Man Of The Year: Visionary of a New China

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presence only when it was too weak to do otherwise. And during the half-century after the first Opium War (1839-42), during the Japanese Occupation of the 1930s and 1940s and during a brief infatuation with the Soviet Union in the 1950s, the Chinese may well have concluded that their prejudices were validated.

Nonetheless, China has felt the hunger to modernize before. Near the end of the Ch'ing dynasty in 1898, under the Emperor Kuang Hsu, the Chinese tried to imitate the Japanese Emperor Meiji's transformation of Japan, from feudalism in the last half of the 19th century. In the early days of Sun Yat-sen's Republican China, an effort to streamline the society with foreign help ended in a bitter failure that eventually turned China toward puritanical socialism. The Chinese, wrote Historian C.P. FitzGerald, "became disillusioned with the false gods of the West They turned restlessly to some other solution."

After the People's Republic was founded in 1949, following a generation-long civil war between Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang and Mao's Communists, China eliminated chronic unemployment and controlled the country's wanton inflation. But there were major disruptions.

Mao's Great Leap Forward (1958-60), with its preposterous backyard pig-iron furnaces and bureaucratic romance of communal farms, left the country in depression and famine. Less than a decade later came the Cultural Revolution, a three-year Maoist spasm of revolutionary zeal against the onset of complacency and bureaucracy. The Cultural Revolution dislocated nearly every institution of Chinese life, many of which still have not recovered. A case can be made that Mao lived too long. The Great Revolutionary died at 82, an enfeebled puppet. His legacy, after the Cultural Revolution, was a ramshackle economy, a badly equipped military and an educational system in which intellect and learning had been superseded by a dank, Orwellian passion for proletarian ideology.

Teng's modernization campaign has its origins in Premier Chou En-lai's report on the work of the government delivered at the Fourth National People's Congress in 1975. It was the Premier's last publicized appearance outside a hospital (he died of cancer a year later). Chou sketched plans to improve China's agriculture by 1980 as part of "the Four Modernizations" that would "turn a poverty-stricken and backward country into a socialist one with the beginnings of prosperity in only 20 years or more." That report (and the Four Modernizations slogan) is widely believed to have been the work of Teng Hsiao-p'ing, the little bureaucratic survivor, tough as a walnut, who was Chou's protege.

It is difficult for Westerners to understand how so vast a population can psychologically reverse itself so quickly. It is like trying to imagine an aircraft carrier turning on a dime. Over the years, of course, the Chinese have been required to perform wrenching changes of allegiance, as friends became enemies and onetime heroes of the revolution underwent their metamorphoses in the character assassins' wall-poster invective that declared dissidents to be "insects," "pests" or "ferocious feudal monsters." The process has bred measures of confusion, sophistication, cynicism and nimbleness in the Chinese.

But the