China’s ‘new era’ marks a retreat from Deng
The first state visit by a Chinese leader to the United States came at the end of January 1979.
It was less than three years after the end of the Cultural Revolution and the death of Mao Zedong – who had strengthened his dictatorial rule in his final years and brought turmoil to China.
China and the United States established formal diplomatic relations on January 1, 1979, amid a complex international environment in which China and the Soviet Union were on opposing sides of the Cold War. Then Chinese Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping’s visit to the US came before the month was over.
The People’s Daily, the official organ of the Communist Party of China, reported at the time what Deng – the leader of a delegation of 70 officials – said was the mission of his US visit. According to the report, he wanted to understand the American people, their lives and the nation’s experience in building an economy. The report said he wanted to learn everything that could be useful for China.
China fully initiated its “reform and opening up” policy that same year, putting top priority on economic construction, as if saying China could not live by ideology alone. This paved the way for a “socialist market economy” – where politics remained under a one-party dictatorship but the economy edged along a path toward capitalism – and the emergence of a major economic power.
Successive Chinese administrations continued with this spirit, utilising everything useful for economic development.
The administration of Jiang Zemin made Communist Party membership available to capitalists, who were the driving force of development.
The following administration, headed by Hu Jintao, declared that China would become a “responsible major power” and focus on the creation of a stable international environment at a time when the “China threat” theory had spread throughout the international community.
“Reform and opening up” was described as China’s lifeline, and the era in which those words were irreplaceable continued. In the present year of 2017, two decades after Deng’s death, that era unexpectedly came to a close when President Xi Jinping, who has just started his second term, declared the start of a “new era”.
Every day, “China [is] moving closer to [the world’s] centre stage”, Xi said. He also said the world welcomes China’s certainty. As these comments suggest, the foundation of China’s approach to the outside world stems from the confidence it has in its model for development and its ability to take the initiative in the international order.
The diplomatic strategy of “hide one’s capacity and bide one’s time” – which symbolised the reform and opening up period – centred on avoiding confrontations and saving strength. That strategy has been completely overwritten with a “strong nation” policy that includes active military expansion and the speeding up of maritime advances.
It is ironic that the masthead calligraphy of the China Ocean News, the official newspaper of China’s State Oceanic Administration (SOA), was written by Deng – because the SOA can now be described as the vanguard of China’s maritime advances. The move away from Deng’s thinking is indicated externally by the strong-nation policy, and internally by a focus on ideology and concentration of power – running counter to “reform and opening up”, which started as a rejection of the Cultural Revolution.
A pro-reform intellectual said: “Reform and opening up was a flexible period in which [China] realistically tried to change and meet the times. That dynamism has given the nation its vitality.”
The intellectual warned, however, that the Chinese leadership “often talks about China being a major power or strong nation, but we must not forget present-day China is standing on the fruits of [the] reform and opening up [policy]”.
Xi’s comment that “party, government, military, society, education, north, south, east, west – the party leads everything”, was newly incorporated in the party’s constitution, its highest guiding document.
This appears to be a declaration of China’s intent to strengthen its control and continue with heavy-handed methods for stubbornly defending the one-party dictatorship. As a stifling atmosphere pervades society, a “new era” is about to begin.
