Fateful Embrace of Communism } 19
the CCP had to fundamentally alter its method of rule. China’s people circa
1978 were, with a few exceptions, tired, hungry, and poor. Both heavy indus-
try and the defense industry had grown rapidly during 1949–1977, but very
little investment had gone into improving the quality of life of the people. In
the cities, housing was crowded, utility and educational services limited, and
goods rationed. Even food and clothing were in short supply. In rural areas,
living conditions were worse, often premodern. The promises of the 1950s for
the imminent arrival of prosperity had become hollow. There was pervasive
fear of being informed on, subjected to “struggle,” forced to participate in
labor reform, or even summary execution. The verities of Marxist-Leninist
doctrine had not yet come under wide challenge; that would happen after
China’s opening in 1978. But the famine of the late 1950s and the widespread
violence of the Cultural Revolution, along with Mao’s purge of Peng Dehuai,
Mao’s mysterious falling out with his declared successor Lin Biao, and the
Gang of Four’s early 1970s vendetta against the widely loved Zhou Enlai, had
led many people to question the wisdom of Mao’s rule. In 1978, the PRC faced
a legitimacy crisis, just as it would again in 1989. Deng Xiaoping’s effort to
refound CCP legitimacy focused on delivering rapid increases in standards of
living, and that, in turn, drove new Chinese foreign policies.
Deng, like Mao, used the mechanisms of party control to engineer a revo-
lution from above, but a revolution of a very different sort. In the process of
reform under Deng, China would discard the Soviet economic model and the
totalitarian aspect of the Stalin-Mao political model. But Deng continued the
Soviet/Leninist model of a vanguard party state. He also abandoned Mao’s
utopian quest, vastly widening the sphere of individual freedom granted to
ordinary Chinese. This abandonment of utopian totalitarianism was a pro-
found transformation sometimes referred to as China’s “second liberation.”
China discarded the autarkic policies of the Mao era, and began to draw
broadly on the assets of global capitalism to rapidly raise the standard of
living of the Chinese people. In this process, China’s foreign relations were
transformed and China was gradually integrated into the global economy
and into global society.
The system set up by Stalin and imported by the CCP in the 1950s con-
centrated power in the hands of the heavy industrial ministries that were
seen as the drivers of development and bore “socialist” ideological creden-
tials.^23 Deng used the CCP’s control over personnel appointments to place
in positions of authority people willing to learn new ways of doing things
to invigorate the economy, including the use of market mechanisms. For a
number of years, these reforms did not challenge the preeminent position
of the old plan-dependent heavy industrial interests. The three most notable
reforms were the authorization of township and village enterprises (TVEs)
in rural areas, the Shenzhen special economic zone, and a voluntary two-tier
(planned and market-based) production system for industry. The crux of