One wonders, immediately, if Deng is dead or close to it. This is not like him. His style has always been more modest, less self-aggrandizing; he was appalled by Mao’s cult of personality. And yet, the current mania is reminiscent of the last days of Mao. The ancient leader is too frail to appear publicly. He can’t even go swimming on his birthday. He communicates through surrogates–in Mao’s case, two women translators; in Deng’s, daughters. “It’s possible the current leadership is building up Deng, and showing their closeness to him, in order to legitimize themselves when he dies,” says a scholar at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “or it is possible that something else is going on.”
The “something else”–specifically, that Deng (or people acting in his name,) is taking sides in the never-ending, but hitherto rather decorous. battle to succeed him–is the hot whisper in Beijing these days. and a possibility Bill Clinton should consider as he ventures forth to meet with Chinese President Jiang Zemin in Seattle this week. Speculation about Chinese successions is, of course, perilous business: few ever predict right. Indeed, the near-universal belief that Jiang is an embarrassing buffoon who’ll lose his lofty perch in the post-Deng festivities is almost (but not quite,) enough to lead one to expect the opposite. Far more important than the personalities involved is a subtle realignment in the political forces vying for power in China. The traditional Western notions of good guys and bad guys–market-oriented reformers vs. socialist hard-liners–has become anachronistic. New sides are being chosen.
For one thing, there aren’t very many socialist hard-liners left. Some of the hardest cases–the leadership of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), for example–are making so much money in the emerging market economy that it would be folly for them to look back. The PLA is becoming China’s Mitsubishi, an enormous conglomerate with interests in everything from luxury hotels to pharmaceuticals to, inevitably, military-industrial products. The families of high-ranking party officials (including those of erstwhile hard-liners like Li Peng and Chen Yon) also are thriving in the new environment. These forces, together with local officials from the booming coastal provinces. represent the most powerful emerging Chinese faction: those who want to go full speed ahead with the market economy–that is, without any rules or regulations to limit the greed, power or connections of the insiders. “Those guys are after us all the time to change the rules, to make exceptions for them,” says one of those involved in writing new regulations for China’s financial markets. “They seem to think insider trading is a birthright, part of the Confucian system of respect for authority.”
The neo-Confucians are opposed by the economic reformers–most prominently, Deputy Prime Minister Zhu Rongji–who believe that the best way to ensure future economic growth, and a stable, expanding middle class, is to build some rules and regulations into the system. Zhu’s reformers have been hard at work, trying to limit inflation, rationalize the credit markets and stock exchanges and wring some of the worst excesses out of the system. The deputy prime minister has not made many friends in high places. “He can be very harsh, very direct in meetings,” says an associate. “This is more Western style than Chinese. The Chinese style is to sit back, listen to everyone, smile a lot and maybe say something innocuous at the end–bad news is delivered indirectly, by intermediaries.”
Zhu’s problems go beyond style. His credit restrictions have canceled hot deals and caused property values to drop in some places (10 to 15 percent in Shanghai, it is said); worse, he promises an independent commercial banking system where merit will count as much as connections in the granting of loans. And so there is speculation that Deng’s recent pronouncements–especially the ones in favor of a full-speed-ahead economic plan–represent implicit criticisms of Zhu and the reformers. “It may not have been Deng’s first intention.” says Liu Binyan. the dissident journalist. “But he may be encouraged on this path by people who’ve been hurt by Zhu’s policies and who’ll gain if he fails The whispering campaign grows: Zhu, who spent most of his pre-reform career on the state planning commission, is routinely derided as a “central planner” by the neo-Confucians and the go-go types in the coastal provinces (who oppose Zhu’s ambitious plans for a federal income-tax system as well). There are reports that Zhu will try to make his reforms more palatable to the provinces by quietly loosening credit once more, but his is not a strong hand. At least. not in the succession battle now looming. Over the long haul, though, Zhu’s reformers must prevail if a middle class is to be nurtured, and if China is to continue on the road to prosperity, which–if he’s lucky and his current interpreters don’t screw it up–will be Deng Xiaoping’s real legacy.
