The Achilles’ heel of all authoritarian systems – the difficulty of handing over power unless a dynasty is

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Published: July 16, 2010

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The Achilles’ heel of all authoritarian systems – the difficulty of handing over power unless a dynasty is firmly in place – put the fate of China once again in the hands of an enfeebled old man over the last six years. While Deng Xiaoping shrank into senility, power-seeking factions circled hungrily round his throne and the country lacked the firm leadership it needed during a period of chaotic change. The years of Deng’s dotage carried painful memories of the early half of the 1970s when Mao Tse-tung took an infernally long time to die in his pavilion in the Zhongnanhai, the imperial compound alongside Peking’s Forbidden City, while his chosen heir and successor, Hua Guofeng, scrabbled for power in competition with Mao’s wife and the radical Gang of Four. With Mao dead, the race was eventually won by Deng, the twice-disgraced dark horse.
If history repeats itself, Deng’s designated heir, President Jiang Zemin and his faction, which has amassed considerable power in recent years, will form a collective leadership until another strong man emerges from the ruck.If Jiang does remain in power, it will be a welcome indication that his reforms and measures to institutionalise the power pyramid (as well as placating the military) have matured the system sufficiently to free China from the threat of personality cults and one-man rule Nevertheless, palace politics are deeply ingrained.

Jiang’s succession could be challenged by either of his two main lieutenants: Prime Minister Li Peng, a colourless apparatchik who gained strength with other hard-liners in the crackdown which followed the Tiananmen tragedy in 1989 and who, with the ageing “Soviet faction”, have always deprecated Dengist revisionism, and Zhu Rongji, a technocrat who tries to identify himself with reforms, modernisation and China’s recent economic progress Neither can the army’s intervention be discounted. Last year’s threatening manoeuvres as Taiwan prepared to go to the polls revealed its readiness to play the nationalistic card in shaping policies.Had Deng died in early 1989, most historians would have praised him as the pragmatic liberal who steered China back to a commonsense middle course after three decades of disastrous excesses. While his apologists can claim that his abandonment of a command economy put China, however belatedly, on the road to prosperity, the loss of so many state controls has complicated the task of his proteges in dealing with problems caused by the growth he triggered: an overburdened infrastructure, an overheated economy, inflation and an outflow of capital, plus a massive growth of corruption and criminal gangs.Deng will also be remembered as the man who imposed martial law on China in May 1989, who gave his blessing to the troops who shot down the dissidents in and around Tiananmen Square and who subsequently ordained the imprisonment, purge and exiling of his critics. As a moderniser, he was willing to open up China to inflows of foreign technology, management techniques and investment, but not to the accompanying winds of change and flows of ideas. He was thus the architect of “market Marxism” but in the final analysis he had only Stalinist answers to the very forces his policies had reinvigorated. His refusal to contemplate political liberalisation has placed his ghost among those of dozens of East Asian dictators who have clung on to power at any cost.During the 1980s “Mr Pragmatism” was the pin-up boy of Hong Kong and others who wished China and its future well, and his anti-dogma aphorisms “Learn truth from facts” and “It does not matter whether the cat is black or white as long as it catches mice” were widely quoted with enthusiasm.

Nevertheless, the 1989 crackdown should not have come as a surprise: Deng’s career was remarkable not only for an elastic capacity to survive but a ruthless readiness to take any steps to ensure that survival.The son of an educated minor landowner in the Western province of Sichuan, Deng sailed for France at the age of 16 as a worker-student. There, between 1920 and 1926 (his years in France overlapping with those of Chou En-lai), he imbibed Marxism and became a professional revolutionary. He received training in the arts of the underground during 11 months in Moscow on his way home, where he immediately plunged into secret Communist Party work, chiefly among the workers of Shanghai.By 1930 he had joined Mao Tse-tung’s army fighting the Kuomintang in Guangxi province, later taking part in the heroic Long March in which Mao’s forces escaped from the encircling Kuomintang armies to traverse much of China in 1934 and 1935, before establishing a stronghold in the north-west province of Yanan. Deng’s military service was recognised after the defeat of Japan when he became a member of the party’s Central Committee, and he played an important role in the campaigns which finally ejected the Kuomintang to Taiwan and established the People’s Republic in 1949.Deng, always a practical man, had proved an energetic and capable implementer of Mao’s orders. After serving as his political and economic commissar responsible for south-west China, Deng moved swiftly up the Party and government hierarchies, becoming Secretary General of the Central Committee and Minister of Finance in 1953, Vice-Chairman of the National Defence Council and Vice-Premier in 1954 and a Politburo member in 1955.In the following year he went with China’s delegation to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, where he was affronted by Nikita Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin.


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