CHINA: Rise of a Model Bureaucrat

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Zhao's tough job is to prove "the superiority of socialism"

The Central Committee is of the opinion that he is a suitable choice and worthy of our trust." With those words, China's Communist Party Chairman Hua Guofeng last week formally announced to the National People's Congress that, as expected, he would step down from his top government post to make way for a new Premier, former Sichuan province Governor Zhao Ziyang. Hua also made it official that seven Vice Premiers, including the architect of the transition, Deng Xiaoping, would retire from their government posts; among their successors will be the Westward-leaning Foreign Affairs Minister, Huang Hua. But it was the appointment of Zhao that best symbolized the rise of a pragmatic, younger generation to power, as TIME Peking Bureau Chief Richard Bernstein reports:

Over the course of last year, Sichuan province, Deng's home, emerged as a national model for China and Zhao, 61, as a model bureaucrat. Zhao had been denounced during the Cultural Revolution as a "stinking landlord element" (his father had been a landowner in Henan province) and was paraded down the streets of Canton in 1967 with a dunce cap on his head, a type of experience he shared with a number of other Chinese leaders. He disappeared for four years; then, in 1975, after serving in both Inner Mongolia and Guangdong province party posts, he was sent to Sichuan, as Party Secretary and Governor.

With the evident approval of Deng, Zhao pioneered many of the programs that have now been approved as policies for all of China. "We must adopt whatever is most effective," he said. "We must never cocoon ourselves like silkworms." He favored practically everything that Chairman Mao Tse-tung had opposed—free markets for agricultural products, competition among enterprises, bonuses and higher salaries for workers to spur productivity. He introduced experimental measures into some 100 factories, allowing profits to be used in part for reinvestment or for better working conditions. So successful were Zhao's policies that, to no one's surprise, he turned up in Peking earlier this year as a member of the Standing Committee of the all-powerful Politburo and as Vice Premier in charge of the government's day-to-day workings.

Zhao now faces the formidable task of making China's backward economy productive and of shaking up a stifling bureaucracy. He has his work cut out for him. Recently, for example, a foreigner imported a car. The exercise involved three visits to the Public Security Bureau, three to the country's only insurance company, three more to the customs office. The final mandatory stop—the car must be clean before it can be licensed—was at Peking's only car wash, where the bill came to $40. Exclaimed a Chinese intellectual on hearing the story: "I'll wash that car for half the price. If I could wash just three a month, I'd make my present salary."