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For a country that only a decade ago scorned educated people--intellectuals were denounced as "the stinking ninth category," the lowest group in Mao's class lexicon, during the chaotic Cultural Revolution--the educational reform seems a promising development, even if its grand ambition may not be realized any time soon. For the moment, neither sufficient money nor equipment nor qualified teachers are available to sustain the plan. Moreover, because education is now locally financed, the wealthiest areas of the country will be the first to benefit. "This is the first official recognition," says a senior Western diplomat, "that the poor areas lag substantially behind the rest of the country." Another foreign observer in Peking takes the argument a step further. "Uneven development," he suggests, "will be the main domestic political issue for the next two or three decades."
In the political arena, the Dengists have allowed a measure of free speech, though it is markedly restrained compared with the period in 1979 when dissidents were able to plaster their complaints on Peking's "Democracy Wall." The Chinese Democratic League, one of eight small non-Communist parties tolerated by the government, was authorized earlier this year to publish a monthly magazine called Opinion of the Masses. In the first issue, the publication invoked Deng's assertion that a revolutionary party should fear nothing except being unable to hear public opinion. Last April, 300 people from Shanxi province in the underdeveloped northwest staged what turned out to be a weeklong sit-in on the front steps of the Communist Party's municipal headquarters in Peking. They were former residents of the capital who had been sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution to "learn from the peasants." Materializing like forgotten ghosts, the protesters demanded that they, along with 20,000 others in a similar situation, be allowed to reside once more in Peking. Their plea went unanswered: they were told that the city was already overcrowded and were sent back to Shanxi. If the outcome was disappointing for the demonstrators, at least they were not roughed up or arrested, as they would have been in Mao's time.
On the whole, however, China remains a closed society that has yet to overcome the inhibitions or remove all the scars left by the Cultural Revolution. On a recent visit to Hong Kong, Liang Koude, a 60-year-old teacher, contended that the regime has not relaxed its hold enough. "The harder we struggle to free ourselves from the party grip," said Liang, "the stronger we feel the squeeze." Writers, teachers, professionals and educated people in general have grown so accustomed to self-censorship, said Liang, that they cannot "free themselves and fly off." Although he believes in the imminence of a cultural renaissance, Actor Ying agrees that the habit of caution will not die easily. "It would not be wrong," he says, "to say that there is a moral crisis in our culture."