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FINANCIAL TIMES
Xi
versus Deng, the family feud over China’s reforms
The anniversary of ‘reform and opening’ has sparked a contest of
narratives about who was responsible Lucy
Hornby At
the end of last year, an exhibition opened in the southern Chinese city
of Shenzhen with a frieze at the entrance depicting former “paramount”
leader Deng Xiaoping touring the region that is synonymous with China’s
reform era. Over
the summer, the gallery closed for renovations. When it reopened in
August, a quote from President Xi Jinping in Chinese and English,
praising the country’s economic transformation, had replaced the
frieze. In
September, the entrance was changed again to include quotes from Messrs
Xi and Deng. By November, the gallery had reverted to the original plan
and the frieze was back. The
hasty series of revamps illustrates the dangers lurking in the staid
world of Chinese Communist iconography. As
China prepares for the 40th anniversary of the reforms next month,
Shenzhen has found itself at the centre of a proxy battle between
China’s two most powerful families that combines politics, history and
power. The battle has played out in galleries like the one in the Shekou
district of the city, which was the launch point for the “reform and
opening” era. For
Mr Xi and his family, the anniversary is an opportunity to set the
historical record straight about the role that his father, Xi Zhongxun,
played in pushing the reforms that transformed China from a poor and
isolated backwater into the world’s second-largest economy. The elder Mr
Xi was at one stage the senior official in charge of Guangdong, the
southern Chinese province which includes Shenzhen. It became the test
bed for a more market-based economy.
Formal celebrations of the 40th anniversary are expected to feature Mr
Xi and his “new era” of Chinese socialism, which he defines as building
on the legacies of both Deng and Mao Zedong. His image centres on a
strong leader standing up for China in the world.
Through shaping the presentation of the crucial period in the late 1970s
and early 1980s, Mr Xi is keen to associate his name and that of his
family with the reform process, which has become so closely linked with
Deng.
“Reinforcing Xi’s direct family links to the genesis of reform
reinforces how crucial that period was, and the legitimisation it
confers,” says Kerry Brown, director of the Lau China Institute at
King’s College London. The
perception that Mr Xi is downgrading Deng’s role has only added to fears
that a new cult of personality is developing around the current leader.
The tussle over the legacy of reforms comes after the constitution was
changed this March to allow Mr Xi to rule for life. Critics believe that
his increasingly statist and authoritarian approach threatens some of
the Deng era achievements. In a
September speech, Deng’s son Deng Pufang called for a return to the
reform era priorities of fixing China’s domestic problems while
maintaining stable external relations — an implied dig at the current
trade war with the US, slowing domestic growth and the triumphalist
propaganda that Mr Xi has cultivated. Given that China remained a
relatively poor country yet faced international instability and
uncertainty, Mr Deng said “the crucial issue is to get China’s own
problems right.” The remark must have stung because Chinese media did
not report the speech. For
Mr Xi, there is a political risk involved in appearing to contest Deng’s
role. Reverence among Chinese for Deng as the “architect” of the reform
era is hard to overestimate. “He is our leader,” says Liang Yuanrong, a
small-business owner, as he stopped to take a photo of a billboard
depicting Deng in Shenzhen. “If it weren’t for him, our life today
wouldn’t be as flourishing.”
After becoming general secretary of the Chinese Communist party in 2012,
Mr Xi did not immediately seek to dilute Deng’s place in the official
narrative. In his first term, Mr Xi adopted the symbolism of the Deng
era. He travelled to Shenzhen in 2012 and laid a wreath at Deng’s
statue. The following year, at the third plenum of the 18th party
congress, the party echoed the famous plenum of 1978 by releasing a
laundry list of long-promised — and still not fully implemented —
economic reforms. In
2016, Mr Xi visited Xiaogangcun, the village in Anhui province that
symbolises the rural reforms of the Deng era, to announce his own vision
for reconsolidating farmland.
However, ahead of the 40th anniversary celebrations, ideological and
personal divisions among the two elite Chinese families have appeared.
The fight has coalesced around Xi Zhongxun’s role in establishing
Shenzhen as China’s pilot “special economic zone” bordering Hong Kong.
Shenzhen is home to some of China’s most advanced tech companies, as
well as the intense assembly-line production that powered China’s
export-led growth. Back in 1978, however, it was a rural backwater.
Fifteen years later, it served as the backdrop for Deng’s “southern
tour”, when he rebooted economic reforms and revived foreign investment
flows following his bloody crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen Square
protests. How
to tell the story of China’s economic reforms in 2018 is a delicate
issue because Shenzhen holds personal significance for the Xi family. Xi
Zhongxun was posted to Guangdong province shortly after the end of the
Mao era. There he officiated over plans to turn Shenzhen, and Guangdong
province more generally, into an export-oriented manufacturing hub to
attract foreign investment and precious hard currency to impoverished
China. He retired to Shenzhen after falling out of favour with Deng in
the late 1980s. He died in 2002.
“There’s a feeling among the Xi family that Deng never gave their father
appropriate credit for Shenzhen,” says Dennis Wilder, managing director
for the Initiative for US-China Dialogue on Global Issues at Georgetown
University. “There seems to be some bitterness.” This
summer, an exhibition at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing
commemorating the 40th anniversary of the reforms featured a painting
with Xi Zhongxun pitching the concept of a special economic zone in
Shenzhen to a seated Deng. The painting was quickly removed after it
sparked a furore on the internet.
Because the picture depicted Xi Zhongxun, not Deng, standing at the
centre, critics accused Mr Xi’s loyalists of undermining Deng’s place as
the “architect” of the reforms. At
an anniversary exhibition that opened in Beijing’s National Museum of
China on Tuesday, Mr Xi’s photo was the most prominently displayed. Deng
was relegated to equal status with other former leaders of the reform
period, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao.
Other flattering images that elevate Mr Xi and diminish Deng — including
a touring painting in which Deng is reduced to a far-off statue — have
been similarly derided. That
may explain Mr Xi’s cautious reaction when he toured yet another
exhibition on reform last month, this one at the new Museum of
Contemporary Art in Shenzhen. Staffers said Mr Xi’s main concern was
that it featured his father too much. The formal opening date was pushed
back as they rushed to rebalance the exhibit. The
clash over the anniversary exhibitions is not just about family pride.
It also goes to the heart of the debate in China about Mr Xi’s
policies. To
the consternation of many in China, Mr Xi has reversed many Deng-era
policies in favour of those more reminiscent of Mao’s time. Despite
declaring that China will be “more and more open”, Mr Xi has presided
over the revival of statist policymaking and a new reverence for
Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy. He has tamped down divergent voices within
the Communist party and tightened the screws on civil society. He has
reintegrated the party with government bureaucracies, threatening the
long effort to create a professional bureaucracy.
“Political reform has been dead for a decade or longer . . . even in the
economic sphere, regression is taking place,” says Chongyi Feng, a
professor of Chinese studies at the University of Technology Sydney and
a critic of the Chinese government. “Deng’s reforms resonated with wider
support from the bureaucracy and society as well.”
Under Mr Xi, state-owned enterprises have been elevated in status and he
has presided over a squeeze on private companies, which were legalised
in the 1980s. Political campaigns and factional purges have been revived
under the cover of his anti-corruption drive. Portraits and sayings by
Mr Xi extolling the party are everywhere, prompting talk of a fresh cult
of personality. The removal of presidential term limits alarmed many of
China’s supporters abroad. When
Mr Xi returned to Shenzhen this October, critics noted that he had
failed to mention Deng in his speeches. “I
don’t see it as such a big snub because Deng’s policies have been
snubbed for a decade already,” says Victor Shih, an expert in Chinese
politics at the University of California San Diego. The
shifting historical narratives give a contemporary urgency to those
defending the reformist agenda that the Deng era promoted.
“I
am concerned that the economic model that the present government seems
to be pursuing — a new kind of ‘state-led capitalism’ — may not be
consistent with China’s long-term needs,” Pieter Bottelier, the World
Bank’s representative to Beijing in the 1990s, told the China
Development Forum in September. “Deng Xiaoping’s ‘reform and opening-up’
policies, guided by China’s long history and deep culture, pushed the
country in the right direction.”
Although China is now much wealthier and competing directly with western
nations, some in China now feel that a sense of direction is missing. At
the beginning of the reform era it was “easy to get consensus,” says
Feng Lun, one of China’s first real estate entrepreneurs. But after
progressing from simply doing things differently than Mao did, to
working out economic strategies and legal structures, “by the fourth
decade there was a split storyline,” he says. Ideological differences
mean sharply different recipes for how to deal with poverty,
environmental problems and international relations.
Since Deng’s death, the party’s constant use of the word “reform” shows
how important the legacy of the era is. Mr Xi has begun to use the
phrase “opening up” again too. In speeches this year he has reassured
audiences China’s “great door will open wider and wider”.
“Nowadays, we can’t talk about Deng’s legacy because reform is not dead.
Only when something is dead does it have a legacy,” says Zhou Zhixing,
chair of the US-China New Perspectives Foundation and a close associate
of the Deng family. Mr
Zhou cites “liberation of thought” as the most important achievement of
the reform era. But he admits that Deng left unchanged the core
structures of Communist party’s statist rule that Mr Xi has so
controversially revived: “You can’t criticise Deng for that. Every
generation can only fight its own battles.” |