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  The Limits of Reform: Deng Xiaoping's Legacy Divides Chinese Leadership

The Limits of Reform Deng Xiaoping's Legacy Divides Chinese Leadership

By Wieland Wagner in Beijing

Part 2: 'We Always Felt Father's Deep Respect for Mao'

Mao pressed ahead with China's development into an industrial and military power, eventually dispensing with the help of the Soviet Union, which he felt had abandoned him. The details were unimportant to the poetic visionary, as he dispatched his enormous country on his "Great Leap Forward" in 1958.

Throughout the country, the Chinese built backyard furnaces to melt down their kitchen pots and tools, cutting down one-tenth of the country's forests for timber and fuel. By the end of the ludicrous campaign, millions of people had starved to death. It was left up to Deng and older associates like Liu Shaoqi to alleviate the misery and revive the economy. It was then that Deng first made his oft-quoted remark: "It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice."

Mao, the great ideologue, retreated resentfully to Zhongnanhai, his seat of government in the western section of the Forbidden City. He despised the new normalcy in which party officials and bureaucrats alike had ensconced themselves. Mao was convinced that he could only win the ideological battle through permanent class struggle and the extreme circumstances of revolution.

Together with his fourth wife, the actress Jiang Qing, and with the support of Defense Minister Lin Biao, Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966. From his base in Shanghai, he ordered his underlings to attack "freaks and monsters" -- the intellectuals who had dared to mock him, the red emperor. In truth, his campaign was directed against his adversaries in Beijing, fellow travelers who had become rivals, including Deng. Mao's "little devils" drove established bureaucrats and high-ranking party officials to commit suicide, devastated temples and burned books.

The former tractor factory where Deng worked at the time, wearing a blue Mao uniform and simple rubber shoes, is a museum today. The workbench where he assembled and filed parts is still intact. Deng owed his survival to the other workers, who protected him against the Red Guards.

The long-awaited turning point and Deng's chance to return to power finally came in 1971. In September of that year, Lin Biao, Mao's anointed successor, died in a mysterious plane crash over Mongolia after an alleged coup attempt. Betrayed by his crown prince, the aging Mao needed someone to serve as a counterweight to his wife and her radical Gang of Four, who were hungry for power. He needed Deng.

The once-ostracized Deng suddenly reappeared at a state banquet in the Great Hall of the People in 1973. He immediately began to boost industrial production, which had declined considerably. He removed radical ideologues from power, released seasoned factory managers and experts from prison and reinstated them in their former positions. Deng quickly introduced reforms of the agricultural economy, industry, the scientific community and defense.

But his approach to reform was so hurried and abrasive that he aroused the dictator's suspicion once again. Mao placed him under house arrest. Deng would not be released until his outsized rival was dead.

In a legendary plenary session of the Central Committee in December 1978, Deng had his new policy of reforms and opening the country to the rest of the world formally ratified. Those who had expected him to use the opportunity to settle old scores with Mao -- perhaps with a dramatic gesture like the toppling of Russian dictator Josef Stalin's statue in Moscow after his death in 1956 -- were disappointed. He allowed the Chinese to continue their pilgrimages to Mao's crystal coffin. Deng, ever the pragmatist, needed the founder of communist China to hold the country together during his enormous reform experiment.

It was more than just tactics. Deng, China's new red emperor, must have felt connected to Mao -- the man who had inflicted so much suffering on him and his family -- in a kind of love-hate relationship. According to his daughter, Deng Rong, now 57, he never even complained about Mao to his family. "We always felt father's deep respect for Mao," she says.

Nevertheless, Deng was determined to prevent another Mao from coming to power. He imposed limits on the cult of the leader, prompting students and intellectuals to feel sufficiently confident to post flyers demanding democracy. But what they failed to recognize was that their idol was dead-set against any attempts to shake the party's monopoly on power. This conflict eventually led to the June 1989 massacre on Tiananmen Square, which ended in the deaths of up to 3,000 people and countless injuries.

Deng's life calmed down after this bloodbath. Officially retired, the patriarch spent his days playing with his grandchildren in his Beijing villa. But he soon realized that the party's old guard was not only watering down his reforms, but was also thwarting his efforts to open up the country economically. In January 1992, the 82-year-old Deng boarded a train for Guangdong, a special economic zone in the south. What seemingly began as a private excursion developed into the reformer's final comeback.

Chen Kaizhi, 67, remembers his meeting with Deng in Shenzhen. A photo in his study depicts a smiling Chen taking the guest from Beijing on a tour of the booming city. Within the space of a decade, the former fishing village near the Hong Kong border had been transformed into a modern city of skyscrapers. Deng was eager to see the city again, which he believed symbolized his life's work.

Whenever his car passed yet another modern factory, Deng ordered the driver to stop. The octogenarian in his beige leisure suit wanted to make sure that he had been right, and that the opponents of reform in Beijing had been wrong. He was convinced that China had to open itself up to even more experiments, including publicly traded companies, more foreign capital and more foreign technology.

Deng staged the high point of his trip in a restaurant on the 53rd floor of the Guomao Building with a view of nearby capitalist Hong Kong. The small old man delivered a 30-minute speech. "Reforms are the only solution," he said, warning the party against tiptoeing along "as slowly as women with bound feet."

Deng had won. It seems hard to believe today that a Communist Party leader could seriously reverse the country's embrace of a market economy. But the new old Maoists in the Communist Party are in fact right when they say, in their letter to President Hu, that functionaries and their children are turning into capitalists who often dispose of privatized state assets as if they were family property.

The true test for Deng's China is still ahead. According to the Asian Development Bank, income inequality is greater in China than in any other Asian country except Nepal. Millions of Chinese remain bitterly poor. Prompted by concerns over unrest throughout the country, the Beijing leadership is reluctant to allow democratic reforms, which could in fact lessen the pressure.

On the whole, says Deng Pufang, the party has not exceeded the limits his father imposed on it.

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan