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The TIME editors spoke with dozens of Chinese, from members of the State Council (China's Cabinet) to factory managers, commune workers, educators and artists. Each provided a glimpse of the rewards and strains of modernization. Together they gave human scale to an epochal transition. Herewith, seven voices of China:
THE VICE PREMIER. "I myself have made revolution my whole life, and I am continuing to make revolution." So said Vice Premier Wan Li, 64, at the beginning of an hourlong meeting in Peking's Great Hall of the People. Wan, a tall, affable, silver-haired man, is widely regarded as the key official below Premier Zhao Ziyang in China's new government. Until early this year he was the governor of Anhui province in the eastern part of China; there, as in Premier Zhao's Sichuan, the new national economic policies were first tested. Wan was brought into the central government when Party Vice Chairman Deng, who was then Vice Premier, began promoting skilled provincial administrators to top jobs in Peking. Like his mentor and ally Deng, Wan had been twice purged as a "counterrevolutionary" and twice resurrected. "I personally suffered a lot," he says. "As a party, we have learned much from our suffering. That is why we have the courage to make these reforms.
"Our party and government made some mistakes in leadership. Sometimes our plans were not completely in accordance with practice, and some ultra-leftist ideas appeared in our development." One major error was not encouraging the production of consumer goods, another was the misuse of workers' abilities. Says Wan: "We had manpower, but we did not stress the importance of science and technology. We did not pay enough attention to the role that the intellectuals could play. Because of these defects, the ministries had too much power and the local enterprises didn't have enough. We stressed egalitarianism, but we did not find ways to ensure that those who contribute more should get more."
Today, the old Maoist disapproval of material incentives has been replaced with its opposite—a recognition that the chance to get richer will make people work harder. Wan cites the way local farm communes no longer have to produce solely according to a state quota system but can decide for themselves what to grow to satisfy local market conditions. Says he: "They are in a better position to know what to plant—and they can become richer." Under the old system, factories produced according to fixed quotas and turned over virtually all of their profits to the state. Now about 20% of their production can be directed to the free market. "We also plan to give a greater role to the banks," says Wan. "In the past, industrial investment was always provided directly by the state. With the new policy, enterprises get money directly from the bank, though they have to pay some interest." (Bank interest on personal loans in China is about 3% a year.)