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Deng Xiaoping
The Post-Mao Transition
 The first open sign of a change in thinking came ... on December 22, 1980, [when] the People’s Daily carried
a front-page article saying that Mao Zedong had made mistakes
in his late years, especially in initiating and leading the Cultural
Revolution, mistakes which had brought grave misfortunes to the Party
and the people. But the assessment of Mao’s historical role was a
delicate matter for the Party. Many of the leaders, formerly associates
of Mao, had themselves been the victims of his policies during the
Cultural Revolution. However, if they were simply to condemn the
Chairman posthumously, they risked reopening the question of Party
authority in a way that might jeopardize their own hold on power. A
resolution adopted by the Central Committee in June 1981 formally
blamed Mao for the mistakes of the Cultural Revolution, which had
“brought catastrophe to the Party, the state, and the whole people.”
But as Hu Yaobang ... declared the following month, Mao committed most
of his errors in his later years. “It is clear that from the
perspective of his entire life, his contributions to the Chinese
revolution far outweigh his mistakes.”
The Party’s final conclusion was that Mao had been correct 70 percent
of the time and incorrect only 30 percent of the time and that his
errors had mostly occurred near the end of his life. (China: Its History and Culture, 228-9)
| “Had Mao died in 1956, his achievements would have been immortal. Had
he died in 1966, he would still have been a great man but flawed. But
he died in 1976. Alas, what can one say?” (Chen Yun, senior Communist Party official under Mao and Deng, in The Economist) |
Socialism with Chinese Characteristics
[Deng
Xiaoping’s] most distinguishing personal characteristic was pragmatism:
he was widely quoted in the English-language press as saying that it
does not matter whether a cat is black or white as long as it catches
mice, and “seek truth through facts” (shishi qiu shi)
became the slogan that the reformers heavily promoted in China. Market
forces, the pursuit of profit, and even stock exchanges gradually
became tolerated. To the extent that some Marxist theoretical
justification was still necessary for such apparently capitalist
behavior, it came to be argued that because China was still only in the
“initial stages of socialism” a little capitalism was only to be
expected. ...
 Outside
critics objected that China’s gradual, piecemeal, hybrid approach to
economic reform could not possibly succeed, comparing it to trying to
leap over the Grand Canyon in [a] series of small jumps rather than one
big leap, but in practice it actually seems to have been more effective
than the big-bang sudden shock therapy reform that was attempted in the
former Soviet Union, where gross domestic product (GDP) actually
contracted sharply after the initial privatization in the 1990s.
According to American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) estimates of
purchasing power parity, by 2014 the real size of China’s GDP was
almost five times that of Russia’s, although the Russian economy had
originally been much more developed. ... Although most Chinese people
remain poor by the standards of the world’s most developed countries,
hundreds of millions of Chinese people have been lifted out of the
direst poverty, and China’s major cities have become utterly
transformed. (HEA, 370-1)
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