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Official opinion continues to vacillate. Deng has declared that talk of capitalism "cannot harm us," but he has also cautioned that China must "combat the corrosive influence of capitalist ideas." At one point, the People's Daily pronounced that the world had changed so much since the days of Marx and Lenin that "we cannot expect (their) works to solve our present-day problems." A few days later, following angry and anxious cries that the paper had renounced the country's very ideology, the People's Daily backpedaled. It had meant to say, it explained in a retraction, only that Marxism-Leninism could not solve all of China's problems. "We do have headaches and problems," Chen Muhua, president of the People's Bank of China, said recently. "From the last quarter of 1984 to the first quarter of 1985, we sensed that the pace of economic reform was too fast. But in the course of development, you are bound to meet problems. The thing is to deal with them appropriately."
The factional jousting has intensified as the Dengists have sought to expand their reform program. Last October, the government extended to urban areas and to certain large industries a system of economic incentives that had been extremely successful in the countryside. In April, the party's General Secretary, Hu Yaobang, announced that by the end of 1986 the People's Liberation Army would discharge a quarter of its 4 million men, thus becoming a more modern, streamlined and, by implication, more efficient force. In May, the government launched a new education plan and followed it with the pledge that China's largely theoretical legal code would be both strengthened and genuinely applied.
Two months later, the leadership announced that it was taking a fresh look at the so-called Special Economic Zones, like Shenzhen, which borders Hong Kong, and Zhuhai, south of Canton. The zones were created in 1979 to attract foreign investment and foster export trade while concentrating foreign influences in coastal areas. Shenzhen, Zhuhai and two other such zones apparently performed less satisfactorily than expected. As a consequence, plans for 14 similar enclaves were scaled back. Where Deng once described Shenzhen as a major element in his economic program, he now talked of it as an "experiment." "We hope it will succeed," he said. "But if it fails, we will draw lessons from it."