What 1978 Means for the Rest in 2018

Deng Xiaoping's directive to “liberate thought” is not just one appropriate for China but for the wider world

Kerry Brown

Kerry Brown is professor of Chinese Studies at King's College London. He once worked at the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, as first secretary at the British Embassy in China. Professor Brown directed the Europe China Research and Advice Network (ECRAN), giving policy advice to the European External Action Service (2011—2014). He is the author of the Berkshire Dictionary of Chinese Biography (Four Volumes, 2014—2015).

The Third Plenary Session of the 11thCentral Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, held at a military hotel in Beijing in December 1978, was not a dramatic event. The newly appointed vice-premier, Deng Xiaoping, made a speech in which he broadly said that cadres should “seek truth from facts” and “liberate their thinking”.

For someone as senior in the leadership to say this was enough, however. And while most foreign observers, initially at least, did not fully understand the significance of what had been signalled, plenty in the new leadership did. Over the next year or so, the signs of what “liberating thought” and “seeking truth from facts” became clearer. Communes and work brigades, such as they still existed, were disbanded. In the countryside, experi

ments first tried out earlier in the 1970s in provinces like Anhui and Sichuan whereby farmers were allowed to have greater freedom to plant crops and to then sell the surpluses in an emerging open market, rather than wholly into the State system, were extended till they covered the whole country. A joint venture law was passed in 1979, with Coca Cola opening up a bottling plant in Tianjin soon after — the first foreign enterprise to work with a local partner since 1949. By 1981, the special economic zones of Shenzhen, Zhuhai, Xiamen and Shantou were up and running. The contours of China under reform and opening-up were from this point irrefutable and clear. The rest, as they say, is history.

The wonderful work of Australia-based scholars Frederik Teiwes and Warren Sun show that this process up to and after 1978 and the seminal meeting then was a complex one. Leaders of that time all made contributions. Some were in charge of provinces that experimented successfully and then had their pilot schemes adopted nationally. Others offered support from Beijing. Peng Zhen, in the mid-1980s chairman of the National People's Congress, introduced the Organic Village Election Law in 1987, which saw the first moves to introduce multi-person elections to China's many tens of thousands of villages. This restored some levels of good governance to China's rural areas, where so many people still lived, and which had been highly unstable prior to 1976. There were many other contributions, like the one most closely associated with Xi Zhongxun while he was the second and then first provincial party secretary and governor in Guangdong Province since 1978 where he supported the implementation of special economic zones, and allowed manufacturing within China for export markets to raise revenue and built up a more powerful local skills base.

There was no blueprint for reform which was laid out in 1978 to be rigorously implemented from 1979 onward. The main thing was the “seeking truth from facts” and the “liberating thought”of a new philosophy and a new approach to policy and its implementation. So instead of rigid central state targets to be fulfilled throughout the vast country by all State enterprises and entities, more latitude was allowed — and expected. Cadres and those who worked with them were meant to fill in the gaps and use some of their initiative. Deng was supportive of young cadres in particular who showed creativity, moving to promote many of them in the 1980s to more senior leadership positions. In many ways, 1978 launched what can be called a process of “the great learning”. Officials were expected to be self-critical, and more open. They were meant to refocus on the thing that mattered most to Deng's political program — improving the lives of the people and addressing their lack of material and daily necessities.

The undogmatic approach of the new leadership allowed them to travel the world looking at many different models by which to try to understand how to sustain high growth rates and modernization of their technology, industry, agriculture and defence— the Four Modernizations, which had been mentioned as far back as the 1950s but which now needed to be addressed urgently. Deng himself was to visit the United States and Japan. Other leaders went to Europe, and looked at high-growth economies within their own region — Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, and South Korea, in particular. Slavish following of foreign models was not accepted. What was allowed was a new ideological focus on “socialism with Chinese characteristics” as it came to be called, which would marry the best aspects of other models with the intrinsic cultural, social and political conditions in China.

There were plenty of unintended consequences that followed from this process of accepting innovation and openness to new ideas. As Deng himself commented later, one of the most important changes, the Town and Village Enterprises (TVEs) which started to spring up in the 1980s, were largely an outcome of dramatically increased productivity in the rural areas, and the fact that with better incentives and more efficient methods, farming became much less labor intensive, and many who had once worked in this sector were free to pursue other opportunities. TVEs were classic hybrid entities, working in the rural areas in many different sectors, some as factories or enterprises, teaching Chinese how to do business. TVEs became the employers of most Chinese people by the end of the decade, and yet, as Deng said, there had never been a specific plan for this to happen. It had simply been a happy offshoot of the whole process of introducing new ways of working and new methods. In many ways, TVEs to this day are the founding entities on which the thriving Chinese non-State sector was built — something that now contributes more than half of all GDP growth and most employment.

In terms of impact on raw growth, reform and opening-up was almost immediately successful. From 1980, Chinese growth started to climb, soon reaching double digits, something that was maintained till the 2000s. For smaller economies to maintain this level of growth is immensely difficult; but for one the size and complexity of China, this was unprecedented. Many therefore, such as the famous economist Justin Lin Yifu, call this a miracle. But it was largely the result of huge efforts by Chinese people, particularly those who migrated from the rural areas to cities, and by officials at many levels of government who used creativity, often took risks, and worked together on the great collaborative enterprise that is the modern Chinese economy.

In places like Shenzhen, the impact of reform is material and real. A fishing center of no more than a few hundred thousand people in 1978, photos of it taken at the time show a place that looks quiet, still and remote. Hong Kong, just over the border, almost seems like it exists on another planet in comparison. But by the mid-1980s, Shenzhen had transformed into a major manufacturing center, and had acquired its own set of high rise buildings and modern apartment blocks. Over this period there were some years when its growth was a staggering 45 percent. Visiting the city in 1994, I could feel some of this dynamism and energy. By then it was almost up to 10 million people. It was a place where many others across China dreamed of coming to work and make money. But it was also often chaotic and confusing, a place where many people came from outside, and where there was a feeling of intransience. Now, Shenzhen is a more mature center, and has the social and administrative infrastructure that any major city has. In the 1980s, it was the epicenter of dramatic, fast experimentation and reform, and will always exist partly as a living monument to the uniqueness and meaning of that period.

As the outside world came to understand that reform and opening-up was not a temporary phenomenon but marked a sea change in attitudes and approaches by China, so too links and engagement between the two deepened, and became more varied. By the 2000s, the whole of China became a special economic zone, with the original locations able to now make goods not just for export, but for the rising domestic market. With accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001, forces of productivity were unleashed in China that impacted the whole country — from the coastal areas right into the western regions. The “Go West” campaign from 1999 started encouraging governments as far afield as Yunnan, Sichuan, Gansu and Inner Mongolia to start their own accelerated reforms. They too set up science parks and technology zones, striving to attract not just domestic, but foreign partnership and support.

In the fourth decade of the reform process, we see two major impacts. The first is that, within China, a middle class with a per capita per annum income of around $8,000 has emerged —more than 30 times the level at the start of this whole process. In 1978, China and the Chinese could only dream of being wealthy and rich. Today, the dream is, for many, a reality. They live lives comparable in standards to those in Europe and the rest of the world. They travel abroad, own cars and apartments. This was something even their grandparents would have found hard to imagine — and yet, it has happened in their lifetime.

The second is more subtle. It has taught the Chinese, and the world, that there a flexibility at the heart of their economic philosophy, and their engagement with the environment around them; this is something that those outside China should pay attention to, and, in their turn, learn from. Deng in 1978 asked his peer and colleagues to “liberate their thinking”. It was a brave thing to do after so many years of uncertainty, especially as he was directing things which were once completely unaccepted— attracting foreign capital into the country, accepting entrepreneurialism, allowing the existence of a Chinese market. From 1979, they were accepted and promoted. This change in attitude, and ability to simply reset and redirect themselves, offers food for thought not just for Chinese, but in fact for everyone. There are no hard and fast rules, as the Chinese experience shows —facts and situations can change. The main thing is to recognise and then deal with this, and to be open and self-critical.

China under Deng, and since the reform era started, has changed radically, of course. But it has maintained its core identity as a very distinctive place, with a unique cultural and social outlook. It shows that in many ways the pragmatism and flexibility of the Deng approach understood something deep and right about the nature of China and the Chinese. To this day, therefore, reform and opening-up endures. It is likely, because of China's global prominence, that the rest of the world now may well go more deeply into their own era of reform and opening-up, and embrace more of China and its rich traditions and cultures. That would truly be a great global learning opportunity. And it would mean that the spirit of “liberating thought” is not just appropriate for China, but for the world.