China makes its great leap despite Mao

Mao led the People's Republic through three decades of misery. It took Deng equally long to turn it into an economic giant.

BEIJING // A few days before October 1, 1949, Chiang Kai-shek, the political leader of the Chinese Nationalist Party, was notified that the US government would not allow his fighter jets to refuel at a US base in Korea. Chiang needed the stopover so his bombers could return home after targeting Beijing, where a grand ceremony was scheduled for the day. Forlorn, Chiang scrapped the plan to bomb Beijing, where Mao Zedong was to celebrate the establishment of the People's Republic of China. It was the moment that marked the end of a decades-long civil war between the ideological rivals, resulting in Chiang's retreat to the island of Taiwan and the beginning of 60 years of Communist rule on the mainland.

Mao envisioned creating a modern, industrialised China that could equal the powers of the imperial West, which had put the nation through "100 years of humiliation" by forcing a series of unfair treaties on the Middle Kingdom. At 3pm on October 1, in his first official speech, Mao declared: "Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation. We have stood up."

Mao wanted to build a socialist country better than the Soviet Union and raise the country's industrial capacity within 15 years to the levels of Britain and the United States. It was a bold plan for a poor country reeling from the effects of occupation and civil war.

Instead, Mao ended up starving people in the effort by launching in 1958 the "Great Leap Forward", which mobilised the nation 24 hours a day to speed up agricultural and industrial production. Because traditional farms did not produce enough to sustain the project, the government set up co-operatives that initially resulted in greater grain yields.

Encouraged, Mao went too far with collectivisation. People's private property was confiscated and each work unit was assigned a production quota it had to hand over to the Communist Party. But zealous and competitive commune leaders inflated their grain production figures to the government, which collected according to the falsified reports. Peasants were left with little to eat. Mao himself was duped. When he went out on inspections, peasants showed him heavily packed rice fields that were in fact full of plants removed from other fields for his visit.

During the Great Leap Forward people ate grass, tree bark and even clay, which destroyed their intestines. The death toll from the 1958-61 famine has been estimated at 30 million.

Mao's reputation remained intact because cadres dared not challenge his authority and the state-controlled media did not report on the deaths. Mao's aides were afraid of emptying their hearts to him, especially after Mao's old friend and a highly decorated military leader, Peng Duhuai, was purged for criticising policy.

In 1964 Lin Biao, the defence minister, published a pocket-sized book,

Quotations From Chairman Mao Zedong

, and distributed it to the military. Lin said: "Every sentence Chairman Mao said is truth."

Later, it spread to schools and work units. People read, memorised and recited it. Teachers taught students that Mao was the saviour of China. The cult of Mao soon elevated him to "living God" status. Twice a day people had to "report" their personal thoughts to Mao, like a religious confession. They danced the "loyalty dance" to the leader. TV footage from the time showed flight attendants dancing in the sky as well.

In May 1966, Mao became dissatisfied with party officials who had become more interested in economic reforms than the revolution. He published articles in

The People's Daily,

encouraging young people to fight that: "It's right to rebel."

In a stratified Confucian society, where seniority was treated with great deference, the paramount leader's preaching was refreshing to the youth. They took his words to heart; they called themselves the "Red Guards" of the revolution. The fanatic Red Guards attacked intellectuals, landlords, school teachers and even their own family members for being "anti-revolutionary".

When the extremes of the Cultural Revolution caused social chaos, Mao disbanded the guards, sending millions of youth to the countryside to be "re-educated" by peasants, the social have-nots.

When Mao died in 1976 China was still a poor country, largely isolated from the rest of the world because of his reluctance to open the nation up to the world despite talks with the US president, Richard Nixon. His motto was: "Clean our room first before we invite guests to our house."

Ultimately Mao failed to bring prosperity to China despite the pledge he made as a young guerrilla leader.

"Mao was one of the biggest landlords and emperors perhaps in Chinese history [but] 'dressed in red'. He was no different than other famous rulers in world history who are power-thirsty and who play with people's psychology," said a Chinese historian and media critic, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Mao's death ended 30 years of misery and heralded a new beginning under a younger leader, Deng Xiaoping, who was "only" 74 years old, relatively young compared with the other party elders, who were in their 80s.

Deng was known for his pragmatist spirit and distanced himself from Mao's heavily ideological, factional politics. Deng became most famous for saying: "It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches the mice" - a slogan he used to start capitalist-style economic reforms in a country that officially subscribed to communism.

"Deng Xiaoping saw the first 30 years of the economy [under Mao] really didn't work," Dennis Wilder said in an interview. Mr Wilder served as China director at the White House National Security Council from 2004 to 2006. Until January he was also the NSC's Asia director and now is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. "Deng realised China needed outside help, so he opened it up. That was really the beginning of China's true rise."

Drew Thompson, the director of China Studies at the Nixon Center, a Washington think tank, said: "You really cannot compare the pre-1978 China as opposed to the post-1978 China and not give Deng Xiaoping a full credit for what China is today."

To test capitalism Deng designated four special economic zones in the southern areas, including Shenzhen, and opened them to foreign investment. When they turned out successful, he added 14 more coastal cities. Conservatives within the party responded to Deng's economic success with mixed feelings. The money-orientated lifestyle of Hong Kong and special economic zones went against everything their revolution stood for. But Deng persisted. In 1992, he insisted that any party leaders or cadres who could not wholeheartedly support the policies of accelerated reform should "go to sleep" - that is, resign from office, said Richard Baum in his book,

Burying Mao

.

Politically the early 1980s was what many Chinese regarded as a seeding period for democracy. Although the newspapers were still under the tight control of the Communist Party, people spontaneously posted political opinions and poems at certain parts of city walls, which were later called "democracy walls". Western-style music became popular. Rock 'n' roll singer Cui Jian had a hit with the song

I Don't Own a Thing in This World

, striking a chord with youth who felt the void from the attrition of political struggle.

College students discussed politics on campus, demanding freedom and democracy. Some senior political leaders, including Hu Yaobang, became sympathetic towards students but then were subject to "self-criticism" and subsequently ousted from the party.

In the spring of 1989, when Hu Yaobang died from a heart attack, students in Beijing spontaneously flocked to Tiananmen Square to pay tribute to the late leader and used the moment to demand democracy. The party labelled the student movement a plot to bring down the government. For the first time since the founding of the People's Republic of China, the people refused to be intimidated by official condemnation. The next day, a six kilometre-long line of students marched to the square. Students across the nation joined the movement. Communist Party leaders were divided over how to respond to their demands. As the top officials increasingly leaned towards physical means to disband the students, the more liberal-minded Zhao Ziyang went out to the square, apologising to the students by saying what has now become one of the most famous words from the year: "I came too late."

Hardliners stripped Zhao of his post as general secretary of the party and barred him from appearing in public. He died in 2005 while under house arrest. The government declared martial law. On June 3, troops forced their way into Tiananmen Square, leading to the mass bloody crackdown on the following day.

Deng, the widely acclaimed architect of China's economic modernisation, was labelled the "butcher of Beijing".

"Tiananmen is the Achilles heel of Deng. He understood the economic reforms very well, but he was unwilling to give up the monopoly of the Communist Party," Mr Wilder said.

It is common for observers to look at China's modern history by dividing it in half: 30 years under Mao and 30 years under Deng. Comparing Mao and Deng is also a common, yet polarised, way to define China today.

"It was really the brilliance of Deng Xiaoping who realised that the reform would unleash the creative spirit of Chinese people. So I think you have to give Deng the bulk of the credit for where China is today," Mr Thompson said. "The reason people want to remember Mao is because he was the founder of new China in 1949. You need to have your own patriotic heroes. But my own feeling is that history is and should be quite hard on Mao. He was a very successful revolutionary hero, but the policy he put in place was a disaster for many people," Mr Wilder said.

While foreign critics unambiguously favour Deng over Mao, in China the picture is more complex. Today, any visitor to Tiananmen will notice a larger than life portrait of one man: Mao Zedong. That is China's face. Despite Mao's many errors, denying the founder of Communist China would undermine the legitimacy of the Communist Party itself.

Considering the widening gap in wealth in China today, some old Chinese are nostalgic about the Mao period, when everyone was poor but equal. The grandfatherly-looking Mao is a saintly figure, whose portrait is ubiquitous and whose name is substituted into the lyrics of western Christmas carols.

Nearing the 60th anniversary of Communist China, workers took Mao's portrait in Tiananmen down only to replace it with another, more burnished Mao.

There is no portrait of Deng Xiaoping in Tiananmen. To see a portrait of Deng one has to go to the Shennandadao, the main boulevard of Shenzhen, the birthplace of Deng's economic reform. There, one finds no portrait of Mao.