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For the moment, Teng, Hua and their Politburo colleagues seem too intent upon the task of modernization to jeopardize it by making aggressive noises, either to foreigners or to themselves. The consensus among Sinologists is that Teng is indeed the man in charge; he holds enough power to be able to take his revenge on old Radical enemies, but still operates within constraints. "There are still some people in the Politburo who probably don't like the trends," says A. Doak Barnett of the Brookings Institution. "But these same people are also uneasy because of their past complicity, so to speak, in the purges of Teng. I think they will now be very careful in voicing their dissent."
Some Sinologists have long predicted that China would swing away from the ideological conflicts of Mao's last days to some form of pragmatic modernization. "The extreme emphasis on Utopian social goals," says Barnett, "was asking more out of a population than any population can be expected to give." Still, there is a very real danger that the Peking leaders could oversell their program to the Chinese people and thus provoke disillusionment and bitterness if there are no noticeable changes for the better in the next few years.
The Politburo clearly faces very hard decisions on how to allocate what are limited resources, considering the size of the task. If China must import 10 million tons of grain to feed its people by 1981, argues Swarthmore College Sinologist Kenneth Lieberthal, it will be almost impossible for the country to carry out its industrialization program at the speed it foresees. Also at issue will be what happens to the Four Modernizations if Teng dies before they are well under way. The basic Teng-Hua conflict would then be unresolved. In Lieberthal's formulation: "While all current Politburo members desperately want rapid modernization, Teng and his supporters are willing to transform China at a greater cost to the core values of the Chinese Revolution than are Hua and his supporters."
TIME Hong Kong Correspondent Ross H. Munro, who until last December was a resident reporter in Peking for the Toronto Globe and Mail, has a more optimistic perspective:
"Teng can be seen as setting up booby traps for any neo-quasi-Maoists who might try to renege on the commitment to modernization and try to return China to insularity. When Teng is dead, China will still have commitments to foreign creditors that will force it to continue pushing exports and internal economic development. When Teng is dead, there will probably be tens of thousands of bright young men and women in China who have been exposed to foreign teachers and foreign ideas and who will resist any return to xenophobia and romantic Maoism. And there may even be a military that will be unable to function without parts and technology from Hamburg or Los Angeles. Teng is thus beginning to lock China into the non-Communist orbit. If current trends continue for a decade, it is hard to conceive of China extricating itself from the orbit even if the modernization drive falters within the country."
what of Teng himself, the persistent heretic who gives lip service to the ideas of the Great Helmsman but who violates their spirit? Speaking as a historian and not as Carter's National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski offers