China: The Bid To Transform A Country

"China After Mao

By Frank Dikotter

Bloomsbury, 390 pages, $30

Never Turn Back

By Julian Gewirtz

Belknap/Harvard, 418 pages, $32.95

Much Western wisdom on Communist China is of the conventional variety, with one belief in particular standing stubbornly unchallenged for decades. This is the view that Deng Xiaoping, the country's paramount leader from 1978 to 1989, was the predominant architect of the China that we know today: an economic giant that aspires to challenge the United States for global supremacy. This dogma holds that China is best seen as B.D. and A.D. -- before Deng and after Deng -- and that without Deng there would be no Xi Jinping, China's present strongman-for-life, whose quest to dominate the world isn't just undisguised but also, arguably, within grasp.

Frank Dikotter, among the most rigorous historians of China writing today, disagrees. By his iconoclastic reckoning, the true maker of modern China wasn't Deng but Jiang Zemin, general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party from 1989 to 2002 and president of China from 1993 to 2003. Although Mr. Dikotter doesn't set this judgment out in precisely these words, the conclusion that Jiang did more to shape the country than Deng will be inescapable to anyone who reads "China After Mao: The Rise of a Superpower."

Unlike his peers, Jiang had "a smattering of foreign languages," which he liked to "display" -- writes Mr. Dikotter -- "in small talk with foreign guests." He also occasionally burst into song, which led some in the West to conclude, to their cost, that he was a bit of a clown. But it was Jiang, says Mr. Dikotter, who made fighting the concept of "peaceful evolution" the party's aim in 1989. This was a notion that John Foster Dulles had come up with back in 1957 to help countries like Poland and Hungary evolve peacefully toward democracy. Mao had regarded the idea as a mortal threat at the time and his Cultural Revolution was, in part, an attempt to defeat it.

As Jiang saw the Berlin Wall fall, he grew determined. The Solidarity movement won elections in Poland on June 4, 1989, the very day on which the Tiananmen protests were crushed. China had to seal itself off from the virus, and Jiang, who became general secretary on June 24, declared that "patriotism and socialism are one and the same" and that "only socialism can save China." It was also he who championed tech giants such as Huawei; he who listed them abroad to attract investment; he who told them to "Go Out" and conquer the world; he who made Xinjiang central to China's consolidation; and he who pushed every private enterprise to establish Communist Party cells. He also pulled off China's entry into the World Trade Organization in the year 2001.

That was Jiang's great coup. As Mr. Dikotter explains, thanks to the ability of the Chinese state to manipulate not just the exchange rate but also the means of production -- cheap land, labor, raw material and energy to Chinese enterprises -- no country inside the WTO can compete with China. Remarkably, many American economists had believed that China's accession to the WTO would reduce the trade deficit between the U.S. and China. Others argued that political reform in China would succeed economic reform "as surely as the cart follows the ox" (in Mr. Dikotter's phrase), some predicting that China would be a democracy by 2015. In fact, the U.S. has had an enormous trade deficit with the Chinese ever since, and the "unfolding of broader historical forces" -- i.e., democracy in China -- didn't occur. By 2015, Mr. Xi was immovable.

Mr. Dikotter is a professor at the University of Hong Kong -- one wonders for how much longer -- and a fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He is best known for a trilogy of books that address Chinese history from 1945 (four years before the country's "liberation" by Mao Zedong) to 1976, the year of Mao's death. A Dutchman who was raised in Switzerland, he writes with elegance in the English language. The first volume in the trilogy, "Mao's Great Famine," begins with the memorable words: "Between 1958 and 1962, China descended into hell."

Mr. Dikotter is described by some as the Robert Conquest of China, for having laid bare the mass-murderous extent of Mao's rule. But the comparison with the Englishman is specious: Conquest, a game-changing historian in his own right, didn't have the opportunity to go to the archives in the Soviet Union. (Once they opened, he was, of course, vindicated.) Mr. Dikotter, by contrast, spent a decade examining party records in archives across China before writing his trilogy. His latest book, he tells us, is based on roughly 600 documents from a dozen Chinese archives, as well as on the diaries of Li Rui, who had once been Mao's personal secretary but who was imprisoned for 20 years in 1959 for (in Mr. Dikotter's words) "mentioning the famine." The diaries end in 2012, the year Mr. Xi became leader. And that is the point at which Mr. Dikotter, too, ends his account of China after Mao.

The most salient figure in "China After Mao," in addition to Jiang and Deng, is Zhao Ziyang, premier from 1980 to 1987 and general secretary of the Communist Party in 1987-89. Zhao, who was ousted just after the massacre in Tiananmen Square, tends to be romanticized in the West, especially by historians and Sinologists who form intense attachments to him because of his seemingly liberal bent. One such historian is Julian Gewirtz, a former lecturer at Columbia University who currently serves on President Biden's National Security Council. Zhao is very much the hero -- almost of Shakespearean proportions -- of "Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s." Its aim is to refresh our understanding of the role played by Zhao in the shaping of modern China as well as to revive his luster as a statesman.

Zhao's story, not to mention his erasure from official Chinese history, is linked inextricably to Deng, widely considered to have been personally responsible for China's opening up in the 1980s. Mr. Gewirtz, however, insists that "Deng was often disengaged from the details" of policy making. The deification of Deng, he argues, obscures the role played by Zhao and ignores the fact that the 1980s in China were "a period of extraordinary, open-ended debate, contestation, and imagination." (Mr. Dikotter, by contrast, regards this era as one of incompetent policy changes that led to uneven growth, massive debt, and inflation, all of which took China to the edge of civil war by 1989.)

Mr. Gewirtz highlights the conciliatory role played by Zhao in the Tiananmen Square crisis, brought to a head when students demanded freedom of speech and assembly and the publication of government leaders' income and holdings. Even though Deng had stated that "this is not an ordinary student movement, but turmoil," Zhao offered dialogue to the protesting students. He also told a meeting of the Asian Development Bank that most students were "not opposed to our basic system." This incensed Deng, as did Zhao's opposition to a People's Daily editorial that said the students' aim was to "sabotage the political situation of stability and unity." (Mr. Gewirtz tells us that Deng's daughter, Deng Nan, raged at Zhao in a telephone call.) In a forlorn final gesture -- his act of political suicide -- Zhao walked out at 5 a.m. to meet the students camped in Tiananmen Square and plead with them to end their protest. "You are not like us," he told them, referring to himself and the party leadership. "We are already old, and do not matter." That was his last public appearance.

What would happen -- Mr. Gewirtz asks -- if the Chinese were allowed to know the supposedly forbidden history of the 1980s, in which, following Zhao's lead, a liberalism beyond anything Deng had wanted was fighting to take hold? "Would it produce the terrible chaos so feared by the Communist Party?" He thinks not. Hopelessly sentimental, he writes that "it is possible to imagine a China, even one ruled by the CCP, that rehabilitates Zhao Ziyang" and "even apologizes" for Tiananmen.

Mr. Dikotter, by contrast, holds Zhao in much lower esteem, portraying him as rather bumbling and inept, not merely in his economics but in politics. He made promises to the students at Tiananmen Square that he couldn't keep and embarrassed Deng -- his boss and mentor -- in the process. Mr. Dikotter also suggests that Zhao's liberalism has been greatly exaggerated, citing a meeting in 1987 with Erich Honecker, the leader of East Germany, in which Zhao said that the party would "reduce the scope for liberalization" once living standards improved. "We will," he said, "never copy the separation of powers and multi-party system of the West."

Reading these contrasting accounts of China after Mao -- Mr. Gerwitz's wistful, Mr. Dikotter's darkly realist -- you have to wonder whether President Nixon's celebrated rapprochement with China in 1972 was a mistake. In words ascribed to Nixon before he died by the columnist William Safire, the former president said this about his own deal with China: "We may have created a Frankenstein." Many Americans today will find it hard to disagree. In a speech in 2020, Mike Pompeo, U.S. secretary of state, went so far as to quote these words of Nixon while telling his audience that the days of "engagement" with China were over. Mr. Dikotter lays the blame for this deep discord on the Xi regime. Deng Xiaoping had warned his colleagues to lie low and bide their time." [1]

1. REVIEW --- Books: The Bid To Transform A Country
Varadarajan, Tunku. 
Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]. 26 Nov 2022: C.7.