Fateful Embrace of Communism } 21
growing torrent of goods to satisfy a vast pent-up demand. The crux of the
domestic-international linkage during Act II was, in effect, a new social com-
pact between the CCP and its subjects: if people would loyally obey the CCP,
that party would allow them the autonomy and opportunities to “get rich.”
A large and ultimately vast array of foreign inputs flowed into the PRC to fuel
Deng’s revolution from above, quickly delivering economic benefits to those
who were willing to participate in the dismantling of China’s Soviet-style
economy.
Deng’s drive to reconstruct China via “opening and reform” had a profound
impact on PRC foreign relations in other ways too. In order to secure broad
US support for China’s opening and reform, Deng used the Soviet-China-US
“strategic triangle” to win US support for China’s emergence as a rich and
strong, yet Leninist, power. Deng transformed PRC-US relations by pouring
new economic wine into the bottles of Sino-US strategic cooperation that
traced to 1972. For Mao, better relations with the United States were about
deterring Soviet intervention or attack and thus protecting China’s uniquely
antirevisionist socialism. Deng realized that, for better or worse, the United
States dominated global capitalism, and that if the still-Leninist PRC was to
draw deeply and broadly on inputs available in the advanced capitalist coun-
tries, it would need American goodwill. The basis of US benevolence toward
socialist China’s becoming a “rich and powerful” nation would be China’s
strategic partnership with the United States against the Soviet Union. The
United States would welcome the PRC’s “four modernizations” because it saw
the PRC as a partner in the “triangular” conflict with the Soviet Union. Deng’s
diplomacy sought to create a favorable macroclimate for a multidecade drive
for economic development by tilting toward the United States. Deng also
sought to lessen conflicts with almost all countries, including China’s tradi-
tional rivals Russia, Japan, and India. In line with this, Deng scrapped Mao’s
revolutionary activism. These moves allowed Deng to cut defense spending,
shift resources to economic development, and expand economic cooperation
with a wide range of countries.
Act II is called a “happy interregnum” for three reasons. First, the CCP
abandoned its totalitarian quest, which had dominated the Mao period. No
longer did the CCP attempt to engineer the transformation of the Chinese
people into some sort of “new man” appropriate to the construction of a com-
munist society according to Marxist-Leninist ideology. The CCP gradually
granted the Chinese people a wide array of personal but long-prohibited free-
doms: travel internationally and domestically, religious worship, romantic
activity among youth, divorce, individual creativity and expression in the
arts, hobbies of all sorts, the permissible scope of private and even public dis-
cussions, and not least, the freedom to form and grow private businesses. The
mechanisms of CCP control over the state, and of state dictatorship over soci-
ety, remained in place, and were still occasionally used. But mechanisms of