CHINA: Teng's New Long March

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Peking's leaders take a great leap outward to modernization

Deputy Premier Teng Hsiao-p'ing flew home to Peking last week after completing a dramatic ten-day tour of Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Burma. Meanwhile, in Canton, a British-made Hovercraft from Hong Kong skimmed into the harbor with a load of 63 tourists, inaugurating the first regularly scheduled passenger sea service from the British colony to China since the Communists took power three decades ago. In California, six Chinese scholars arrived at Stanford University, the first cadre of 700 students and researchers that Peking intends to send to the U.S. within the next twelve months. At the United Nations, China was allowed technical assistance it had requested, worth $10 million to $15 million, to train Chinese in languages and in agricultural and scientific technology. A consortium of West German companies is negotiating a $14 billion deal with Peking to build in Hopei province what would be the world's largest steelmaking complex. Britain's government agreed to negotiate the possible purchase by Peking of 30 Harrier vertical-takeoff jet bombers at $6.6 million each.

All these unprecedented events were part of an extraordinary Great Leap Outward. Departing from the rigid xenophobia of the late Chairman Mao Tse-tung. the Peking government has embarked on a policy of winning new friends, discrediting and, if possible, isolating the Soviet Union and, above all, acquiring the capital, technology and expertise to transform China into a superpower by the year 2000. Scuttling Mao's sacred precept of national self-sufficiency, China's leader have called for "a New Long March," toward modernization. There are mythic overtones to that phrase: Mao's original Long March of 1934-35, from Kiangsi to remote Shensi province, was the crucible that forged the Communist Party in China.

The principal architect of this new policy is Teng, who has clearly emerged as China's strongman, overshadowing Mao's titular successor as Chairman, Hua Kuo-feng. Teng has given supreme priority to reversing the disruptive effects of Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which was zealously pursued for more than ten years by Mao's wife, Chiang Ch'ing, and her radical colleagues. Twice toppled from power by the radicals, in 1966 and 1976, Teng has stepped from the political shadows, not only to supervise the disgracing of Chiang's Gang of Four, but to see his pragmatic goals adopted as the party's approved road.

While Teng has not directly attacked the memory of the Great Helmsman, a gradual process of de-Maoification is under way in China. Last week, for example, the Peking daily Kwangming Jih Pao published an article arguing that a well-known polemic launching the Cultural Revolution—clearly inspired by Mao, if not written by him—was "counterrevolutionary" and a "signal to practice fascist dictatorship." Meanwhile, the memory of Teng's protector, pragmatic Premier Chou Enlai, is increasingly honored, and something of a cult of personality seems to be developing about Teng himself.