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Still, some members of the Old Guard stubbornly cling to power. Such veterans as President Li Xiannian, 76, and Marshal Ye Jianying, 86, a member of the Standing Committee of the Communist Party Politburo and vice chairman of the party's military commission, continue to command a following in the military establishment. While they accept the reforms, they are said to harbor some doubts about their pace and scope. Among the most formidable of the pragmatists' adversaries is Chen Yun, a central planner who masterminded the Soviet-style economic programs of the '50s. He is said to believe that the reforms can work only if they are kept within a tight socialist structure. If the Chinese economy is a bird in a cage, Chen holds, then the cage should be enlarged but not discarded. "In crossing the stream," he reportedly warned his colleagues in another metaphor, "wade cautiously to avoid stumbling over stones."
That may be a point well taken. Even if Deng and his colleagues maintain control at the top, they still face opposition at the regional and local levels. This is all the more so because China is a huge country that tends toward fractiousness at any sign of uncertainty in Peking. "Already," says a foreign diplomat, "we are seeing signs of provinces erecting trade barriers against goods from other areas." Economic improvement varies from region to region, and vested interests have begun to assert themselves. Chongqing, the country's largest city, was criticized last spring by Peking for refusing to send its bonus taxes to the central government. The People's Daily reported that half of all state- and collectively run enterprises were cheating on their taxes. Deng's government is concerned that jealousies could grow even further among China's many regions, thus affecting the pace of reform. This may intensify the need for the Deng leadership to forge a national vision that goes beyond Communism. Hu Yaobang recently told the party's propaganda department that "the most important political task of literary and artistic creation and performance is to inspire patriotism." But patriotism without a / higher goal can easily curdle into ugly nationalism. "There are obvious dangers to using nationalism here," says a Western diplomat. "The main one is that someday the Chinese will once again go off the chauvinistic deep end."
Several times during the past century China has absorbed outside influences only, in a convulsive fit, to spit them out again. In the mid-19th century, the fanatical Taiping rebels nearly overthrew the non-Chinese Manchu Dynasty with an eclectic ideology of primitive Communism and a wrathful Old Testament deity. In 1900, two years after the proclamation of Western-oriented reforms by the young Emperor Guang Xu, the Boxers, a peasant organization that aimed at ridding China of the presence and influence of Europeans, exploded in a burst of xenophobia, called for the ouster of all foreigners and fought a yearlong war with Western colonial troops dispatched to put down the uprising. Six decades later, following the collapse of a close association with the Soviet Union in ideological wrangling about the true path to Communism, Mao triggered the Cultural Revolution to turn China in on itself once again. "The one constant in China in this century has been change," says Father Laszlo Ladany, a Hong Kong-based analyst of Chinese affairs. "Change is the only certain thing."