More on Deng’s Political Reforms and Chinese Cultural Debates in Days of Deng

The move to a new generation of leadership gave the party an opportunity to review its path on three main axes: capitalist v socialist methods, bourgeois v proletarian culture, and Long March veteran v new generation ideas. The party was thus divided now into ‘reformer/Dengist’ and ‘conservative/Leftist/Maoist’ camps based along these axes. The Dengists tended to be on the capitalist/bourgeois/new generation ends of the spectra though Deng himself was of course of the Long March generation, a fact he was able to use to maintain respect for his position even from those of his own generation who may not have agreed with it.

The early 1980s were in various ways the high water mark for the reformers but Deng was nevertheless often forced to make concessions to the conservative side. The June 1979 Electoral Law, which led to direct elections at the county/city and town/city-district level for the People’s Congresses in 1980, gives one example of what this meant. Direct elections for the two higher levels would still not be held. The law specifically required that there be more candidates than positions at the elections and provided for a free nomination process (by four voters) free of pre-screening by officials, a right to campaign and distribute campaign literature and a right to a secret ballot. Many non-party candidates contested the 1980 elections, debates took place and criticism of the party during the campaign by candidates who were subsequently elected was not uncommon.

There was a limit, however: the Four Cardinal Principles. If a party official decided that a candidate was in breach of any of these rules it was within her/his power to replace the candidate with a party appointee. Wang Juntao, a young physicist, was such a candidate. He was elected to represent Beijing University but replaced for breach of the principles. Along with the appointee, another ‘opposition’ candidate for Beijing University was in fact elected and the Hunan Teachers’ College voters also elected at least one. The freedom allowed at this election (such as it was) has not been allowed since.

It followed from Deng’s idea (actually quite a Maoist notion) of “seeking truth from facts (實事求是 – shi shi qiu shi)” that a degree of opportunity for relatively free intellectual debate was allowed and people were allowed to get creative with Marxism (that had been a feature of Mao’s own genius after all). The ideas of Marxists living in the West that gave a humanist critique of Maoism were considered acceptable to discuss. They were along the lines that Mao had unnecessarily not allowed his people sufficient freedom and thus unnecessarily alienated them. Again indicating the ongoing strength of Deng’s conservative opponents, Mao’s main speechwriter (and a prominent conservative), Hu Qiaomu, was permitted to give the CCP position on this western perspective. He said “we practice a socialist and collectivist form of humanism, not bourgeois individualistic humanism” thus putting western Marxists in their places as far as Hu was concerned (though he too had suffered under the CR).

A third example of the strength of the conservatives is the fact that the campaign against spiritual pollution (Qingchu Jingshen Wuran) and the education campaign to create a ‘spiritual civilisation (精神文明 – Jingshen Wenming)’ were permitted in 1983 and 1984. Along with social and cultural pollution coming from the West the idea was to root out ideological pollution as well (while leaving the ‘good’ economic inputs coming from the West).

In debates that occurred in the Deng era in the cultural arena Maoism (critical as it was of feudalism) was criticised as itself a vestige of feudal culture. Su Shaozhi extended the criticism to the then current CCP political culture calling its autocracy and what he called its “monotruthism” an influence of feudalism – they were influenced by “feudal remnants”. He argued that ‘true’ Marxism was really more like the Western version and more ‘democratic’ with open debate and pluralism.

In the meantime, historians and other scholars were permitted to study and discuss the pre-1949 era history and culture again after a period of relative repression of intellectual inquiry in these fields and they revised previous opinions.

More generally what came to be referred to as a ‘culture fever’ began to be pervasive in Chinese intellectual and social life after many repressive years culturally.

The film and televisual arts resurged. New TV productions of classics like Journey to the West and Dream of Red Mansions were popular.
The so-called ‘5^th generation’ of filmmakers, Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou among them, began a period of flourishing, sometimes making films critical of aspects of the official revolutionary history and/or of actions of the historical actors themselves. Zhang’s Red Sorghum presented an interesting new view of the Chinese defeat of the Japanese. It showed the people resisting the Japanese occupation and not being led by the party.

River Elegy (He Shang) was an influential television documentary series that has been accused of encouraging the students in their so-called attempted counter-revolution of 1989. It was particularly critical of the inward looking nature of the Chinese culture and also slammed it as feudal, backward and destructive.