First Brooks Brothers Communist : Zhao’s Liberalism More Smoke Than Substance

Two years ago, an American journalist working at the Chinese Communist Party’s Central Translation Bureau suggested that the English texts of party documents eliminate words such as masses and struggle.

Those words “sound too Communist,” argued the journalist, Jeanne Moore, who later recalled the conversation in a Detroit Free Press article. She argued that the translators should begin to use words that sound more modern and appeal to Westerners.

“You mean trick them a little,” a Chinese colleague joked. “Like Zhao Ziyang putting on a Western suit.”

It was a line that revealed a good deal about how party cadres perceive their premier--as a man whose Western appearance is only gabardine-deep, and whose underlying values are not threatening to the political traditions of the ruling party.

In the pantheon of Chinese leaders, Zhao Ziyang (pronounced Jow Dzuh Yong) is China’s first Brooks Brothers Communist. With his well-cut suits and his fashionable ties, his dyed-black hair and aura of self-confidence, he would not look at all out of place in the cloakroom of the U.S. Senate.

It is not all a matter of show. Zhao, 67--China’s premier since 1980 and named Friday as acting general secretary of the Communist Party, replacing Hu Yaobang--has been the spearhead of China’s modernization program. For the past six years, he has been the leader responsible, more than anyone else, for carrying out the economic changes necessary to spur China’s development and turn it into a modern socialist state.

Zhao has overseen China’s move away from central planning toward a mixed economy in which market forces play a role. He helped to make profits acceptable as a valid economic goal and urged that workers be paid bonuses for increased productivity. And he pushed successfully to end China’s “iron rice bowl” policy--the guarantee of lifetime employment from the state.

“We must not bind ourselves as silkworms do within cocoons,” he said in one speech eight years ago. “ . . . We can abolish any economic patterns and conventions that hold back production.”

Yet no matter how often he departed from Communist economic orthodoxy, the premier has always been careful to stay in the mainstream of political and ideological thought within the party. He is a man who has spent more than half his life as a local or provincial party boss. He has taken care to soothe the conservatives within the party and has never been reluctant to borrow their rhetoric when necessary.

“During this new historical period, it is all the more necessary to quickly alert all party members to the question of capitalist inroads,” he said in a typical speech in 1982. “By sounding this alarm, we hope we can help our party members come to their senses, heighten their spirit and strengthen their will to withstand the test.”

Good Political Sense

In this ability to sense what will be politically acceptable within the party, Zhao is reminiscent of the late Premier Chou En-lai, a man who carried on the day-to-day work of running the country and survived all the factional in-fighting under Mao Tse-tung.

Like Chou, he is a man willing to take responsibility. In early 1985, when the initial stages of China’s urban economic reform program strayed out of control, he stood before the National People’s Congress, China’s legislature, and coolly described what had gone wrong.

After meeting him in New York City in 1984, former President Richard M. Nixon pronounced Zhao “poised, suave, tough and pragmatic, the kind of leader the People’s Republic of China needs at this time.”

Zhao had flattered Nixon by quoting extensively from Nixon’s 1982 book “Leaders” during their visit.

The son of a landlord in the central Chinese province of Henan, Zhao has a high school education. He joined the Communist Youth League in 1932 and the Communist Party in 1938.

Filled Local Party Posts

But he did not fight in the Red Army and has no close ties to the generation of leaders, such as Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who worked under Mao at the revolutionary base camp in Yanan. Instead, during the 1940s, Zhao worked as a local party secretary and in rural reform work.

For most of the next 30 years, Zhao worked his way around China at the provincial level. He served as party boss in Guangdong province in the south until the Cultural Revolution, when he was denounced as a “stinking element of the landowning class” and was paraded through the streets of Canton wearing a dunce cap.

By 1971, he was permitted to return to work as party boss in Inner Mongolia, and two years later he returned to Guangdong, the province adjoining Hong Kong.

He came to national prominence during his five-year tenure as party boss in Sichuan, China’s most populous province, from 1976 until 1980. It was here that he began many of the economic experiments that later, under Deng, became part of the national economic reform program.

Pioneered Rural Reform

In Sichuan, he pioneered in rural reform programs that gave peasants freedom to cultivate private plots, implemented tough family-planning policies and gave individual factories greater control over their own management.

The innovative policies attracted Deng’s attention, and in 1980 Zhao moved to Peking to take over as premier.

Although he has been regarded for nearly a decade as a protege of Deng, Zhao was once obliged to denounce him.

In 1976, after Deng was purged from all his party and government posts following the mass demonstrations at Peking’s central Tian An Men Square, Zhao called on Communist Party members to “thoroughly expose and repudiate the Deng Xiaoping crimes of trying to subvert the dictatorship of the proletariat and restore capitalism.”

That was the official party line at the time, and Zhao felt obliged to go along with it, biding his time until the political winds shifted again.