Chinese tell of the momentous changes sweeping their nation
Will it work? And how far can it go? These are the questions that the Chinese keep asking as their leaders search for ways to modernize the world's most populous nation. In the past two years these leaders have abandoned a rigid ideology in favor of a relatively freewheeling pragmatism. Communist economic policies have been modified to give greater initiative to local factories and farms. The government has offered new latitude for artists and writers, and it has risked sending thousands of scholars and scientists to study in the capitalist West. Taken together, these peaceful changes could ultimately prove as profound as those that came with the armed Communist revolution in 1949. Rarely in history has a ship as large and unwieldy as the People's Republic of China been turned so sharply.
To see firsthand how far some of these changes have gone and to hear of what might be in the offing, Editor in Chief Henry Grunwald led a number of Time Inc. editors on an eleven-day tour through four separate regions of China. The group included Editorial Director Ralph
Graves, TIME Managing Editor Ray Cave and Chief of Correspondents Richard Duncan; they were accompanied by Peking Bureau Chief Richard Bernstein. After a stay in Peking, the party visited agriculturally rich Sichuan province, where many of the current experiments in economic liberalization were first tried, then flew over the towering Hengduan Mountains to Lhasa, Tibet (average elevation: 16,000 ft. above sea level) and finally to the semitropical trading port of Canton some 3,000 miles to the southeast.
The editors found a country obsessed with the "four modernizations"—the upgrading of industry, agriculture, science and technology, and the military—formally announced by then Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping three years ago. In a radical departure from past practice, local farm and factory managers are increasingly deciding what to produce on the basis of what will make a profit. After filling their state quotas, they have been given considerable freedom to sell some of their products directly to other factories or on the free market, and they keep part of the resulting profits to use as they see fit, primarily to pay bonuses to workers and buy additional raw materials and new equipment. Greatly expanded contacts with other countries, particularly the industrialized democracies of Japan and the West, have begun bringing China advanced technical knowledge and a growing impatience to liberalize still more. But this form of modernization has many hazards in a vast Communist state, a fact that China's new leaders are very much aware of. The ambitious, flexible programs that China has begun will produce tensions and fissures in a society long controlled by force and regimentation. Even as statues of Mao are vanishing all across China and the trial of the Gang of Four—which includes Mao's wife Jiang Qing—begins, there are rumors of conflicts between the reformers and the Maoists.