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THE JOURNALIST. "Most important are the changes in the fundamentals," says Yuan Xianlu, 52, foreign affairs editor of the official Communist Party newspaper, the People's Daily, which has a worldwide circulation of 6.3 million. Yuan, a tall, wiry man who has been with the paper for three decades, warns that easy political slogans and simplified explanations will not solve China's problems. He has seen too many of them before. "Many people say that everything bad is the fault of the Gang of Four," he says. "Some of our friends in the West have had doubts about this, and, in fact, while it is true that the Gang of Four did a lot of damage, if we blame everything on them, we won't find the real reasons why China has not developed satisfactorily."
Among China's defects, Yuan mentions its long imitation of the Soviet system, which was not relevant to local conditions. Like many other intellectuals, he also blames the country's "feudal heritage," the centuries during which China's economy remained backward and "the Emperor's word was law." Adds Yuan: "One thing that the common people get very angry about is the special privileges of high-ranking officials. There used to be a saying in the old society that once a man got promoted, even his dogs and chickens could go to heaven." This notion lingers, and it impedes efforts to reform the practice of officials clinging to their jobs for life. Says Yuan: "The problem is that once a person has a high position, he gets special privileges that he doesn't want to give up.
"We admit that because of the Cultural Revolution and the Gang of Four, the prestige of the Communist Party has decreased. But the party still has the basic support of the people. For example, compare China and Poland. A lot of the trouble in Poland began with a rise in the price of meat. But in China the economic situation was much worse than in Poland, and yet last year we had to raise the price of eight varieties of food. We did do a lot of political and economic groundwork to handle the matter."
The TIME editors asked Yuan whether rising expectations and greater tolerance of criticism might hold long-term dangers for China. His answer: "In the rural areas the farmers don't care about democracy. What they care about is good rulers. In the absence of democracy there are only two ways for people to show dissatisfaction — with silence or with rebellion. Now there is something in between. There is criticism, and that is healthier."