intellectuals were also