The 10th anniversary of Deng Xiaoping's death passed quietly on February 19, 2007. China's media barely mentioned the news, nor did the current leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) make any comment.
Deng Xiaoping was the former leader of the CCP. He has been complimented as the "chief architect of China's reformation and opening up" He is perhaps best known for two things: his policy of "allowing part of the people to get rich first" and his order to crackdown on the pro-democracy movement on June 4, 1989.
Is It a Blessing or a Curse When Part of The People Is Allowed to Get Rich First?
Since Deng Xiaoping triggered the economic reform in China in the late 70's, "to allow some people to get rich first" has been a widely quoted slogan. But today, for the leadership of the current CCP, this slogan has become an embarrassment.
The reason is that the "part of people" who did get rich in the past 30 years turned out to be mostly the CCP authorities and those who are related to them, and they accumulated fortune mainly by seizing things from the common people. While tycoons are becoming richer and richer in China, the common people are drowning deeper and deeper in the soaring cost of housing, education, medication and the soaring unemployment rate. Chinese authority says such tribulations of the people are only unavoidable side effects of the reform.
The complaints of an editor of a labor website in Beijing may represent the true attitude of most Chinese people: "Who got rich? Did they get rich through decent means? Most people don't believe they did. We all know that they got rich by corruption, and by abusing political powers,"
The same editor has traveled to many places in China and talked to local people. He said that it is widely agreed that the CCP now is more corrupt and autocratic than the Kuomintang who ruled China before 1949. China needs democracy urgently, said the editor.
It's commonly believed that the "part of the people getting rich" policy opened a gate for corruption.
The Tiananmen Square Massacre: The Topic No One Can Avoid
When evaluating Deng Xiaoping, his order to slaughter the students in Tiananmen Square is a topic no one can avoid. This episode has made so deep a wound for the CCP that even now, 18 years later, the CCP still does not allow anyone to touch it.
The former director of the Institute of Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Science, Yan Jiaqi pointed out that to objectively evaluate Deng Xiaoping requires the evaluation of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. Yan said, "I believe that the major vice of Deng Xiaoping lies in his giving the order of the massacre. When evaluating him we have to understand this. Of course we also need to discuss the social polarization and the widening gap between the rich and the poor that Deng's policy caused. But on this subject we should avoid going back to the old equalitarian theory of Mao Zedong."
More Chinese's people's views are harder to collect because of the government's rigorous Internet blockage. But some people still manage to express themselves in hidden or circumventing ways such as, "If you have to talk about the spiritual heritage (of Deng), well, we are most impressed by 'political power emerges at gunpoint.'"
Is The Economic Reform a Success?
Some people commented on the economic reform that: "Without the Deng Xiaoping, the 'chief architect,' Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, CCP leaders in the 1980's may have led China to a better place as they supported both economic and political reformations."
Many experts agree with this remark. Yan Jiaqi, for example, believed that if reformation had been carried out in both the economic and political areas, the social polarization and corruption would not have been as serious as today.
According to a Voice of America report, many experts on Chinese issues believe that the low-key attitude of Hu Jintao on the 10th anniversary of Deng's death does not imply an effort to deny Deng's policy, but rather an attempt to move from Deng's "part of the people getting rich first" policy back to Mao Zedong's equalitarianism. Experts are calling for the Chinese' authority's objective evaluation of Deng, a fair review of the Tiananmen Square massacre and the pro-democracy movement, and a return to the paths of Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang who tried to start reformation in both the economic and political areas.
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