The future of the reform movement now underway in China hinges on many complex factors–some of them, like the weather, entirely beyond government control.
Record harvests in 1979, spurred on by exceptionally good weather, overinflated the success of the rural reforms and helped buoy the movement. A series of bad harvests now could touch off a violent backlash against China`s current leaders and be used by a new group as a pretext to take power.
Although the Chinese leadership has begun to question the relevance of Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought to China, it has not challenged the relevance of the party, which remains the nation`s most durable institution. The wave of reform is a curious blend of centralization and decentralization that leaves party members on the top and peasants on the bottom, squeezing the cadres and functionaries in the middle.
Since 1949, this middle layer has served as the most important link between the people and the leadership. Now the central government is asking middle- and low-level cadres to implement policies that, if successful, could leave them with far less power than they are accustomed to wielding. As the peasants gain more economic freedom, the cadres lose considerable power over them.
Ironically, the local officials remain the greatest hope for, and pose the greatest threat to, the reform program. The new system, which has no other institutions to fall back on, must depend on the party. Rural cadres are still the most important check on the peasants, who may be ”getting carried away with their new freedom,” as one Western scholar explained.
The leadership has increasingly tried to bind peasants with formal, written contracts stipulating what crops are to be raised and how much of the harvest peasants must turn over to the collective and the state. It is unclear, however, just how binding those contracts are. Despite recent attempts to strengthen legal codes, Chinese law remains embryonic, imprecise and often capricious.
As China expands its legal system, it is being forced to acknowledge more of its citizens` legal rights, many of which were either grossly ignored or trampled on in the past. From the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, five decades ago, law and politics have been virtually identical in the People`s Republic. In moving to differentiate between the two, the nation may unleash a demand for broader individual rights, which will be followed by a government crackdown.
Just as the implementation of reforms has fostered disputes between peasants and local leaders, so it has raised tensions between local leaders and Peking. The central government is walking a tightrope, trying to encourage greater decentralization while maintaining a comprehensive state plan that unambiguously upholds Peking`s position as the final arbiter. Arguments between the central government and local leaders over raw materials, investments and distribution of products and surplus probably will increase.
The reforms also have fostered tensions between the party and the army. Next to the Communist Party, the army, or PLA, has been the hardiest institution in China. The party has expected soldiers to play a valuable ideological and organizational role; in return for their loyalty, they receive favored treatment in obtaining party membership, cadre positions, jobs and education. The economic reform movement, which began shortly after civilian leadership re-emerged following the Cultural Revolution, threatens the army`s privileged position.
Although the recent shake-ups and retirements in the army attest to Deng`s strength in reducing the army`s role in Chinese politics, his efforts could be reversed quickly.
The current leadership faces what has been a centuries-old dilemma for China: the great income disparities that result from the wide differences around the country in natural and human endowments. As the central government relinquishes its control over local production, it will become increasingly limited in its ability to play Robin Hood. Some have contended that the recent reforms have raised the nation`s ”threshold of tolerance for inequality.”
Defending the changes, a top agricultural researcher argued that all the peasants would stay poor if the more successful ones were held back. ”So some peasants have become better off first and the others will be helped to catch up with the goal of achieving common prosperity,” he said.
The contrasts within villages, or between cities and the surrounding countryside, have not become glaring yet, so inequities have not been widely challenged. But if the peasants are allowed to move about more freely in the future, China`s very poor may become more discontented and rebellious, seeing the great gap between them and the groups that have prospered.
In giving away some of its economic prerogatives, the government may also lose some of its power to enforce its birth control program. The plan has depended on strict adherence to draconian measures that deeply touch the local and personal affairs of the Chinese people. As the party loses control over crop production, it will have fewer inducements at its command, such as wages, work points and ration coupons, with which to induce peasant women to agree to sterilization and abortion.
The Chinese people–beaten, inspired, traumatized, run over, embraced and discarded by nearly four decades of zigzagging political movements–are often more able than outside observers to realize how wide the gap is between the ideal and the real in politics. They have learned the virtue, indeed the necessity, of being yang feng yin wei: compliant on the outside, defiant on the inside.
They are like the peasant who in 1982 was asked by a cadre why he had not yet spread fertilizer on the orchard he had contracted to take care of under the new responsibility system. ”I`m waiting for the 12th Party Conference next month,” he replied. ”I`ve got to see if there`s any policy change.”
By calling for a more realistic look at the major threats and challenges to the economic reforms, I am not making yet another argument that China is inherently unstable and unpredictable, and thus that these reforms are doomed to fail as others have before them. Nor am I attempting to belittle what clearly is the promise of a new era of maturity and good sense in Chinese domestic policies. The recent changes have been dramatic and refreshing. All too often, however, the drama of current Chinese politics beguiles some Chinese and China-watchers into forgetting or excusing away the past.
For example, it is quite remarkable and significant that last year the People`s Daily questioned the universal validity of Marxism and its relevance to modern China. Yet one must not overlook what the Chinese leadership was saying about Marx on the centenary of his death only three years ago, when the reform movement was already well underway.
In a national address entitled ”The Radiance of the Great Truth of Marxism Lights Our Way,” General Secretary Hu said that even though ”Marx and Engels have passed away . . . Marxism has developed with increasing vigor,” and that ”the history of Marxism is one of triumph over
. . . antagonistic ideological trends.”
Even Mao from time to time had to remind his colleagues of the abyss between propaganda and reality. In the 1950s, when he was denying in private what he was vehemently claiming in public–that an attack from the United States or the Soviet Union was imminent–he chided them, ”We must not be misled by our propaganda.”
