Deng’s Economic Reforms Win Beijing Support

BEIJING — China’s Communist Party has staked its future on economic reform in a triumph for 87-year-old leader Deng Xiaoping over hard-liners devoted to Marxist ideology.

In a two-day meeting this week, the party’s Politburo vowed to keep policies of reform unchanged for 100 years and said those who put politics first must be stopped, said a report splashed across front pages of major newspapers today.

The decision marked a victory for Deng, who is officially retired, in a power struggle before the first party congress in five years--scheduled for late this year--and may lead to a purge of those opposed to reform.

The announcement made clear that China’s leaders have decided that economic prosperity--not ideology--is the key to retaining power after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of communism in Eastern Europe.

“It’s a major turning point and shows Deng is very strong,” a well-placed Chinese source said. “It shows they still have to listen to him.”

Deng, who introduced market-style economic reforms in 1978 that have dramatically raised Chinese living standards, feared the hard-liners would undo his achievements in the name of protecting China from bourgeois contamination. The hard-liners say the reforms are leading China toward capitalism and that the “open-door policy” of maintaining contact with the West is bringing in drug use, low-brow Western culture and crime.