Families Watch Rites for Deng--in Comfort

Zhang Lianzhong, a 60-year-old engineer, watched today’s public memorial service for “paramount leader” Deng Xiaoping in the privacy of his Qinghua University apartment. With him were his wife and their married daughter, who was visiting from abroad with their infant granddaughter.

In their three-room home on the northwest side of town, the Zhangs were surrounded by ample evidence of the materially good life: not just comfortable furniture but an air conditioner; a color Hitachi television set and VCR; a stereo system; a telephone and a fax; a well-appointed kitchen with microwave cooker, gas stove and oven.

“When Mao died,” Zhang said, people at least knew that Deng was waiting in the wings, even though he had been purged during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution. “We thought, ‘There is a Deng who could fix China, if he could come out again.’ But now that Deng has died, we don’t have that kind of figure anymore.”

The normally ebullient man, red-eyed and greatly subdued, sat on the couch beside his wife, who also appeared to have been weeping. Twenty-one years ago, when Mao Tse-tung was publicly memorialized before 1 million mourners in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Zhang and his wife, both Communist Party members, didn’t even own a radio.

After what Zhang called “20 years’ hard work for Mao,” the couple also didn’t own a bed, table or chairs. They lived with their 9-year-old daughter in a 9-by-12-foot room that had neither a kitchen nor a toilet. Zhang was forced out of the university during the Cultural Revolution, first to labor in the countryside, then to work in a factory for 62 yuan (about $32 in 1976 dollars) a month.

Listening to Mao’s funeral in 1976, Zhang said, was obligatory:

“We were organized. It was a political task for everybody.” Zhang and his co-workers all listened to the service on the factory’s radio.

Today, Zhang is a technology corporation executive. He and his wife, who is retired, have a combined income nearly 40 times what it was in 1976.

“The most significant gains in the Deng era are economic developments,” he said. “The reform and opening policies are the greatest contribution Deng has given China. But other than that, I believe a lot of people think that we have got to reform our political system as well.”

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The Wang and Ling families’ tiny two-story home near Shanghai’s Huangpu River was within easy earshot of the ship bells and foghorns that rang out during the nationwide tribute to Deng.

Wang Miaogen, 68, a retired propagandist, has resided in the house in a former Japanese district for 50 years and lives with his sister, his 49-year-old nephew Ling Yu, a food company manager, and Ling’s wife and daughter. As family members quietly gathered to watch Deng’s service on their large color TV, Wang recalled the tense experience 21 years ago when Mao died and he watched the funeral with his work unit.

“We wore dark colors and couldn’t talk loudly or laugh. If you even smiled, you had to go bow before Mao’s portrait and beg for forgiveness,” he said.

The family scanned the huge crowd of party leaders ranked for Deng’s memorial, and the details of the state display. Commenting on the size of the huge portrait of Deng that dominated the funeral stage, Ling’s mother, Wang Jin, 77, said, “It looks even larger than Mao’s.”

“It should be larger than Mao’s,” said her daughter-in-law, Shen Aiwen. “Deng has done much more for China.”

The family approved of the stamina and proper decorum of “even very old” party members who stood throughout President Jiang Zemin’s eulogy, and they observed finally that in their opinion, “everyone who should be there is there.”

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Three generations of Li Yupei’s family in Beijing, from the 91-year-old matriarch to the 22-year-old scion, watched Deng’s memorial service on their color television in the modern high-rise apartment they moved into two years ago. The gracious apartment--with central heat, hot and cold running water, a kitchen, toilet, telephone and such luxuries as a computer and printer--is far more comfortable than their ancestral home, a traditional courtyard house without these amenities in the once-ritzy, central Dongdan neighborhood.

The new apartment also gets much better television reception, Li said. He had watched Mao’s memorial service on a fuzzy black-and-white TV in the company of the strangers to whom government housing authorities had assigned half of his mother’s house, where he, his wife and her grandmother also lived. The Lis’ two children lived at a local state-run kindergarten.

“I was grieving for Mao,” said Li, a university mathematics professor. “I felt deep sorrow.”

“It was as if a god had died,” said Li’s wife, Kan Shuzheng, 55, a teacher. Both ardent socialists, the couple had spent more than two years of the Cultural Revolution working in cotton fields in Beijing’s Fangshan suburb. Li said he had “no problems or major conflicts then.”

“Chairman Mao did great things for the country,” Li said. “My mother has bound feet. It is extremely painful. She has suffered so much. Mao liberated women like my mother from practices like foot binding.”

But he said that after Mao’s death ended the Cultural Revolution, “life was hard for everyone. We all shared the same hardships.”

“The living standards and lives of the people got better under Deng,” Li said. “For me, the last 20 years have been very productive. I’ve had so many opportunities that once were unavailable.”

Yet Li said he is ambivalent about the Deng era.

“I’ve noticed that ideology is not so important now,” he said. “People no longer think about others and socialism; they’re just concerned with their own selves. You hear stories of corruption among cadres and leaders. They’re not even concerned about the masses.”

Tempest reported from Beijing and Farley from Shanghai. Beijing Bureau researcher Li Ping Lo contributed to this report.