The Second Revolution

Five years ago, Ju Songzhen was an agricultural worker in a village in Shanxi province. He had a reputation as a can-do fellow, but, like his neighbors, he was earning not much more than $30 a month. Then, in response to a daring new government policy that encouraged country people to develop their own moneymaking projects, Ju began building and marketing metal frames for the battery chargers used by local coal miners. Soon demand for his high-quality but economical merchandise started to snowball. Customers multiplied; orders boomed. By 1984, thanks to his success in manufacturing a product that the country badly needed, Ju had amassed a considerable fortune.

All but drowning in his newfound wealth, the 44-year-old entrepreneur began spending, and spending, and spending. He surprised his wife and two teenage sons with a refrigerator and a color television set. He acquired an electric fan and a grandfather clock. He bought a washing machine and a sewing machine, a cassette radio and a stereo system. He purchased three bicycles and four motorbikes. He ordered a Japanese-made van equipped with air-conditioner and stereo. Before long, his small home was so crowded with material possessions that he had a new two-story house built. Even then, enough cash was left over to enable Ju and his wife to take long vacations, flying around the country and staying in the best hotels.

Spending his cash, Ju believed, was a way of helping his country. His neighbors, however, thought otherwise. According to the newspaper Economic Reference, which told Ju's story, "the masses in his village viewed his spending as ostentation. Their erstwhile 'red-eye disease' (envy) toward Ju changed to 'white-eye treatment' (the cold shoulder). Ju found himself ostracized."

The tale of Ju, the all too successful entrepreneur, exemplifies in a small * but revealing way some of the tensions and paradoxes created by the daring "Four Modernizations" policy that has been pursued since 1977 by China's leader, Deng Xiaoping. On the one hand, Ju's embarrassment of riches advertises the potential of free enterprise in China, where even the People's Daily, the Communist Party newspaper, has declared that "getting rich and buying consumer goods is not decadent--especially if it makes life more pleasant." On the other hand, the ostracism suffered by Ju highlights the difficulties of introducing capitalist measures into a state that for more than three decades has regarded the unfettered pursuit of money as a source of evil. If prosperity is encouraged in Deng's China, it is still not universally admired.

This ambivalent feeling about wealth and the means of obtaining it is just one indication of a startling transformation that is sweeping the world's most populous country, the result of a reform program that is even now being re- examined by the Chinese government. Deng, 81, and his allies are steering China through the most dramatic yet peaceful turnabout in a long, strife-laden history. The very word modernization has become a symbol of national purpose as Deng's forces strive to update Chinese industry, agriculture, science and technology, and defense--even China's way of thinking. The goal: the reshaping of the country into a prosperous and confident world power. "We are trying to compress the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Industrial Revolution into a single decade," says Ying Ruocheng, China's best-known stage actor, who appeared two years ago in a production of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman in a Peking theater.

At the center of the transformation is the country's aging leader, the shrewd and gritty party veteran who refers to the program of economic reform as China's "second revolution." Whether in reaction to the paroxysms of hero worship that accompanied Maoism or perhaps out of a personal sense of propriety, Deng Xiaoping has actively discouraged a personality cult for himself. His portrait does not adorn government offices, and his ancestral home in Sichuan, though well maintained, is virtually unknown to Chinese citizens. Still, the man and the "revolution" are inseparable, and Deng's personal popularity appears to be on the increase. At the time of his 81st birthday last month, the Chinese press published a freshly written song in his honor. After twice repeating the words "Xiaoping, hello," the lyrics continue: "Lands frozen in the past today are becoming fertile/ Ships grounded in the past today weigh anchor and sail/ Things lost in the past today are returning twofold."

At a long-awaited conference of the Chinese Communist Party that begins this week, Deng hopes to secure his vision by promoting some of his younger loyalists to positions of party leadership, thereby safeguarding his legacy of reform. In Peking last week, taxis and hotel rooms were in short supply as the more than 1,000 conference delegates began to arrive in the capital. At the gathering, only the fourth such meeting in the 64-year history of the Chinese party, delegates will discuss a proposed new five-year plan for national development and other topics, but the "central mission" of the conference, according to Deng, will be the advancement of younger leaders.

Accordingly, in keeping with the shake-up that has been under way throughout the country for some time, it is expected that as many as nine members of the party's so-called third echelon (see box) could be named to the 24-member Politburo, while between 30 and 50 newcomers could replace party veterans on the 210-member Central Committee. Says a middle-level official: "The changes will be part of a flowing movement rather than an abrupt one, but they will be substantial and profound." Deng, who knows full well that no program of reforms is irreversible, put it crisply when he told a group of visiting Japanese legislators, "We will guarantee the continuity of the policy currently in force in China."

In venturing beyond the confines of Maoism over the past eight years, Deng's great undertaking has, perhaps predictably, come in for some rough challenges. Disagreement lingers between the reformers, who are experimenting at the very margins of Marxism, and conservatives wedded to Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy and Maoist collectivism. Communes have been abolished, central planning reduced, party and government bureaucrats replaced by technocrats. Deng's innovations, rooted in the premise of "building socialism with Chinese characteristics," have stirred apprehension among China's Old Guard that the Communist Party's dominance could eventually be endangered. How much ideology can a country shed and still be considered socialist, they ask, and how much economic liberalization can be permitted before pressures for greater political freedom arise?

Other Communist countries, notably Hungary, have tinkered with market mechanisms. Bulgaria, for instance, has allowed the establishment of a string of largely autonomous companies that offer bonuses or other incentives to workers if warranted by profits. In Poland, some 75% of farming is in private hands, as are some small restaurants and shops. But never before has a Communist state challenged the tenets of Marxist economics as fundamentally as has Deng's China. Soviet officials may complain that the Chinese have "gone too far," but such criticism leaves the reformers undeterred. Says a Chinese party leader: "We should never regard Marx's theory as some kind of immutable, sacred and inviolable thing."

Yet this does not mean that China is about to embrace capitalism full tilt. Deng and his collaborators have stretched Marxism as it has not been stretched before, but they have yet to define the political and economic structure they seek in its stead. "The Chinese are not sure where they are going," says a Western economist who has served as a consultant in Peking. "There seems to be no overall plan." Deng's goal, pragmatic to the core, is to pursue whatever makes China strong.

The reforms have also bred corruption, large-scale fraud and considerable uncertainty among segments of the population. There are signs that, faced with unexpected problems and setbacks, the Peking leadership is contemplating new approaches to redefine some of its policies. Efforts are under way to cool down a plainly overheated economy. In the ideological context, there is a tendency to describe some of the country's bolder economic strategies as "experiments."

Official opinion continues to vacillate. Deng has declared that talk of capitalism "cannot harm us," but he has also cautioned that China must "combat the corrosive influence of capitalist ideas." At one point, the People's Daily pronounced that the world had changed so much since the days of Marx and Lenin that "we cannot expect (their) works to solve our present-day problems." A few days later, following angry and anxious cries that the paper had renounced the country's very ideology, the People's Daily backpedaled. It had meant to say, it explained in a retraction, only that Marxism-Leninism could not solve all of China's problems. "We do have headaches and problems," Chen Muhua, president of the People's Bank of China, said recently. "From the last quarter of 1984 to the first quarter of 1985, we sensed that the pace of economic reform was too fast. But in the course of development, you are bound to meet problems. The thing is to deal with them appropriately."

The factional jousting has intensified as the Dengists have sought to expand their reform program. Last October, the government extended to urban areas and to certain large industries a system of economic incentives that had been extremely successful in the countryside. In April, the party's General Secretary, Hu Yaobang, announced that by the end of 1986 the People's Liberation Army would discharge a quarter of its 4 million men, thus becoming a more modern, streamlined and, by implication, more efficient force. In May, the government launched a new education plan and followed it with the pledge that China's largely theoretical legal code would be both strengthened and genuinely applied.

Two months later, the leadership announced that it was taking a fresh look at the so-called Special Economic Zones, like Shenzhen, which borders Hong Kong, and Zhuhai, south of Canton. The zones were created in 1979 to attract foreign investment and foster export trade while concentrating foreign influences in coastal areas. Shenzhen, Zhuhai and two other such zones apparently performed less satisfactorily than expected. As a consequence, plans for 14 similar enclaves were scaled back. Where Deng once described Shenzhen as a major element in his economic program, he now talked of it as an "experiment." "We hope it will succeed," he said. "But if it fails, we will draw lessons from it."

In many respects, the results of Deng's innovations have been remarkable. His goal is to raise the national per capita income to $800 by the year 2000, a formidable task. Already, China has not only met but exceeded its ambitious target of an annual 7% growth rate. The countryside has flourished in the six years since Deng's government introduced a "contract" system of incentives that allows China's 800 million peasants to sell all their surplus produce on the open market or to the state at premium prices and to establish small collective businesses. Crop production has shattered records every year, turning China into a net exporter of grain; the average peasant has more than doubled his cash income to $125 a year. Yet the lives of a quarter of the world's people cannot be changed easily, or overnight. China is not only the largest Third World nation but also one of the least developed. The fast pace of growth since the reforms went into effect has begun to tax the economy, * putting extraordinary pressure on the infrastructure: energy supplies, housing and transportation are stretched to the limit.

Moreover, despite a largely successful birth control scheme aimed at reducing the birthrate (now 17.5 per thousand), the population has topped the 1 billion mark. Equally important, as many as 230 million Chinese are still illiterate. While underemployment is estimated at 40% to 50%, skilled workers and experienced managers are in short supply. For all the emphasis on less central planning, only 3% of the economy (9.3 million small enterprises with 13 million employees and an annual turnover of $16 billion) is involved in private enterprise. Finally, the reforms have so far had only marginal impact in the cities, while their astonishing success in the countryside has started to level off. Chinese farmers are beginning to buckle down to the difficult transition from traditional methods to more sophisticated ones--from night soil, as it were, to nitrates. "They have achieved all the easy gains," says a Western agricultural expert. "Now comes the hard part."

Perhaps the most promising ingredients of Deng's second revolution are the small economic units, jointly owned by groups of citizens, that are known as collectives (see box). They are a far cry from the collectives of the Soviet Union, which on the whole have not been successful. Aided by low-interest government loans and subsidies, the Chinese collectives offer both the security of a state-run business and the potential profit of private enterprise. Their benefits have not been lost on the country. Thousands of new collectives are sprouting each month; this year two out of five graduates of city schools are expected to join such units.

Despite their generally small size, the collectives have reshaped the look of much of China. They produce badly needed consumer goods and step up competition. They have also put to work some of the estimated 100 million members of the rural work force who are either unemployed or underemployed. By allowing them now to stay in the villages and work in nonfarming jobs, the collectives have reduced the number of peasants streaming into the already overcrowded cities. "If we can keep the same proportion of urban and rural populations," wrote Sociology Professor Fei Xiaotong in a recent issue of the Beijing Review, "we will enjoy an enormous success. Anything else would be a catastrophe."

What the collectives still have not been able to rectify is the inequity * between country and city. Free enterprise may flower on the farm, but, with some exceptions, it sputters in urban, heavily industrialized environments. As soon as the government declared last May that the cost of some subsidized goods in 22 cities and provinces should be determined by market forces rather than by state decree, prices surged by as much as 50%. The rise triggered panic buying and brought back memories among older citizens of the hyperinflation that ravaged China in 1949 during the final months of the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek.

Many of the bureaucrats who run state-owned industries have been slow or reluctant to adjust to the new economic climate. As a result, almost a year after the introduction of the urban reforms, China's success stories remain largely rural: almost all the rich wanyuanhu (literally "10,000-yuan households"--roughly $3,510) are in the countryside, as are nine out of ten private enterprises. "Yet without the urban reforms," says a Western diplomat, "the rest of Deng's program will eventually fail."

The reforms' mixed results have made for some uncertainty among urban workers. In a recent poll of 2,500 city dwellers, conducted by the National Economic Reform Institute and Peking University, 75% of the respondents conceded that the price reforms were beneficial, but more than half also said that they would prefer having their salaries frozen. Just as revealing was the response of a worker who visited a Peking library after a stop at the vegetable market. When the librarian suggested that he read a book on the new economic reforms, the man replied heatedly, "I just paid 28 cents for a cabbage"--a hefty sum for someone who may earn $30 a month--"and I don't need any book on the reforms."

As the reformers have loosened the Maoist straitjacket on the economy, they have also permitted greater, though still limited, social, cultural and even political freedom. Their far-reaching education program, for example, is founded on Deng's observation that "if a huge nation with 1 billion people could boost its education, its tremendous superiority in human resources would never be matched by any other country." The government plans to introduce gradually nine years of compulsory education throughout all of China. Until now, such basic education has not been mandatory, and was available only in the cities. Under the new plan, primary and secondary schooling would be controlled not by the Ministry of Education in Peking but by local + authorities, and private schools would be encouraged. Under a reorganization of the university system, students would be charged tuition based on their ability to pay, but after graduation would not be required to take a job offered them by the government. Students who accepted scholarships, however, would be obligated to work where they were told.

For a country that only a decade ago scorned educated people--intellectuals were denounced as "the stinking ninth category," the lowest group in Mao's class lexicon, during the chaotic Cultural Revolution--the educational reform seems a promising development, even if its grand ambition may not be realized any time soon. For the moment, neither sufficient money nor equipment nor qualified teachers are available to sustain the plan. Moreover, because education is now locally financed, the wealthiest areas of the country will be the first to benefit. "This is the first official recognition," says a senior Western diplomat, "that the poor areas lag substantially behind the rest of the country." Another foreign observer in Peking takes the argument a step further. "Uneven development," he suggests, "will be the main domestic political issue for the next two or three decades."

In the political arena, the Dengists have allowed a measure of free speech, though it is markedly restrained compared with the period in 1979 when dissidents were able to plaster their complaints on Peking's "Democracy Wall." The Chinese Democratic League, one of eight small non-Communist parties tolerated by the government, was authorized earlier this year to publish a monthly magazine called Opinion of the Masses. In the first issue, the publication invoked Deng's assertion that a revolutionary party should fear nothing except being unable to hear public opinion. Last April, 300 people from Shanxi province in the underdeveloped northwest staged what turned out to be a weeklong sit-in on the front steps of the Communist Party's municipal headquarters in Peking. They were former residents of the capital who had been sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution to "learn from the peasants." Materializing like forgotten ghosts, the protesters demanded that they, along with 20,000 others in a similar situation, be allowed to reside once more in Peking. Their plea went unanswered: they were told that the city was already overcrowded and were sent back to Shanxi. If the outcome was disappointing for the demonstrators, at least they were not roughed up or arrested, as they would have been in Mao's time.

On the whole, however, China remains a closed society that has yet to overcome the inhibitions or remove all the scars left by the Cultural Revolution. On a recent visit to Hong Kong, Liang Koude, a 60-year-old teacher, contended that the regime has not relaxed its hold enough. "The harder we struggle to free ourselves from the party grip," said Liang, "the stronger we feel the squeeze." Writers, teachers, professionals and educated people in general have grown so accustomed to self-censorship, said Liang, that they cannot "free themselves and fly off." Although he believes in the imminence of a cultural renaissance, Actor Ying agrees that the habit of caution will not die easily. "It would not be wrong," he says, "to say that there is a moral crisis in our culture."

That situation may have been aggravated by the increasing exposure of the Chinese people to an ever wider array of influences from abroad. One week there is talk of a Disney-style amusement park for southern Peking. The next, General Motors delivers a fleet of 20 Cadillac limousines to be used by visiting businessmen. Last April, party officials, after solemnly viewing videotapes of the British rock group Wham!, allowed the band to appear in Peking, complete with scantily clad go-go dancers and pelvis-thrusting vocalist. A golf course is scheduled to open next May in the historic Valley of the Ming Tombs, with prospects of ski slopes, a racetrack and a hotel to be built nearby.

The foreign influence is most visible in the very appearance of the people. During more than two decades of Maoism, the Chinese wore proletarian garb, look-alike unisex uniforms in drab colors. Now the lusterless Mao suits have given way to a variety of clothing, including trench coats and safari jackets. The result is a transformation in the look of many a city street. Here and there, sunglassed trendies wearing 3-in. platform shoes, English-slogan T shirts and zipper-pocketed jeans share the sidewalks with young women whose ruffled shirts are incongruously set off by knee-high stockings.

The average Chinese is now said to spend a quarter of his or her salary on clothes. Tickets for garment fairs are sold by scalpers at 50 times face value. The biggest rage of all is for Western-style suits. So desired is the new look that for a while some factories and work units handed out Western suits instead of cash bonuses to deserving workers. The practice was soon officially dubbed one of the Eight New Evil Winds* and eventually banned by the government. But fashion is still coming on strong in Chinese life, at least in the big cities. "It's fantastic," says Pierre Cardin, as eleven Chinese models sashay up a Peking runway in black silk dresses made for him in Shanghai. "In ten

years this place will be like Seoul." That is precisely what Deng's opponents--and perhaps Deng himself--fear. As China dresses up, it has also begun to pursue new goals. Under Mao, the people were told that their lives would be enriched if they dedicated themselves to work. Now they are being exhorted to work in order to get rich. "Our government promotes the policy that some will get rich first," says Du Runsheng, the top party adviser on rural affairs. "Then others will get rich. Our final goal is that all people will be rich." The words kuaile, or pleasure, and yule, or recreation, have crept back into the national vocabulary. "Only with an adequate amount of wining and dining, fun and games," says an editor of the China Youth Daily, "will the workers' productive power be restored."

The invitation to pleasure is being taken up with accelerating zest. Beauty parlors have mushroomed. Sedate discos and bowling alleys have sprung up. Citizens are snapping up $100 cameras and going on picture-taking sprees. In a few cities, six out of seven families own a television set, on which they can watch commercials offering a wide range of domestic and foreign consumer goods. There are aerobics classes and body-building sessions; one of the beauty items for sale in the capital is a fengruqi, a machine purported to enlarge the breast.

Other diversions are less acceptable to the regime. In some video parlors, where impromptu movie screenings are shown with a video recorder, customers pay 30 times as much to see an imported pornographic movie as a Chinese film. In a sudden crackdown on Peking street vendors last spring, the police confiscated 700,000 copies of lurid tabloids. Even more threatening, perhaps, are trends that amount to outright rejection of the egalitarian ideal. In Peking, more and more families have been hiring housemaids. For a while, lotteries that promised such grand prizes as imported television sets and refrigerators were a national obsession. After one culminated in a televised finale watched by 200 million viewers, the authorities banned the pastime, saying that lotteries are "disgusting."

Critics within the regime, fearful that Western valuables bring Western values, find plenty of ammunition in such excesses to use in sniping at reform. "Money," said former Propaganda Chief Deng Liqun, "has already eroded relations between our people." The great drive for riches, and the diversions they afford, also troubles many party and government bureaucrats --though for less ideological reasons. Their complaint is that the reforms have left them out: with incomes under $35 a month, they earn far less than enterprising peasants and even some urban workers. A vice minister takes home less than Li Yongming, a Peking cabby who chooses to work 15 hours a day, seven days a week. The losses are not only financial. "Party people," says an academician, "are losing their stability as well." Nor are they consoled by the admonition of Hu Qili, secretary of the Communist Party Central Committee and one of Deng Xiaoping's lieutenants, that party members "must be first in suffering hardship and last in enjoying benefits."

In response, some middle-level officials have come up with ingenious racketeering schemes. Earlier this year, the press told the story of Liu Baoqin, a minor county official who dreamed up a ploy to import color television sets from Hong Kong and resell them. By the time the authorities caught up with him, Liu had made a huge profit and was taking it easy in a luxury hotel in Shenzhen. Last month the People's Daily reported that Xiang Dong, an official in Yunnan province, had used state funds to buy pornographic videotapes. At the same time, China's news agency, Xinhua, revealed that some Hainan officials had jointly embezzled about $1.5 billion by importing large quantities of cars, TV sets, video recorders and motorcycles and reselling them at higher prices at government expense.

Nearly half of the 40 million men and women on the party's membership rolls, 4% of the population, signed up during the fervor of the Cultural Revolution. Now they find themselves faced with a new order that seems both hostile and incomprehensible. "It's only natural that there will be disgruntled bureaucrats and party people," says a senior Western diplomat. "They are not sharing in the wealth, and they are losing their positions of control." A story circulating among Chinese intellectuals tells of a group of party veterans wandering along the bustling streets of Shenzhen. After taking stock of the high-rise apartments and the stores jammed with consumer goods, one of the oldtimers bursts into tears. "Is this," he weeps, "what we fought for?"

One of the paradoxical effects of the transformation is that some of those who join the party these days--and all Chinese are free to do so except those directly implicated in the excesses of the Cultural Revolution--are joining not out of ideological conviction but out of straightforward pragmatism. Gu Dehua, a 28-year-old tailor in Shanghai who earns about $70 a month, enrolled in the party apparently in much the same spirit as a Western counterpart might sign up with the Rotarians. Did Gu see a contradiction between the Communist vision and his eagerness to collect material possessions? "Communism is the ideal," he explained, sitting in a small room appointed with two TV sets, one color, the other black and white. "But my property is mine forever."

"The party's legitimacy," says one government official, "will come from the success of its policies. As the country becomes stronger, so too will the party." As Leader Deng sees it, that means retiring many of the older officials and replacing them with better-educated, better-qualified young technocrats. Yet rebuilding the party remains an uphill struggle. Despite infusions of fresh blood, nearly half of its members have no more than an elementary education and at least 10% are illiterate. Many are unprepared to deal with directives from government and party headquarters that put a premium on efficiency and management skill.

At the highest levels, Deng has tried to ensure that his reforms will outlast him by weeding out opponents or gently moving them to the sidelines. In 1981 he eased out Party Chairman and Premier Hua Guofeng, Mao's choice for the succession, and installed in Hua's place General Secretary Hu Yaobang. The premiership, which Hua also held, went to Zhao Ziyang, the former governor of Sichuan. Last July, Propaganda Chief Deng Liqun, who had missed no opportunity in recent years to reaffirm "the purity of Communism," was ousted from his post. Deng Xiaoping has defanged other neo-Maoists, or "whateverists" (so called because of their belief that whatever Mao said was correct) by offering them high posts without power. In April, General Secretary Hu launched an overhaul of regional and local party units; later he announced that 40,000 party members would be ousted. In June, eight new ministers were appointed; all were much younger than the incumbents.

This month's party conference is expected to consolidate that process by strengthening the position of the younger Deng supporters of the "third echelon," including Hu Qili and former Youth Leader Wang Zhaoguo. Overall, these personnel changes have been accomplished with notably less of the factional fighting and intrigue that have attended so many of China's ideological transitions in the recent past.

Still, some members of the Old Guard stubbornly cling to power. Such veterans as President Li Xiannian, 76, and Marshal Ye Jianying, 86, a member of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party Politburo and vice chairman of the party's military commission, continue to command a following in the military establishment. While they accept the reforms, they are said to harbor some doubts about their pace and scope. Among the most formidable of the pragmatists' adversaries is Chen Yun, a central planner who masterminded the Soviet-style economic programs of the '50s. He is said to believe that the reforms can work only if they are kept within a tight socialist structure. If the Chinese economy is a bird in a cage, Chen holds, then the cage should be enlarged but not discarded. "In crossing the stream," he reportedly warned his colleagues in another metaphor, "wade cautiously to avoid stumbling over stones."

That may be a point well taken. Even if Deng and his colleagues maintain control at the top, they still face opposition at the regional and local levels. This is all the more so because China is a huge country that tends toward fractiousness at any sign of uncertainty in Peking. "Already," says a foreign diplomat, "we are seeing signs of provinces erecting trade barriers against goods from other areas." Economic improvement varies from region to region, and vested interests have begun to assert themselves. Chongqing, the country's largest city, was criticized last spring by Peking for refusing to send its bonus taxes to the central government. The People's Daily reported that half of all state- and collectively run enterprises were cheating on their taxes. Deng's government is concerned that jealousies could grow even further among China's many regions, thus affecting the pace of reform. This may intensify the need for the Deng leadership to forge a national vision that goes beyond Communism. Hu Yaobang recently told the party's propaganda department that "the most important political task of literary and artistic creation and performance is to inspire patriotism." But patriotism without a / higher goal can easily curdle into ugly nationalism. "There are obvious dangers to using nationalism here," says a Western diplomat. "The main one is that someday the Chinese will once again go off the chauvinistic deep end."

Several times during the past century China has absorbed outside influences only, in a convulsive fit, to spit them out again. In the mid-19th century, the fanatical Taiping rebels nearly overthrew the non-Chinese Manchu Dynasty with an eclectic ideology of primitive Communism and a wrathful Old Testament deity. In 1900, two years after the proclamation of Western-oriented reforms by the young Emperor Guang Xu, the Boxers, a peasant organization that aimed at ridding China of the presence and influence of Europeans, exploded in a burst of xenophobia, called for the ouster of all foreigners and fought a yearlong war with Western colonial troops dispatched to put down the uprising. Six decades later, following the collapse of a close association with the Soviet Union in ideological wrangling about the true path to Communism, Mao triggered the Cultural Revolution to turn China in on itself once again. "The one constant in China in this century has been change," says Father Laszlo Ladany, a Hong Kong-based analyst of Chinese affairs. "Change is the only certain thing."

So far, Deng and his reformist allies have displayed an impressive blend of self-criticism and self-confidence in their attempts to balance a measure of freedom with control, unity with diversity, experimentation with tradition. Their success at opening to the outside world a country that has long lived behind walls both great and small has been remarkable. The people have seized their new opportunities with the spirit and skill shown by the industrious Overseas Chinese. But the very success of reform could invite trouble as the initial heady effects of the transition subside. "Suppose in 15 or 20 years they haven't met their goals," says a senior Western diplomat. "Suppose factionalism gets in the way. Suppose population growth gets out of hand. Suppose energy and transportation begin to prevent the economy from growing. The death of Deng won't matter too much. But I worry about the future."

Such concern could mount as long as the government pursues a policy of trial and error, one day stressing a capitalist slogan ("To Get Rich Is Glorious"), the next a Communist one ("Sacrifice for Socialism"). The most urgent priority of what some Chinese call Deng's "cultureless (materialistic) revolution" is to find a new dynamic for China that can help ensure the stability of its society even when the inevitable economic and political disappointments occur. The pragmatists have succeeded in brushing off the ashes of Maoism. They must now find a way of enabling the Middle Kingdom to advance at last along a middle way.

FOOTNOTE: *The original Eight Evil Winds, designated in 1951 and '52, were corruption, waste, bureaucracy, bribery, tax evasion, theft of state property, cheating on government contracts and stealing economic information.