The People’s Republic of China 147
and advertising for anything but revolutionary politics was forbidden.
Romantic love was regarded as a bourgeois sickness, and adultery was
treated much as under the Confucian family system.^6
After Mao died, Deng Xiaoping promoted drastic changes in allow-
ing capitalist style advertising and in allowing men and women to dress
as they pleased. Western-style dress became the accepted mode of attire
in China’s cities. Fiction writers in the 1980s began to write candidly
about romantic love, and some even wrote erotic or pornographic sto-
ries, evading censors by publishing in underground publications sold on
street corners by highly mobile hawkers. Advertisers once again used
beautiful scantily clad women to sell products. Art schools allowed
drawing from human nudes; the cosmetics industry took off; fashion
shows became commonplace in large cities; and some urban women
began to have their eyelids cut to make them look more “Western.”
Despite the promises of the Marriage Law of 1950, the Communist
Party had aggressively discouraged divorces in the Maoist era and had
set up mediation committees to mobilize troubled couples’ families and
friends to pressure them not to divorce. In the post-Mao era, these regu-
lations were greatly relaxed, and divorce rates quickly rose in China’s
cities in the 1980s and 1990s. In the countryside changes were less dras-
tic, as old attitudes continued to hold sway.
Upon his return to power in 1978, Deng Xiaoping encouraged
people to write honestly and truthfully about their mistreatment in the
Cultural Revolution. He himself had suffered at Mao’s hands, and he
thought the cathartic sharing of such feelings would unite people behind
his leadership. However, when people went beyond condemnation of
the Gang of Four to question the entire system, Deng turned against
them. One of the most outspoken critics to emerge in 1978–79 was
Wei Jingsheng, a young electrical engineer. At an intersection in Bei-
jing that became known as Democracy Wall, where people could post
their criticisms, Wei was shockingly direct in mocking Deng Xiaoping’s
“four modernizations”: “Democracy, freedom and happiness are the
only goals of modernization. Without this fi fth modernization, the four
others are nothing more than a new-fangled lie.”^7
Wei Jingsheng was arrested in March 1979 and sentenced to fi fteen
years in prison. Democracy Wall was abruptly closed down, and the
Party announced Deng Xiaoping’s doctrine of the Four Principles (to
counterbalance the Four Modernizations): it would tolerate no opposi-
tion to socialism, to the proletarian dictatorship, to Communist Party
leadership, or to Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought. Deng, like
Mao before him, tended to alternate between competing factions in the