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| Photo: Wikimedia |
When I visited Huangshan in Anhui province, my guide showed me the place where Mister Deng often sit during his leisure time to enjoy the scenery of the magnificent mountains, floating above the clouds. This place seemed to be Mister Deng favorite spot and he chose this mountain area to deliver his 'Huang Shan Speech' to promote this place as a key site to revitalize the tourism industry, and to address the future direction of Chinese tourism. Years later, the Chinese tourism market has transformed into one of the world's most-watched tourist markets, the number of domestic trips reached six billion in 2019, indicating an exponential increase compared to the number of trips made in China ten years ago.
Known as China’s “father of reforms” Mister Deng in 1978 announced a new policy, the “Open Door Policy”, to open the door to foreign businesses that wanted to set up in China. The policy of “reform and openness” (gaige kaifang) laid the foundation for a successful transition from a planned economy to a market economy, achieving unprecedented high growth rates. Average annual growth rates of 9.7 percent pulled hundreds of millions of Chinese out of poverty. The policy of reform and openness also led to a fundamental departure from norms in Mao’s China, replacing collectivism and group conformity with individual performance and diversity.
Enough said about him, I desperately wanted to interview this man and made an application through the CPC (Communist Party of China) office in Beijing. Knowing the tight bureaucracy of this office I wasn’t expecting approval soon and might be never ever get the approval, I was just trying my luck. I knew there were not many foreign journalists that got the chance to interview him personally, Mike Wallace, Oriana Fallaci, Ezra Vogel to name a few, who else?
Then after 4 months, I found a red envelope in my apartment letter box, it was from the CPC office indicating an appointment in the next month meeting Mister Deng. Wow , really? It made my day! It was my first interview with a political leader, and from China!
So on a Saturday, at the CPC Office at Chang’an Avenue in Beijing, I met a small man in a gray Mao suit, white socks and black Neiliansheng shoes. I didn’t expect that he was Mister Deng, he looked so humble for such a paramount leader. For sure, he didn’t look like as what once pronounced by Henry Kissinger, a ''nasty little man''.
I said:
“Good afternoon Mister Deng, you are known to be the de facto leader of China, in the way that although you are not the chairman of the CPC and neither are you the President of China, but you are the chief policy maker and reformer of China throughout the decades leading to China’s great development. You are a member of Standing Committee of the Political Bureau, and the chairman of the CCP’s Central Military Commission, but it seems you avoid to be the top leader of China.”
Mister Deng:
“See, we must remember that chairman Mao for most of his life, he did very good things to China. Many times he united China and saved the party and the state from various crises. Mao Zedong Thought lead us to victory in the revolution and it will continue to be a treasured possession of the our country, and we will always remember him as a founder of our party and state.
Because of his leadership he was treated like an emperor reminiscent of the country’s imperial past. The people created Mao Zedong’s cult of personality, fueled by fanatics, mass media, propaganda and books, elevating his status to that of an infallible heroic leader. The whole nation mimicked his style of drab clothing, memorizing his quotations from the little Red Book and living under the gaze of his imposing portraits.
He then became authoritarian and led the country in patriarchal ways, one-man rule, which are feudal in nature. He became unwilling to listen to other comrades, did not listen to differing opinions. We can’t say that all criticisms were right, but neither was he ready to listen to many right opinions put forward not only by me but by other party members. At this time, he increasingly lost touch with reality. For instance, he did not consistently practice democratic centralism and the mass line, and he failed to institutionalize them during his lifetime. Democratic centralism was impaired and so was collective leadership.
I opposed the notion of lifelong terms, of personality cult, and of one-man rule and desired to prevent the emergence of a Mao-like strongman. I promoted ideological pragmatism and emphasized above all the necessity of a fundamental reform of the party, especially by reviving the inner-party discussion and decision-making processes, known as collective leadership.”
I said:
“The world can observe the great progress that China achieved in economic development in past decades, but many Western scholars believed that China’s reform and opening-up policy only achieved great success concerning economic modernization, with no significant progress in political democratization. Some even went so far as to claim the reason for the successful Chinese economic modernization was precisely because China did not have any accompanying democratic reforms.”
Mister Deng:
“In this century China has been a land of warlords, invading armies, floods, famines and revolution. Tens of millions have died violently, or wretchedly from starvation. I told President Bush in 1989 that if all one billion of us undertake multiparty elections, we will certainly run into a full-scale civil war. Taking precedence over all China's problems is stability, therefore to avoid disorder and the violence we opposed political pluralism.
However, as I told Oriana Fallaci of the Washington Post, I can tell you that after the overthrow of the Gang of Four we emphasized very much the promotion of the socialist democracy. Without giving up, of course, the dictatorship of the proletariat. Democracy and dictatorship of the proletariat are the two aspects of one antithesis, and I should add that proletarian democracy is far superior to capitalistic democracy.”
I said:
“I guess with proletarian democracy you mean the
key concept of democracy held by the Chinese elites who sought to combine
democracy with authority, dictatorship and centralism. “
Mister Deng:
“The essence and the core of socialist
democracy is that the people are the masters of the country, and it is the
system of multi-party cooperation and political consultation under the
leadership of the CCP. We practice democratic centralism, which is the
integration based on democracy, with democracy under the guidance of
centralism. Democratic centralism is an integral part of the socialist system.
Under this system, personal interests must be subordinated to collective ones,
the interests of part to those of the whole, and immediate to long-term
interests.”
I said:
“ John Naisbitt, a well-known American scholar
of future studies, predicts that a new ‘vertical democracy’, which combines the
bottom-up mass participation with the top-down central command, emerging in
China, and is likely to become an alternative to the Western style of
‘horizontal democracy’.
We can observe that this ‘vertical democracy’
worked well in achieving fast economic development in China. The world is impressed by the striking
economic reform under your leadership, but through the eyes of many Western observers
there has been slow progress toward political reform. Despite some random democratic
free speech, as in the ‘Democracy Wall’ period during the late seventies,
political freedom has shown almost no progress.”
Mister Deng:
“I deeply understand this point. If we fail to
do political reform, we shall be unable to preserve the gains we have made in
the economic reform. Without political reform, economic reform cannot succeed …
So in the final analysis, the success of all our other reforms depends on the
success of the political reform.
We do allow political reform, but on condition that
the three elements of China’s socialist democracy are upheld: first, the people’s rule over the government,
which is the main principle of democracy; second, the CCP’s leadership and
centralism, which are necessary for democracy; and third, collectivism, which
is also the major principle for resolving the conflicts of different interests
in practice.”
I said:
“I think while there is general agreement that democracy literally means ‘rule by the people’ the Communist Party concept of ‘the people’ differs from the Western concept. The Western liberal view of ‘the people’ is all-inclusive, referring to all members of society and viewing society as an aggregation of individuals and a plurality of diversified social groups and interests. By contrast, in the Communist Party view, ‘the people’ is a collectivist concept. The emphasis was on the pursuit of collective interests, rather than being based upon, or even recognising, individual autonomy and expression of interests.”
Mister Deng:
“What China needed is socialist democracy, for
this is people’s democracy, and not bourgeois democracy, individual democracy. We practice democratic centralism, which is
the integration based on democracy, with democracy under the guidance of centralism.
Democratic centralism is an integral part of the socialist system. Under this
system, personal interests must be subordinated to collective ones, the
interests of part to those of the whole. The purpose of socialist democracy is
not, after all, to validate individualism or pluralism, but to unify the people
for the pursuit of common interests and objectives. “
I said:
“According to Western media, you ordered to use military force through martial law in order to squash the protests that had erupted in the Tiananmen Square in 1989, despite resistance from some leaders. The result was bloodshed and within 48 hours Tiananmen Square was cleared. According to intelligence estimate about 1,000 people died and several dozen of soldiers and police were killed by protesters. Did you order the bloodshed or was it a military blunder, Mister Deng?”
Mister Deng:
“I praised the army as ‘the bastion of iron of the state’ and stressed that China would continue the basic policies of economic reform and openness to the outside world. This incident has impelled us to think over the future as well as the past sober-mindedly. It will enable us to carry forward our cause more steadily, better and even faster and correct our mistakes faster.
We cannot tolerate turmoil. We will impose martial law again if turmoil appears again. Our purpose is to maintain stability so that we can work on construction, and our logic is simple: with so many people and so few resources, China can accomplish nothing without peace and unity in politics and a stable social order. Stability must take precedence over everything.
We can't handle chaos while we're busy with construction.
If today we have a big demonstration and tomorrow we have a great airing of
views and a bunch of wall posts, we won't have any energy left to get anything
done. That's why we have to insist on clearing the square.”
I said:
“There was a dramatic incident during the Tiananmen Square crackdown that captured the whole world attention. The Western media called it ‘The Tank Man’ incident, a lone man holding a grocery bag was photographed and videoed standing in front of a column of tanks leaving Tiananmen Square via Chang'an Avenue. As the tank driver tried to go around him, the ‘Tank Man’ moved into the tank's path. He continued to stand defiantly in front of the tanks for some time, then climbed up onto the turret of the lead tank to speak to the soldiers inside. After returning to his position in front of the tanks, the man was pulled aside by a group of people. The fate of "Tank Man" following the demonstration is not known and for the world the ‘Tank Man’ remained faceless and nameless.
May I ask you Mister Deng, who is this man that stopped the tanks, and what happened to him?”
Mister Deng sat motionless on his overstuffed
chair, his feet barely touch the floor. Suddenly an officer came approaching
him and whispered something in his ear, Mister Deng nodded and then declared
that he had other appointment in his schedule and must go now. So the meeting
was over….
THE END
This is an imaginary interview
in memory of Deng Xiaoping
Sources:
https://chinachannel.org/2019/02/07/reform-opening/
https://www.vox.com/2014/6/2/5772016/this-1989-speech-is-one-of-the-most-important-in-chinas-history-and
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