In the immediate wake of Deng’s purge, many of his followers also fell from power, and a political campaign was launched to “criticize Deng Xiaoping and his right-deviationist attempt to reverse correct verdicts [on people during the Cultural Revolution].” Only Mao’s death in September and the purge of the Gang of Four by a coalition of political, police, and military leaders in October 1976 brought this effort to vilify Deng to a close. Although it was officially ended by the 11th Party Congress in August 1977, the Cultural Revolution had in fact concluded with Mao’s death and the purge of the Gang of Four.

Consequences of the

Cultural Revolution

Although the Cultural Revolution largely bypassed the vast majority of the people, who lived in rural areas, it had highly serious consequences for the Chinese system as a whole. In the short run, of course, the political instability and the zigzags in economic policy produced slower economic growth and a decline in the capacity of the government to deliver goods and services. Officials at all levels of the political system had learned that future shifts in policy would jeopardize those who had aggressively implemented previous policy. The result was bureaucratic timidity. In addition, with the death of Mao and the end of the Cultural Revolution, nearly three million CCP members and other citizens awaited reinstatement after having been wrongfully purged.

Bold actions in the late 1970s went far toward coping with those immediate problems, but the Cultural Revolution also left more-serious, longer-term legacies. First, a severe generation gap had been created in which young adults had been denied an education and had been taught to redress grievances by taking to the streets. Second, corruption grew within the CCP and the government, as the terror and accompanying scarcities of goods during the Cultural Revolution had forced people to fall back on traditional personal relationships and on extortion in order to get things done. Third, the CCP leadership and the system itself suffered a loss of legitimacy when millions of urban Chinese became disillusioned by the obvious power plays that took place in the name of political principle in the early and mid-1970s. And fourth, bitter factionalism was rampant, as members of rival Cultural Revolution factions shared the same work unit, each still looking for ways to undermine the power of the other.

China after the death of Mao

Perhaps never before in human history had a political leader unleashed such massive forces against the system that he had created. The resulting damage to that system was profound, and the goals that Mao Zedong sought to achieve ultimately remained elusive. The agenda he left behind for his successors was extraordinarily challenging.

Domestic Developments

Readjustment and Recovery

Mao’s death and the purge of the Gang of Four left Hua Guofeng, a compromise

candidate elevated to the premiership by Mao following the purge of Deng Xiaoping, as the chairman of the CCP and thus the official leader of China. Hua tried to consolidate his position by stressing his ties to Mao and his fidelity to Mao’s basic

ideas, but many others in the top leadership wanted to move away from these issues, and Hua’s position eroded over the remainder of the decade. Furthermore, Hua’s successor as party chairman, Hu Yaobang, helped abolish the chairmanship in 1982 in response to concerns that one person might again become too powerful within the party; however, he remained as general secretary.

The ambivalent legacies of the Cultural Revolution were reflected in the members of the Political Bureau chosen just after the 11th Party Congress had convened in August 1977. Like Hua Guofeng, almost half of the members were individuals whose careers had benefited from the Cultural Revolution; the other half were, like Deng Xiaoping, the Cultural Revolution’s victims. While a balance between the two groups would be reached only after a period of years, in the short run the tide quickly shifted in favour of the latter group.

Economic Policy Changes

In the late fall of 1976, the CCP leadership tried to bring some order to the country through a series of national conferences. They moved quickly to appeal to workers’ interests by reinstating wage bonuses. The economy had stagnated that year largely because of political turmoil, and Mao’s successors were anxious to start things moving again. Despite some uncertainty, Deng was rehabilitated and formally brought back into his previous offices in the summer of 1977.

Lacking detailed information on the economy, the leaders adopted an overly ambitious 10-year plan in early 1978 and used the government’s resources to the limit throughout that year to increase investment and achieve rapid economic growth. Much of that growth consisted of reactivating capacity that had lain idle because of political disruption. Future growth would be harder to achieve, and long-term trends in matters such as capital-output ratios made it increasingly clear that the old strategies would be less effective.

One of the major changes of 1978 was China’s sharp turn toward participation in the international economy. While in the 1970s there had been a resumption of the foreign trade that had been largely halted in the late 1960s, along with far-more-active and Western-oriented diplomatic initiatives, the changes during and after 1978 were fundamental. China’s leaders became convinced that large amounts of capital could be acquired from abroad to speed up the country’s modernization, a change in attitude that elicited an almost frenetic response from foreign bankers and entrepreneurs.

These several strands came together in late 1978 at a major meeting of the CCP leadership, when China formally agreed to establish full diplomatic relations with the United States. China’s leaders also formally adopted the Four Modernizations as the country’s highest priority, with all other tasks to be subordinated to that of economic development. This set of

priorities differed so fundamentally from those pursued during the Cultural Revolution that the implications for future policy and for the interests of various sectors of the population were profound.

The opening of China’s economy to the outside world proceeded apace. In the late 1970s the country adopted a jointventure law, and it subsequently enacted numerous other laws (such as one governing patents) to create an attractive environment for foreign capital. An initial experiment with “special economic zones” along the southern coast in the late 1970s led in 1984 to a decision to open 14 cities to more intense engagement with the international economy. The idea was to move toward opening ever larger sections of the country to foreign trade and investment.

Within the domestic economy, numerous experiments were undertaken in finance, banking, planning, urban economic management, and rural policy. Of these, by far the most important were the series of measures taken toward the roughly four-fifths of the population that lived in the countryside at the time. Prices paid for farm products were sharply increased in 1979, thus pumping significant additional resources into the agricultural sector. The collective farming system was gradually dismantled in favour of a return to family farming. At first, families were allowed to contract for the use of collective land for a limited period of time. Subsequently, the period of those contracts was extended, and subcontracting (essentially, allowing

one family to accumulate large amounts of land) was permitted.

Peasants were also allowed far greater choice in what crops to plant, and many abandoned farming altogether in favour of establishing small-scale industries or transport companies and other services. Thus, rural patterns of work, land leasing, and wealth changed markedly after 1978. Exceptionally good weather during the early 1980s contributed to record harvests.

The reforms in the urban economy had more-mixed results, largely because the economic system in the cities was so much more complex. Those reforms sought to provide material incentives for greater efficiency and to increase the use of market forces in allocating resources. Problems arose because of the relatively irrational price system, continuing managerial timidity, and the unwillingness of government officials to give up their power over economic decisions, among other difficulties. In the urban as well as the rural economy, the reformers tackled some of the fundamental building blocks of the Soviet system that had been imported during the 1950s.

Reforms have continued in the rural and urban areas. Rural producers have been given more freedom to decide how to use their earnings, whether for agricultural or other economic activities. Private entrepreneurship in the cities and the rationalization, privatization, and, in some cases, dismantling of state-owned enterprises have gained speed. At the same time, the central government has

moderated the pace of change—primarily to avoid increases in social unrest resulting from rising unemployment—and constructed a social safety net for those who lose their jobs.

Political Developments

The reformers led by Deng Xiaoping tried after 1978 to reduce the level of political coercion in Chinese society. Millions of victims of past political campaigns were released from labour camps, and bad “class labels” were removed from those stigmatized by them. This dramatically improved the career and social opportunities of millions of former political pariahs. To a considerable extent, moreover, the range of things considered political was narrowed, so that mundane elements such as style of dress and grooming and preferences in music and hobbies were no longer considered politically significant. More importantly, criticizing policy no longer triggered political retaliation against the critics. Overall, the role of the Public Security (police) forces was cut back substantially.

The reformers also tried to make preparations for their own political succession. This involved first rehabilitating cadres who had been purged during the Cultural Revolution (most of which was accomplished in the late 1970s). These cadres in many cases were old and no longer fully able to meet the demands being made on them, and they were encouraged to retire. Younger, better-educated people committed to reform were then brought

into prominent positions. Deng proved masterful at maintaining a viable coalition among the diverse forces at the top. By the end of 1981 he had succeeded in nudging Hua Guofeng and others of the more-rigid Maoists out of high-level positions. Although he refused to take the top positions for himself, Deng saw his supporters become premier (Zhao Ziyang and then Li Peng) and general secretary of the CCP (Hu Yaobang, Zhao, and Jiang Zemin), and he worked hard to try to consolidate and maintain their hold on power.

In early 1982 the CCP leadership made a concerted attempt to restructure the leading bodies in both the government and the party, and much was reorganized, with the appointment of many new officials. This general effort continued, with the focus increasingly on the bloated military establishment, but progress slowed considerably after the initial burst of organizational reformism.

Throughout 1982–85 the CCP carried out a “rectification” campaign designed to restore morals to its membership and weed out those who did not support reform. This campaign highlighted the increasing difficulties inherent in maintaining discipline and limiting corruption at a time of rapid change, when materialistic values were being officially propagated.

By the mid-1980s, China was in transition, with core elements of the previous system called into question while the ultimate balance that would be struck remained unclear even to the

top participants. The reform movement began to sour in 1985. Financial decentralization and the two-price system combined with other factors to produce inflation and encourage corruption. China’s population, increasingly exposed to foreign ideas and standards of living, put pressure on the government to speed the rate of change within the country.

These forces produced open unrest within the country in late 1986 and again on a much larger scale in the spring of 1989. By 1989 popular disaffection with

the CCP and the government had become widespread. Students—eventu- ally joined by many others—took to the streets in dozens of cities from April to June to demand greater freedom and other changes. Government leaders, after initial hesitation, used the army to suppress this unrest in early June (most visibly in Tiananmen Square), with substantial loss of life. China’s elderly revolutionaries then reverted to moreconservative economic, political, and cultural policies in an attempt to