China’s Profound Instability

In a 1980 interview with the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, Deng Xiaoping observed, “For a leader to pick his own successor is a feudal practice. It is an illustration of the imperfections in our institutions.” Deng was referring to the series of attempts by Mao Tse-tung to anoint the man who would follow him as China’s supreme leader. For more than a month now, Communist Party members in Beijing have been whispering about Deng’s own efforts in that direction--his latest choice to be pre-eminent among the next generation of leaders is the innocuous party chief Jiang Zemin.

As China staggers toward Oct. 1, the 40th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, it remains riven by a political instability so profound that it is impossible to assay the country’s future with any confidence. Devoid of any institutional strengths, China’s polity remains as bound to the whims of one man as it did on Oct. 1, 1949--when Mao stood atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace and proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic. Where Mao never interested himself in creating a party or government structure that could endure in his wake, Deng has tried but failed. Leadership succession, a litmus test of political stability, has eluded China.

China’s first president, Liu Shaoqi, was the first of those formally designated to succeed to paramount power. Liu traced his friendship with Mao to 1932 and the early guerrilla wars. By 1945, Liu was regarded as second only to Mao--and often acted in Mao’s stead. Through the 1950s, Liu exercised sweeping influence over domestic policy and, in 1958, when Mao announced he intended to retire from daily affairs, Liu was named chairman of the People’s Republic. The People’s Daily, the official party organ, began describing Liu as Mao’s “closest comrade-in-arms.” In 1961, Mao told the Sunday Times that Liu would inherit the mantle of supreme leadership.

Mao spoke too soon. Five years later, when the ideological tidal wave of the Cultural Revolution crashed over China, Liu was swept into political oblivion as the country’s “No. 1 capitalist roader.” He was hounded from his home by Mao’s minions, imprisoned and, in 1969, died on the concrete floor of a prison cell, lying in his own excrement. By then, however, Mao had found a new “closest comrade-in-arms,” Lin Biao, the minister of defense. Lin, a brilliant general during the 1940s guerrilla campaigns, enthusiastically embraced the Cultural Revolution and Mao’s call for attacks on the party Establishment. Mao, for his part, declared Lin the new prince-in-waiting.

Lin, slavish in his public adulation of Mao, fanned the political hysteria of those years. Then he disappeared from view in September, 1971. The story that emerged from China months later was he had betrayed Mao and, after his attempt to seize power had failed, he fled to the Soviet Union, his plane crashing in Mongolia. Another version had him gunned down by Mao’s guards in a wooded compound west of the capital. In any case, Mao again remained without a successor.

Not until he was on his deathbed, in 1976, did Mao try again. This time he supposedly told an obscure party official from Hunan, Hua Guofeng, “With you in charge, I am at ease.” This blessing was intended, so Hua proclaimed, to confer ultimate power. He became chairman of the party. With Mao’s death however, Hua lost his principal supporter, and a coalition of senior party officials, who had been purged during the Cultural Revolution, soon wrested power from the hapless Hua. The coalition was led by Deng Xiaoping.

By 1978, Deng had established his authority over the party and began the process of rebuilding a Communist Party shattered by a decade of factional conflict and ideological tyranny. Already well into his 70s, Deng busied himself with laying the groundwork for a stable transition to the next generation. He turned to Zhao Ziyang--an accomplished official from Sichuan Province who had revitalized the critical agricultural sector--to head the government as prime minister. To lead the party, a demoralized institution floundering for direction, he chose Hu Yaobang, a peppery, witty and irreverent Hunanese. These men, Deng declared, would supervise the restructuring of China’s economic and political life and permit the generation of revolutionary leaders, led by Deng himself, to retire.

Deng’s carefully woven succession began unraveling as the decade wore on and the implications of profound economic change began to threaten the older generation’s political orthodoxy. The country’s intelligentsia, exposed to the world beyond China and freed to begin thinking and working on their own terms, became restless under the shackles of ideological orthodoxy. In December, 1986, university students marched through more than two dozen Chinese cities, demanding greater freedom of expression and more democratic political institutions. Deng responded angrily and swiftly. He dismissed Hu Yaobang and installed Zhao in his place, ordering in the meantime a reassertion of ideological conformity. Deng, pressured by his octogenarian contemporaries who feared an erosion of China’s socialist soul, appointed Li Peng, a Moscow-trained engineer suspicious of many of Deng’s economic reforms, as prime minister.

But change swept across China. After Hu’s sudden death in April, China’s students and intellectuals again took to the streets, this time in numbers vastly greater than two years earlier. At times, more than a million Beijing citizens clogged the capital’s streets, demanding basic civil rights, freedom of expression, a more democratic political order, an end to the party’s monopoly of power, an end to the pervasive corruption that gripped the bureaucracy. Deng reacted savagely, ordering tanks and troops to crush the protests. Thousands were massacred in the process of retaking Beijing from its own citizens.

Again, Deng turned on his chosen successor. Zhao Ziyang was stripped of his post and placed under house arrest. His closest aides and advisers were arrested or purged. Each week that passes, still more of Zhao’s proteges are being dismissed from posts as provincial governors, economic advisers, party secretaries. For counsel, Deng again relied on the aged coterie of retired party leaders who now exercise control of the party.

Faced with a vacuum within the next generation of leadership--apart from Li Peng, a man detested throughout China--Deng plucked the inoffensive, if incompetent, party secretary of Shanghai, Jiang Zemin, to lead the 47-million-member Communist Party. Before becoming Shanghai party chief, Jiang had been the mayor, but was replaced because of his inability to rejuvenate the city’s stagnant economy or surmount the sclerotic municipal bureaucracy. But Jiang exhibited one trait that appealed to Deng. During both the 1986 student protests and the much larger demonstrations this spring, Jiang led the swift suppression of the movements.

As soon as Jiang arrived in Beijing, Deng gathered the party leadership to inform them the new leader would wield dominant authority. “We must consciously defend the core, which is none other than Comrade Jiang Zemin, everyone’s comrade,” one version of Deng’s remarks goes. Reports from Beijing suggest some quiet disbelief at Deng’s statements. Jiang, despite his formal ascension to the party’s highest post, has no power base and is viewed as a man whose devotion to conventional political orthodoxy meshes comfortably with his unimaginative approach to economic change. But most of all, it is whispered in Beijing, Jiang’s anointing will be no more secure than that of his numerous predecessors.