America’s trade embargo had long ended and
China had taken its place fully in the international
community, replacing Taiwan’s representative as
a permanent member of the UN Security
Council. Relations with the West were nor-
malised, a process that began with the Soviet
Union only in the late 1980s. Thus the opening
to the West had begun under Mao’s auspices in
the 1970s. It was to reach a high point in the
1980s, with many thousands of Chinese students
being sent abroad – most to the capitalist US,
where over 20,000 were sent to study advanced
technology and management. Deng’s younger
son studied for his doctorate at Rochester
University. It was an ironic reversal: in the 1950s
it had been the Soviet Union that had provided
the education.
Mao’s immediate successor, chosen as chairman
by the geriatric Politburo, was an orthodox
Maoist, Hua Guofeng. His most significant con-
tribution was to drive the Gang of Four, that is
the extreme left, from the most powerful posi-
tions. We can only guess at the struggles within
the Politburo that led to Deng’s recall to his
former posts in 1977. Natural disasters, which
struck the countryside in 1977 and 1978, slowed
down the economic recovery then under way and
probably helped the reformist section of the
Politburo. A distinguished Chinese historian has
called the third plenary session of the Eleventh
Party Central Committee held in December 1978
‘a turning point of far-reaching significance’. Hua
was dismissed from his position as party chairman
in 1978, accused of persisting in the ‘two what-
evers’ – that is, of wanting to uphold whatever
policy decisions Mao had made and whatever
directives Mao had sent down.
A main plank of Marxist strategy was now
abandoned with the dropping of the ‘class strug-
gle’ as the key to development and the shift to
‘socialist modernisation’. What this meant in
reality, despite lip service to Maoist thinking, was
a break with Mao’s revolutionary drives, founded
on the belief that the creation of communist man
must come first through education and the organ-
isation of the peasantry in collectives and workers
into state-managed enterprises. The benefits of
well-being and economic progress were supposed
to follow automatically. It was now thought that
the prime task was to modernise China, to do
whatever was necessary to increase production on
the land and in industry as rapidly as possible so
as to raise within a generation the Chinese stan-
dard of living from one of the lowest in the world
to rank with that of the West. The new line
(which had to be sloganised to conform to polit-
ical practice) was called ‘Seeking truth from facts’.
Where Marxist ideology proved a hindrance it
would be jettisoned. This indeed was a revolu-
tionary change of course, though gradual in exe-
cution. The party, whose standing had reached
rock-bottom during the Cultural Revolution, was
to be restored to pre-eminence, to ensure that the
reforms decided by the leadership would be
carried through; and the People’s Liberation
Army was cosseted to ensure that it would remain
the loyal instrument of power and preserve order,
unity and obedience to the party leadership.
Democracy in the Western sense of pluralism and
of a leadership chosen by the people played no
part in this programme – indeed, demands for
such things were seen as jeopardising the aims of
modernisation, as destroying the essential unity of
purpose.
Deng Xiaoping, the man who represented the
new line and who had already played a significant
role in attempting to make China more modern
economically, belonged to that elderly group of
revolutionaries who had been active in the 1950s.
The open distancing from Mao’s supposed infal-
libility was signalled by subjecting the Gang of
Four to a televised trial in 1980 in order to expose
the wrongdoings of the Cultural Revolution.
Jiang Quing, Mao’s widow, alone offered a spir-
ited defence, refusing to admit any guilt: ‘You
can’t have peaceful coexistence in this area of ide-
ology’, she spat out. ‘Youcoexist, and they’ll
corrupt you.’ She was sentenced to death, but this
was later commuted to life imprisonment. As a
symbol of the Cultural Revolution she became
the most hated woman in China. Meanwhile, a
younger generation of politicians had been placed
in the top positions: Hu Yaobang became party
leader and Zhao Ziyang the head of government,
both of them reformist followers of Deng. Deng
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