The 18th of December, after two years of cementing his power and fending off the ambitions of the Siren Bang with only the final humiliation and destruction - if, gracefully, not physical - left, the barely five foot one Deng Xiaoping, master of everything but no station within the all-powerful Communist Party of China rose to the podium of the third plenary session of its 11th Central Committee to announce the beginning of the new world. If the proclamation could not have estimated the passing of things within the next half century without edging on insanity, even in the presence of a man so modest in stature and speech, it was controversial in its date and could only have emerged from the most vitriolic, if gently managed and peacefully concluded conflict with the orthodox factions within the party. In the end, the confirmation of Hua Guofeng - forgotten leader-paramount - would have been crucial to the collapse of the Gang of Four and the radical transformation about the begin.
A speech that would change everything. While reform might have been expected after the sanguinary epoch of the chairman - the post his true successor would never hold - the truth to unfold, and its fruits, would have stunned both sympathisers and the translucent antagonism of the gang of four.
For what proposed by Deng - again, only so subtly but yet groundbreaking, as crowned by the most counter-revolutionary proposal the previous year of cats and mice, and that the revolution must, in our reality, be subservient to facts and reality, with a clear priority of building a powerful state adhering to socialism rather than the opposite - was no short of a revolution far more groundbreaking than the 1949 Maoist surge and the expulsion of the Guomindang to Taiwan and a few scattered nearby islands. As Chiang had, after a career of criminality, massacre, corruption, conquest, calamitous defeat, staggering, theatrical rise, humiliating staggered consolidation and downfall, final ignominious defeat, bested Mao in performance and dynamism and the great quest - if yet in the incubator - of reviving a great China so long and ingloriously negated, now was the time to ameliorate the damages continually done for two thirds of a century by domestic forces.
Deng's vision, following a different path but in the steps of the Han Chinese-dominated city state of Singapore and its, to Deng, inspirational Lee, and the (more) authoritarian Republic of Korea of Park Chung-hee as by Chiang's China (abandoned recognition, finally and conveniently, this year by the US State Department) in the end turned out an utter and astounding success. Utter and astounding not because of its relative success comparable to the performance of the "tigers" which took the first leaps fresh out from carnage and colonial status, but because of the completion - or nearly thus - of the task left unmade since the aspirations of Cixi and Sun Yat-sen in the last days of the Qing; indeed, since the very first contacts with the West, which had only made apparent the stagnant state of the giant once unrivalled.
First, agriculture was de-collectivised, foreign investment encouraged and restrictions on business limited. After strong initial success, in the late 1980s, the process was carried on to extents of Milton Friedman's liking, involved lifting financial regulatory frameworks, except in key sectors such as banking and petroleum. The grapes of this reevaluation of doctrine, brave if made by the scions often dear to the chairman shortly before, have changed the landscape of China and just as certainly the world, and it is no conservative estimate to announce that if a similar survey as made in 2012 by the author were penned, the name most certain to be included would be that of Deng Xiaoping.
The real revolution, acknowledged. Since the stagnant decline of the Qing, the Asian counterpart of the Ottoman's sick man of Europe, dreams of a rising China have fallen upon different hopes, from the late Sun to the lengthy Chiang, to the Mao of many actions and initiatives.
After the implementation of the reforms, swift change followed. In the 1980s, Deng's definite decade, GDP nearly doubled. From the year of the speech until 2013, it would grow with a mean of nearly 10 %, rekindling Napoleon's prophetic words of the rising dragon. In the 1990s, to his continued aspirations but relaxed stewardship, China was able to establish itself as a normal international actor and business partner, and eventually reclaimed Hong Kong and Macau, and in 2001 joined the World Trade Organization. The territorial integrity of Qing, bar Mongolia and pugnacious Taiwan (though mutually recognised as part of China) had been reestablished.
The inspiration for this remaking, nothing short of a revolution within the revolution of 1949, has been speculated widely, but key interest has been invested in the "Hong Kong model" emerging from the 1960s, within the framework of British colonialism but effectively a system of moderate self-government, of Chinese culture juxtaposed with economic freedom and - eventually - progress and civic virtue and peace heralding a welfare comparable to Western countries. But equally impressive, and arguably more influential, would have been the republic of Singapore, in 1965 declared independent in brusque separation from Muslim Malaysia to the tears of its longtime leader Lee Kuan Yew, whose juxtaposition of capitalism under state-guided leadership, but also of economic liberalism to developmental authoritarianism, had managed to successfully steer it out of a colonialist mould, and far from direct it to a position independent to its neighbours be the tiger of South East Asia, the envy of a continent as far as material concerns were considered. All this from an idea and a strong hand - and arguably a convenient deep-sea harbour. China sported no such comparative advantage, but a large population and army (armed with nuclear capacity) and auspicious natural resources arming it for an independent course of its choice.
The re-emergence. Once the great economy, rivalled only by its south-west neighbour, now soaring well above it. Will the red line claim the world, as well, in a rise of all of Asia, or eventually be harnessed by it?
The great political assumption regarding the future of the Rénmín Gònghéguó, and perhaps even its status as such, strengthened with the continued bond with the United States into the end of the Cold War, was the emergence of liberal democracy and institutional reforms to this effect - alternately, inexorably, a downfall akin to that of the more reluctant Eastern Bloc states, which came to an ecstatic climax but not a final showdown with the protests at the Tiananmen Square in 1989. Against certain expectations, this was not due to an innate desire of political liberalism accompanying the emergence of capitalism, nor (as is usual) against stagnant living conditions, but actively encouraged by elements within the ruling Communist Party, most notably by Chairman Hu Yaobang, whose deposition in 1987 had led to discontent regarding the future course. Following his untimely death - also coinciding with the unrest, or often the lack of it, in Eastern Europe - discontent grew into open protest, culminating in the great opposition on the Tiananmen Square still crowned with the portrait of the (former and eternal) chairman, which had displaced the earlier one of Chairman Chiang. In this, Hu's successor Zhao Ziyang took sides with the protesters and ultimately, the protest was subverted by the same means that might have expected, and the political reform process stalled. It would not hinder Deng himself, closer to 90 than 80 before the summer was at an end, from withdrawing gradually from his unnamed seat - rather than resigning it - through the following years.
With this chapter closed, the work to build "socialism with Chinese characteristics", in fact an abandonment of socialist orthodoxy and any semblance of the Marxist-Leninist one-party state as much as democracy, could really begin. It would involve - in short - a number of foundations including a rotating, meritocratic order, with oligarchy maintained, under a single-party developmentalist governance, including social constricts like the one-child family with its demographic consequences, a rigidly managed but not micromanaged capitalist economy and societal ethic both freer and eventually controlled by means unavailable to the previous leadership. Two of these core features have been rescinded lately, but the bedrock remains not only a potent contradiction - more so than its manifold critics - but a formula continuing to ride the dragon out of its long rest.
With forty years passed since the takeoff of Deng's agenda, and a stark twenty years since his death, his legacy stands as the perhaps most significant of any 20th century leader, and the most significant Chinese since the emperors, perhaps since Qin Shi Huangdi himself. But compared to it, any other geopolitical change bar the collapse of the Soviet Union - partly his achievement - shrinks in comparison.
This storm was bound to come sooner or later.
Deng Xiaoping, 9 June 1989
When our thousands of Chinese students abroad return home,
you will see how China will transform itself.
Deng Xiaoping, as quoted by Forbes Magazine, Vol. 176
A revolutionary and reformer. A work still in progress under a looming tombstone. A nation riveted by change. As change in its own form comes to Hong Kong, one may ask whether political reform was intended as such, or even necessary to the relative political and economic liberalisation occurring as a result of Deng's policies, with some Sinologists (or Zhongnanhai-ologists) pointing out the example of Singapore. Nevertheless, just as the 1978 Party Congress unleashed the floodgates of China's geopolitical prominence, reform made possibly both the 1997 handover and the current Gleichschaltung. One should never lose sight of the fact it could all have been very different.
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