Now he is dying. Last week a high-level Chinese source told NEWSWEEK Deng had lapsed into a “vegetative state,” kept alive by machines and a team of doctors. The source thought the old leader might remain in that condition for “weeks or months.” Whenever the end comes. a “core leadership” is in place to succeed Deng, led by President Jiang Zemin, 68, who also heads the Chinese Communist Party, and Prime Minister Li Peng, 66. Deng’s successors are skilled bureaucrats, agile survivors. cautious reformers in Western-style business suits. But they will not neccessarliy inherit the mandate or even hang on to their jobs for long. The regime itself could fall apart, split by the seemingly impossible task of promoting radical economic reform without corresponding political change. Last year Deng warned in an internal party document that instability could be caused by disloyal generals. regional “warlords” or restless ethnic minorities. He urged his heirs to “maintain the absolute authority, of the center.” But that authority has already begun to crumble, and because none, of his successors has anything like Deng’s stature, it will probably erode even more when he dies.
Does that matter? China is still a relativety poor country, self-absorbed and far short of its potential. But in the new multipolar world, the ancient Middle Kingdom has already become a regional powerhouse: 1.2 billion people churning out double-digit economic-growtb rates. Its leaders are headstrong and nationalistic, all too willing to defy world opinion with human-rights abuses, reckless arms sales and piratical trading practices. If it remains united China could eventually become a supperpower – another Japan, but with 10 times the population and a nuclear arsenal. If it falls apart, a chaotic China could destabilize all of Asia.
Officially, the Chinese govenment insisted last week that Deng was, “generally speaking, in good health” for a man of his age. But Deng’s daughter Xiao Rong had told The New York Times that his “health declines day by day” and that the time was coming “When he passes away.” Later, newspapers in Hong Kong said China’s top leaders had been asked to stay in Beijing instead of going on holiday for the lunar New Year next week.
Some Chinese thought they saw omens portending the end of a dynasty. They took the earthquake in Japan, and a much smaller tremor in China’s Guangxi province, as possible signs that Deng’s end was near, recalling that in 1976, Mao Zedong died just six weeks after a quake killed 242,000 people in the Chinese city of Tangshan. They noted that, like 1976, the new Year of the Pig will be a leap year, traditionally thought to be a time of instability. Even the weather stirred concern. “When the weather is unusual, people do strange things,” says a Chinese proverb. As it happened, Beijing was having an unusually mild winter. “So weather forecasters on TV keep saying, A cold snap is on its way’,” observed a relative of one prominent dissident. ““That’s how nervous people are.”
By most political standards, China’s current regime is illegitimate; it was elected by no one and espouses a communist ideology that most Chinese reject as do many of their rulers, in practice. If nothing else, strong leaders are thought to be legitimized by the Mandate of Heaven a moral imperative to rule, with an implied obligation to govern humanely. A dynisty’s loss of the mandate is Supposed to he preceded by natural disasters, Such as earthquakes, and by popular uprisings, such as the student-led democracy movement that ended in the Tiananmen massacre of 1989.
But most analysts do not expect the Mao-Deng dynasty to fall apart the minute the last strongnman dies. President Jiang. Prime Minister LI and the other top leaders maintain it least a facade of collaboration. For now, not one of them is strong enough to shove the others aside. Jiang is a former mayor of cosmopolitan Shianghai. When he meets with U.S. officials, he likes to recite Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (in English) and boast about the time in 1982 when he waltzed with Dianne Feinstein, then mayor of San Francisco and now a U.S. senator. But Jiang doesn’t get a lot of respect in Beijing. “No one dared to criticize Deng openly, but everyone dares to criticize Jiang,” says a European diplomat stationed in the capital. Leadership of the politically powerful Chinese military do not support Jiang. Last September nine top generals reportedly complained to his face about China’s “soft line” toward American “hegemonism” in the Pacific.
At the other end of the political balance of power is prime Minister Li the favorite of party hard-liners. Li is detested by democrats. who call him the “Butcher of Beijing” because publicly participated in the crackdown on the Tianarimen protesters. fle could be the scapegoat if a post-Deng government decides to reassess the official verdict on Tiananmen. “China’s political Culture is a morality play,” says a Western lawyer in Beijing. “You need a good guy and a bad guy, and Li is the most obvious bad guy. The problem is. who’s the good guy’?”
Given the choices, that might turn out to be, Vice Prime Minister Qiao Shi, 70, the enigmantic former head of China’s intelligence service who now chairs the National People’s Congress Qiao has predictably striong support from the sthe security appartus, but he also seems acceptable to liberals; he reportedly abstained when the Politburo voted on sending troops into Tiananmen. Meeting one foreign VIP in 1993, Qiao took a remarkably soft line on dissent. “He realized that dissidents weren’t the same as criminals and murderers,” says a participant in the meeting. Already, some Chinese expect Qiao Shi to come out agead of Jiang Zemin after Deng’s death. A political ditty circulating in Beijin goes: “When the river recedes, stones emerge” – playing on the words jiang (river) and shi (stone).
Jiang may get some support from a fellow member of the “Shanghai clique,” Vice Prime Minister Zhu Rongji, 66, another ex-mayor of the city and now the chief policymaker on the booming economy. China’s sky-rocketing growth rate scores political points for Zhu. But his tight-credit policies and his efforts to shut down inefficient state industries also could make him vulnerable to criticism in an economic pinch. Already, well-placed diplomats think Zhu will soon give up some of his economic responsibilities, probably the agriculture portfolio. Whether that is a political setback or a blessing remains to be seen.
The machinations in Beijing could take months or even years to work out. A turning point might come at the 15tb Party Congress, scheduled for late 1997. when leadership changes could be made relativeIy smoothly. But behind the scenes, the political scuffling probably will begin soon after Deng goes “to meet Marx,” as he has often put it.
Meanwhile, the new leadership will have to face an avalanche of social problems. China’s primitive form of market economics has created gaping income disparities. Corruption has become endemic, with huge illicit profits reaped by government and military officials and hundreds of Yuppie “princelings” – the children of oflicials. Inflation has soared above 20 percent. higher than the rate in 1989, when the Tiananmen protesters made runaway prices a key grievance. Some 30 million workers face eventual dismissal under the government’s plan to close or downsize 100,000 state enterprises – a plan so likely to stir up labor unrest that it may well be delayed for a few years.
There are still 55 million ostensible Communists in China, but the party is in no shape to solve these problems. Regional officials have usurped much of Beijing’s authority, especially on economic matters. With the demise of collective farming, the party apparatus has collapsed in the countryside. By 1993, according to one study, 60 percent of the party’s rural branches had ceased to function. Yet Deng insisted all along that the party had to keep its monopoly on power, that economic reform could not be accompanied by political liberalization. “As long as we, the older generation, are still around,” he said in 1992 “the hostile forces know that change cannot happen. But who can guarantee this once we old men pass away?” Soon power will formally be handed to a younger generation – men in their 60s, for the most part, and set in their bureaucratic ways. It will be power without legitamacy at first, and many Chinese are not convinced that heaven will confer upon Deng’s successors the mandate they so sorely need.
In a country ruled more by strongme than by law, Deng, 90, and nearing his end, still towers over his collective successors. They are skilled bureaucrats, agile survivors, cautious reforms in Western-style business suits. But they lack his epochal stature. The outlook for each of them.
With his power base in Shanghai, Jiang needs to mend fences with the military. Li, perhaps the most hated man in China, could still be dragged down by his “Butcher of Beijing’ label.
China’s economic czar gets credit for the boom, but he could be undone by runaway inflation or serious labor unrest.
A former intelligence chief now chairing the rubber-stamp legislature, Qiao knows what skeletons his rivals have hidden.
Deng Xiaoping was purged twice before he finally depose Mao Zedong’s chosen successor. He has guided China, mostly from the periphery of formal power, for the last 16 years.
