December 31, 1977
CHINA SURVEY
Three people's China:
p. 23Three journalists from The Economist made a 3,000-mile trip through the length and some of the breadth of China this October, on a visit that was exclusive to this newspaper. The three were Emily MacFarquhar (the paper's Chinese-speaking expert on East Asia), Brian Beedham (the foreign editor) and Norman Macrae (the deputy editor). Instead of making a committee report, it was agreed that each should write a separate survey.
Emily MacFarquhar looks at how Hua and company are picking up the pieces after 10 years of assorted revolutions; and says which broken eggs are being reassembled better than others
Everything has changed and nothing has changed in China under Chairman Hua. Maoism has been buried and is still the state religion. New men have come to power who are mostly old men in their old jobs. Policies on pay, management and education have been reversed, which means revived. The official headcount has been raised by 100m, which makes at least 900m people now sharing the same-sized rice bowl and wearing the same shapeless government-issue clothes.
But there is one change from Mao's China that hits a returning visitor between the eyes: call it the purge of the polemic. The press is as preoccupied as ever with denouncing the Russians and the latest internal enemy, Mrs Mao and her Gang of Four. Slogans still paper the walls, along with regulation photographs of Mao, now side by side with his wartless look-alike, Hua Kuo-feng. But in ordinary conversation the standard political prologue has gone with the gang. People would actually rather discuss production targets.
It is tempting to see this new preference for plain talk as a reaction from below against years of mindless sloganising. But however relieved local officials must be to get off the ideological treadmill for a while, they are quite clearly responding, through the world's most sensitive political antennae, to a changed set of signals from Peking. The operative slogan in China today is not that warmed-over quote from Chairman Mao about grasping class struggle, but rather the demand made last summer by Mr Teng Hsiao-ping for "less empty talk and more hard work".
Still, adjusting to a new style is not easy and results in some ludicrous scenes: like our arrival at a Chinese airport, after a hair-rising flight on a limping Russian aeroplane, when the welcoming cadre plumped himself down in front of a larger-than-life statue of Mao and, without waiting for the loudspeaker to pause, or for our ears to clear, or for the luggage to stop being heaved across his feet, delivered his anti-Soviet piece. That done ("As you know, we Chinese do not believe in detente. We want real not false detente. So much for mu short greeting") the real business of the visit could begin.
The real business of our delegation in China was very broadly defined. We asked to see the model oilfield in the north-east, heavy and light industry in central and south China , agriculture in Mao's home province, officials at every level of administration. Most of our requests were granted; some were refused, including interviews with senior army officers, which accounts for one gap in this traveller's report: sorry, no newly-mined nuggets here about how the party plans to tame the army or how the army means to modernise itself. It was also found to be "inconcenient" for us to visit the provinces of Szechwan and Fukien.
Our only contact with the politburo -- in the person of a member little known to the west, Mr Chi Teng-kuei -- produced a new population estimate of 900m, an extended diatribe on western eagerness to provide credits to the Soviet Union and some pungent remarks about western unwillingness to sell China its most advanced technology. But for what we really wanted to know about what goes on in the Forbidden City, we were forced back upon the usual entrails and tea leaves of the China-watcher.
As one of that band, my own object on every encounter with the world of my imaginings is, first, to reconfirm that it exists, and, second, to accumulate fragments of actuality to be fitted, Lego-like, into the China model I have been constructing at The Economist for a dozen years. On this trip, my third since China opened its doors to Americans like me in 1972, the central question was change: how much and what kind, since the death of Mao Tse-tung in autumn, 1976,and the ascension of Hua Kuo-feng.
top
Call it continuity
p.24Emily MacFarquhar
Change is the very raison d'etre of the Hua regime. Although Hua Kuo-feng was the successor-in-waiting to Mao Tse-tung, he had to claim his inheritance, a month after the chairman's death, by coup d'etat. With the arrest of Mao's widow and her three Shaghai colleagues on October 6, 1976, the radical engine that had driven China's political machine for much of the previous 10 years was stilled and the controls passed to Hua and his team of pragmatic modernisers. This 180-degree swing amounted to the biggest instant turnabout in Chinese politics since the communist conquest in 1949.
After that night of the long knives, Chairman Hua and his allies set out to consolidate the shift to the right in two ways: by drastically overhauling the ruling structure down to grass-roots levels, and by promulgating policies aimed at undoing the damage wrought by those years of centrally-inspired upheaval.
When is a change not a change? When it has to be disguised as continuity. The problem in China is that it is not yet politically possible to discuss the dynamics of the successive campaigns which are loosely labelled the "cultural revolution", or to write off the 10 years as a wasted decade. To do so would be to cut too close to the bone of a controversy which could well split China's leaders into warring factions once again. The unaskable questions concern the role of Mao Tse-tung during this period; his relationship with the Gand of Four; and the links between the Maos and those of the present leaders who profited from the cultural revolutionary purges.
Today's politburo is a coalition of three groups: the rehabilited victims of the cultural revolution, aggressively championed by Mr Teng Hsiao-ping; the survivors, led by the 79-year-old minister of defence, Mr Yeh Chien-ying; and the beneficiaries, headed by Mr Hua Kuo-feng. The two senior men, Hua and Yeh, can also be seen as a separate subgroup because of their roles as mediators. The first two groups, which are natural allies, would have everything to gain from an inquest into the cultural revolution and a frank acknowledgement that today's task is to set the clock back to 1965. But the beneficiaries would have their own legitimacy to worry about if the movement they rode to power were discredited along with its prime mover, Mao Tse-tung.
Contradictory views of recent history are already surfacing, by way of code and metaphor, between the lines of the Chinese press. And the the conflicting interests of the groups are being pressed through patronage, with rival leaders promoting and protecting members of their own camps. All this is reminiscent of earlier factional struggles. But fortunately for China, the groups have not so far polarised behind opposing policies -- perhaps because there is a genuine consensus on what needs to be done; perhaps because neither side wants to risk the collapse of the coalition. So appearance are being preserved by blaming all the abuses of the recent past on the Gang of Four and by defining today's restorationist policies as a fresh advance along the true revolutionary path marked out by Mao.
First you show who's the boss
The initial challenge for any new government must be to establish its authority. For the Hua coalition this has been triply difficult: because of its uncertain legitimacy; because of the anarchic legacy of the cultural revolution; and because of the compulsion to carry through the purge of radical sympathisers of the Gang of Four.
What Hua inherited was an authoritarian system without the authority to make it work. The party network, once a highly effective conveyor-belt for information up and orders down, had been redirected and reshuffled too often to retain the confidence to rule. Exhausted by years of continual struggle and fearful of yet another turn of the screw, officials were unwilling to take decisions or accept responsibility. So Hua had to try to bolster the faint-hearted at the same time as he was sweeping many of their colleagues out of jobs.
One way to reassure the worries that the cycle of upheaval was well and truly over was to restore civil peace. This was the first of the two immediate priorities put forward by Hua under the umbrella slogan of "bringing great order across the land". The second was to make China's political and economic machinery responsive once again to central control. Only then could he get the country moving towards the long-term goal of parity with the advanced econmies by the year 2000.
top
On a wing, a prayer and a string
p. 24Emily MacFarquhar
This is the story of a flagging Russian-made airliner, Chinese ingenuity and a roll of string. The scene is Chengchow airport where our Gang of Five has landed, so exhilarated by our first glimpse of the Yellow River plain that we have forgotten the aborted takeoff and the several hours' delay in Peking. We watch airport workers tresh rice in front of the terminal building; we stroll 20 yards (no farther, say our hosts) to the airport gate; we read months-old Peking Reviews in the waiting room; only then, our departure time long since passed, do we realise that a gripping spectacle is taking place on the tarmac.
In centrefield is our Tupolev turboprop with its drawers down. Overalled Chinese are hurtling up and down a ladder in a variation of the standard circus turn; how many men can fit into an engine cowling? Then a dozen or so break off to squat purposefully under one wing. This is a Mao study session, I explain. But no, those are not the works of Mao; those papers being studied are the plans of a Tupolev engine.
All we need now, says I, is some sticky tape and string. Sure enough, off goes one member of the study group and back he comes, bearing rope. At which point Evelyn de Rothschild and Norman Macrae start speculating about flying south in the Wright brothers-vintage biplanes scattered around the field, Brian Beedham, our sweaty-palmed flier, is left tucked away for his own good in the terminal building, and I point out to the Chinese how western stock markets might react if a Rothschild were to fall from a great height into a rice paddy.
But the rope does the trick, the engine roars and their aircraft moves -- atwist. The front wheel is now lodged sideways. A van appears and heads for the aircraft. That is a luggage-removing van, I inform Evelyn de Rothschild, already planning my late-night tour of Chengchow. No, says our chairman, who didn't get to be chairman for nothing, that is a plane-pulling van. Which it was. And it did. And the wheel came round. and we boarded. And we didn't tell Brian Beedham why we were laughing so manically until we landed, safe and shaken, in Wuhan.
top
Where have all the beavers gone?
p. 25Emily MacFarquhar
A foreign visitor in China, containerised on arrival and then shifted from one vehicle and one hotel to another, in the constant company of colleagues and guides, generally has very little chance to verify reports of disorder or breakdowns in the system. Nobody knows less about what is happening in the country at any given moment than an traveller outside Peking. But there is one area where disorder and a lack of authority are visible for all to see -- in the Chinese factory. Piles of rusted rubbish in the yards, lounging workers and idle machines in the workshops: shambolic is the word.
So irreconcilable is the reality of Chinese industry with the conventional image of a nation of blue-suited beavers that one imaginative China-watcher has devised a theory to bridge the gap. He calls it the Potemkin village in reverse: the Chinese have set out all the rubbish piles and broken machines just to lull us into complacency; meanwhile, back at the dam, those beavers are working flat out to overtake us. It is a nice theory and Teng Hsiao-ping might like to buy it. But he would be the first to admit that, if China is to overtake us one day, there will have to be some big changes first.
Chinese ritual modesty allows a factory manager to admit certain shortcomings. In a Canton plant turning out China's first indigenous truck, for example, a veteran cadre confessed to high costs and substandard quality due to inexperience and under-mechanisation. And politics demands that the blackest picture be drawn for previous industrial troubles during the "three ups and downs" of 1971-76: in a Harbin turbine factory, go-slows resulting in a loss of one year's production over the five-year period; at the Wuhan Iron and Steel complex, a total shutdown lasting several months. All this can now be revealed -- and laid to the Gang of Four. But what cannot be admitted, at the local level at least, is that worker indiscipline and managerial impotence persist today.
Yet the evidence is overwhelming. Take the idle machines -- up to 25% in some workshops we visited. The same official in the Canton truck plant, all frankness about low productivity, hastened to refute our suggestion that machines might have been untended because the workers had sloped off before the end of the shift. This happened in the bad old days, yes, but now the machines had done their quota and operators had been moved to other work.
Other explanations for unused machines elsewhere included that they were "outmoded" (in a nine-year-old textile plant), "not needed except for extra work" (in a factory claiming to be exceeding its stated capacity) and occasionally just plain out of order. Workers visibly unoccupied were "waiting for their machines to be repaired". This last excuse was probably at least partly true, since maintenance is known to have been grossly neglected under the free-wheeling reign of the gang. Certainly the nonworking workers rarely tried to look busy when their bosses appeared with foreign guests in tow.
Managers do talk about discipline indirectly when they confirm the need to restore shopfloor rules and regulations which had been tossed out, along with professional management, under the gang. One vice-chairman, at Wuhan Iron and Steel, went so far as to admit that the rules he was bringing in were virtually the same as those abandoned as tools of revisionist oppression during the cultural revolution. This model Tengist had a clear view of what needed doing in his 90,000-worker complex. His top priority? Increasing production, of course. But, as a German technician working on a foreign-designed extension to the plant observed at first hand, his writ just does not run.Like so many Chinese officials today, he has an authority problem.
There are no illusions among the ruling group, and certainly not among Teng Hsiao-ping's economic planners, about the demoralised state of industry. Teng issued several tracts about it in the summer of 1975 before he was purged for the second time in February, 1976. And even before his return to power this past summer his prescriptions for putting industry back on its feet had become national policy. These included a tightening of central controls over the allocation of labour and raw materials, a new concern for profitability, quality standards and competent management, and a new receptivity toward imports of advanced technology.
Then came the carrot Chinese workers had been hankering after for more than a decade. On October 24th, the chief economic planner, Mr Yu Chiu-li, announced a nationwide wage rise backdated to October 1st. Some 46% of the workers in every state-owned enterprise or office will be promoted a full grade, so that their pay will go up by 10-15% or an average of 8 yuan ( $4) a month. Another 10% of the lower paid, who are not on any of the several standard wage scales, will get smaller rises.
The main beneficiaries of the wage deal will be "those workers and staff with many years of working experience who receive fairly low pay" -- which means mostly young people who have been mouldering for years in the second lowest of the eight wage grades. The rises will not be tied to productivity, although work performance is supposed to be one of the criteria, along with senority and political attitude, for determining who gets what. And who decides? In the Canton heavy machinery plant, where politics is still very much to the fore, the workers themselves. The higher-paid there were said to be vying with one another at open meetings to decline rises in favour of the younger and the poorer. But in other factories, and probably most factories, it will be the managers who cut up the cake.
Small and belated as they are, these rises are not so much an incentive as an easing of old grievances. (Chinese workers have not had a rise in real wages since 1963). But Yu Chiu-li also suggested (what managers dared not mention) that further material rewards might be in order, on the basis of "more pay for more work, less pay for less work". A month later the People's Daily confirmed that yet another cultural revolutionary totem was being smashed: productivity bonuses and piece work, so long reviled by the radicals as the thin end of capitalist wedge, were now redefined as legitimate ways of "making up for the weakness of basis forms of payment for labour".
Yu was a good deal more pessimistic than any of our managers on the spot about present industrial conditions:
The consolidation of economic management and management of enterprises has just begun, and no significant improvement has yet been made as regards the poor quality of products, big consumption of material, low labour productivity, high production costs and the tying up of too much capital.
He gave managers to years to shape up -- many ineffective ones will be eased out before then -- and said he would send inspectors to check on claims of progress. The crux of the matter, he explained, was "to strengthen the system of authority" and "to put an end to the situation of nobody accepting responsibility".
Nobody who has visited a Chinese factory in recent months can have any doubt of the need to stiffen managerial backbones. But neither can there be any question of the new toughened-up management coexisting with that celebrated Maoist innovation -- worker control. The management structure which was introduced during the cultural revolution to give workers a bigger say actually began to be dismantled a few weeks after we left China; travellers reported that factories (and universities) were dissolving their revolutionary committees and that the ubiquitous vice-chairmen were reverting to their old titles of manager of director. Yet when we asked about how worker power worked, the standard answer everywhere was "through their representatives on the revolutionary committee". Other examples offered of worker clout were their responsibilities for checking things like attendance and safety standards.
Workers do also have seats -- but nothing like controlling a block -- on the real decision-making body in the factory, the party committee. And other forms of consultation -- worker congresses, ad hoc meetings on the factory budget -- will probably be preserved as well. But westerners who have been looking to China for a model of genuine worker power had better read the lessons of the cultural revolution and look again.
Chinese industry will be busy burying the cultural revolution, Mr Yu Chiu-li implied, for another two years at least. During this spell of recuperation, apart from the highly selective introduction of imported technology, change will have to square one. But whether Chinese industry will be ready for takeoff, even in time for the next five-year plan in 1980, will depend, more than anything, on getting those beavers back on stream.
top
Dream machines
p.26Emily MacFarquhar
Agriculture was luckier than industry in the last years of Mao. It had its bad harvests, mostly due to bad weather: this year will be the second in a row of nearly nil growth.But for most of the convulsive decade, while industrial workers were downing tools and getting paid for it, rural commune members were going about their traditional tasks. The alternative was to see both their incomes and their grain rations go down.
The relative stability of the rural areas, combined with an unremarkable rate of growth, led Peking to adopt a highly ambitious scheme for boosting agricultural production: the mechanisation of 70% of farm processes by 1980. This target was first introduced by Hua Kuo-feng, as spokesman on agriculture, in 1975. Hua then gave it the stamp of his new office in his first major speech as party chairman in December, 1976.
Local authorities are taking the mechanisation targets very seriously and can provide detailed lists of the machines they hope to acquire in the next three years. Hunan province, for example, is planning to increase its farm inventory by 30-40%. But the lower-level units we spoke to in Hunan were far more ambitious. Mao's home district of Shaoshan is considered an advanced area by one important measure: it already has 600 tractors, more than the standard target of one per team (although 30 poorer teams have none). So mechanisation for Shaoshan will mainly mean buying combine harvesters; it now has five, and wants one for every brigade, a total of 54.
Changsha county, also in Hunan, is expecting to be able to cultivate 65% of its land by machine by 1980 and to have its irrigation wholly mechanised -- using electric and diesel pumps, some as small as 3.5 horsepower, for its mountainous areas. Like Shaoshan, it is aiming at five trucks per commune and one small tractor per team. This will mean increasing its small tractors from 3,000 to 8,000, but it also wants at least one large tractor for each of its 1,030 brigades; it now has 400. Small tractors are made within the county but most large ones, and trucks and combine harvesters, will have to come from outside the province. Hunan is only just starting to make its own large machines in Changsha city.
In a rice-growing commune near Canton, the mechanisation problem is slightly different. There too the commune leaders are looking forward to acquiring harvesters; they now have 20 and want another 300. But one of their biggest tasks, transplanting, is proving difficult to mechanise: the transplanters which Shanghai is selling are not suitable to Kwangtung. So the commune leader is working with local factories to try to adapt the Shanghai model to local needs. If this succeeds, he will order 300.
For the individual production team or commune, the chief limit on its mechanisation programme, in spite of subsidies, will be money: teams buy small machines out of their own kitties; communes buy larger ones. But for counties (which are in charge of production, purchasing and distribution on behalf of the communes) and also for the provinces and Peking, the main brake will be supply.
The most graphic measure of China's mechanisation aims has been given by a long-time resident in China, now a farmer in America, William Hinton. What China is aiming at, he says, is the American level of farm mechanisation of 1940. What China has now is a typical volume of agricultural production per man of some 30 kilos a day compared with 10,000 on Mr Hinton's own avowedly average American farm.
Catching up with prewar America does not sound overly ambitious - until one compares America's infrastructure then with China's now: six times as much road mileage, nearly three times as much steel produced and about 25% more installed electrical capacity. Hunan, with a population of 48m, for example, has barely enough metalled road (50,000 kilometres) to span the province once across and twice down, and 20% of its communes do not have proper roads of any sort. The small tractors which many production teams are using and some communes are making can move on rough surfaces. But the large ones which most of them want to acquire need roads. So do the trucks and the combine harvesters which are the gleam in the eye of Mao's home district, Shaoshan. But counties and communes are not talking about road-building yet; castle-building seems to come first.
The other big limit on mechanisation is electricity. Most of Hunan is still not electrified. In well-developed districts like Shaoshan, only 10% of the homes can be lit with the surplus power left over from current farming and industrial needs. Where then is the extra to come from for the electric pumps, threshers, milling machines and fodder choppers which the communes are ordering -- let alone for electrifying the other 90% of peasant homes as Shaoshan wants done?
Peking provided an answer in the December issue of the party monthly, Red Flag. It admitted, not for the first time, that electric power is "a weak link" in the economy. And it called on local units to supplement large-scale central efforts by building their own mini-power stations, using local materials and exploiting China's vast reserves of hydro-electric power (Red Flag put these reserves at 500,000 megawatts, more than 10 times the present installed electrical capacity). The construction of small generators, Red Flag suggested, should be included in local plans for "capital construction" - the development projects organised to utilise farm labour in the off-season.
Spare but not idle
Local leaders have not yet estimated how much labour they will save with the new machines; they are probably right to be cautious, for the number of machines any unit will actually get is still uncertain. But commune officials ae counting on having some spare manpower to put, first, into capital construction (including the building of those small generating plants), next into expanding commune industry and then into lightening the work loads of other commune members.
The mechanisation plan obviously captured imaginations. But does it really make sense for a country which has such a vast supply of cheap labour? Yes, say western experts, particularly for extending multiple cropping, where speed is of the essence and where the biggest growth in output is going to come from.
Yet mechanisation looks like being promoted less vigorously these days by Peking. One reason could be that since Chairman Hua's speech a year ago, somebody has taken a closer look at available resources and costing. In October Yu Chiu-li repeated Hua's call for basic mechanisation by 1980, but he reminded people that it "must proceed from and conform to actual local conditions, with emphasis on practical results". Which sounds like a warning to communes not to go overboard for glamorous gadgetry, and to take the 70% target with a grain of peasant salt.
top
Generation game
p.28Emily MacFarquhar
Targets are seldom to be taken literally, especially in a country the size of China. But there is one area of aspiration in which the Chinese are to be taken at their word: their determination to transform another disaster zone of recent years -- their educational system. They are bent on universalising secondary education while raising undergraduate and graduate training to advanced world levels.
This is no abstract aim, based on a philosophical appreciation of learning. It is a hard-nosed practical plan, born out of a realisation that China has lost a generation of scientists and trained thinkers of all kinds and, with it, opportunities for economic growth.
Even with the strongest will in the world, the Chinese will be a long time making up for the four years when universities hardly functioned (1966-70) and the six years after that when they were used as political laboratories by the Gang of Four. Until 1984 virtually all the students who finish university and graduate school will have suffered some disruption in their education at secondary level or above. And it will be 1981 before the first crop of post-Gang graduates and post-graduates can move into the technical jobs and labs where they are so badly needed.
Future scientists are being selected now in a graduate programme sponsored by the Chinese Academy of Sciences and managed by the China Science and Technology University of Anhwei: 1,000 advanced students will be enrolled in three-year courses at science institutes over the next three years. Some selected universities will also start taking graduate students, mostly scientists. Graduate admissions this year are planned to be the highest in history; before the cultural revolution the normal intake was 1,000-3,000 a year.
The enrolment that has seized the minds of the youth of China, however, is not this specialised corps of scientists but the fiercest-ever competition for some 300,000 undergraduate places. In December 15m-20m young people sat for entrance exams, prepared by each province, to win admission to university next February. This was the first such mass examination since the cultural revolution, and the first time, too, that secondary school leavers were allowed and encouraged to apply to a university without first going off for the regulation stint in the countryside. Some 20-30% of the places will be reserved for them.
With 12 years' worth of secondary graduates applying for one year's worth of university places, the ratio of applicants to entrants will be the toughest ever -- more than 50 to 1. The sheer numbers applying were causing local problems, even before the exam, as would-be students tried to find time for study and harassed local officals either tried to stop them or cut down the number of local applicants by subjecting them to an ad hoc preliminary test.
Kwangtung province issued a warning in November that this sort of interference by officials "will probably give rise to contradictions between candidates, between candidates' parents and between units". This was only one expression of the apprehension which ran through the press about the possibility of a violent reaction among the many millions of disappointed applicants and families.
Even if the immediate post-enrolment reactions can be contained, the regime will not have heard the last of this lost generation - roughly today's 20- to 30-year-olds. The older half of this group are the young people who were told in 1966 that the world was theirs; then, after a few intoxicating years in the Red Guard movement, their dreams were dashed as they were exiled to the countryside to take up new lives as instant peasants.
In a gesture towards these veterans of political struggle, two secondary school graduating classes -- 1966 and 1967 -- have been excluded from the 25-year age limit for university applicants. But this means that three other similarly disadvantaged classes -- 1964, 1965 and 1968 -- will never get a chance to recoup their educational fortunes and, given the competition, neither will most of the others who, after short-circuited secondary training, spent anything from two to 10 years "learning from the workers and the peasants". Young people who evaded this compulsory service or returned illegally to the cities need not even apply.
Formal training has never been an important qualification for leadership in China, and the former Red Guards will have picked up a political trick or two. But as the walking wounded of the cultural revolution, they are none the less bound to remain a uniquely under-qualified cohort, stalled behind 40 years of oldsters who are unwilling to step aside and soon to be passed over by better-educated younger brothers coming up. It is a recipe for frustration and, unless they are appeased in some way, recurring unrest.
With entrance exams revived, college terms restored to their former length (four years for most subjects, five for medicine) and academic discipline reemphasised, the cultural revolution has been repudiated more decisively in education than in any other sphere. The radical experiment is acknowledged to have been a costly failure: just how costly is still being totted up. Shanghai city recently tested science graduates working in local scientific and technical departments and found that few of them could reach middle-school standards in their own fields: 68% failed basic mathematics, 70% failed physics and 76% chemistry.
The new education policies have been joyfully received, both by the applicants for university places and by professors who have shaken off the label of "stinking intellectuals". But the bigger the policy reversal, the greater the difficulty in pleading continuity, especially when Mao's own words are being contradicted on several scores. A writing group from the ministry of education tackled this ideological embarrassment in December's Red Flag. To reassure "some people" who are still "bewildered" or "unable to catch up with the needs of the situation", the ministry explained that today's education policy is what Mao really meant, notwithstanding those well-publicised thoughts of his on how "the length of schooling should be shortened" and "education should be revolutionised". But the defensive tone suggested that this particular bit of doubletalk was not even expected to convince.
Yet politics have not been wholly banished from the campuses, as we discovered on a visit to Wuhan university in Hupeh. We asked about the academic background of the university head, to be told that he is "well versed in party affairs". He is still aided in his work by a 30-man worker propaganda team which first arrived on the campus, 500 strong, in 1968, although the university says it is now studying whether this team of political coaches can be disbanded.
Students at Wuhan still devote half a day to political study each week (about the average for most workplaces, except the Stakhanovites at Taching oilfield) and they still do regular unpaid physical labour at a nearby factory or commune. But nowadays there is some attempt to make the work relevant to their studies and to limit it to 20% of their time.
Professors at Wuhan, as at other universities, are now working on the umpteenth revision of their textbooks for the new term. New courses are being added -- in modern literature and classical Chinese (much trampled upon in recent years, notably by the anti-Confucius campaign). But others do not seem to have felt the wind of change at all -- like political economics, which does not touch on any non-Marxist later than Malthus or admit such foreign concepts as macro- and micro-economics.
Like other universities, Wuhan has a much smaller student body today than it had in 1965 - 3,000 compared with 5,000. But its administrators have big plans: they want to restore the undergraduate division to at least its former size and eventually to have an equally large graduate school.
If Wuhan is at all typical, Chinese universities have ample room for expansion. On this 370-acre campus, not only are there fewer than 10 students per acre; there are also only about three students per teacher. The reason for this extravagant ratio is that during the cultural revolution the staff at Wuhan went on merrily growing, even when the university was closed or operating at part strength. Plainly universities are no more cost-conscious than factories, though they too may be expected to show greater productivity from now on.
Stretching schooldays
What will press them to do so is the greatly increasing numbers of secondary graduates who will soon be knocking on university doors. Although official energies and propaganda outlets have been preoccupied in recent months with the new university enrolment plan, the concern with raising educational standards has also percolated down to lower levels. The word seems to have gone out to the provinces to prepare to universalise secondary education by 1980.
Cities are claiming already to have reached this goal: schools in Wuhan and Changsha assured us that every urban child, regardless of intellectual ability, goes on from junior middle school to complete the two years of senior middle, China's equivalent of sixth form. The head of Changsha's celebrated first normal school -- part teachers' training college, part shrine to Mao Tse-tung -- calculates that it will be at least 10 years before secondary education can be truly universalised. But he also explained why this is a realisable goal: because of the increasing effectiveness of China's birth control programme.
Numbers started dropping in Human's primary schools two or three years ago. In another two or three years, this fall in the birthrate -- Wuhan now claims a growth rate of 0.8% -- will have reduced the size of all the age groups in primary school, enabling teachers to be shifted to the next level up. Teachers who are not qualified to handle secondary subjects, along with those whose training suffered during the cultural revolution, will be offered extension courses, correspondence courses or refresher courses in their own schools. In fact all of China's 10m schoolteachers will require some degree of retraining next year because of plans to introduce new higher standard textbooks next autumn.
A visit to a Chinese school today offers a sobering vision of what this country can do -- and indeed is doing -- with the world's biggest talent pool. The discipline that is so missing from factories is alive and well in the schools. Apart from the inevitable models, just about every school is a comprehensive (no streaming, no selection) but just about every pupil does the academic equivalent of a British grammar school course including, at the senior level, advanced mathematics and sciences. Regular exams are being held again twice a year. Pupils who fail go on retaking the exams until they pass or until the school gives up and promotes them anyway. Failure is not a term the Chinese use.
The most appealing demonstration of the high standards Chinese pupils attain is in the regulation musical show put on for foreign guests. Heavy political content cannot distract from remarkable technical skills in a performance which would put not only British school concerts but many adult professionals to shame.If academic standards are equally high -- and, in spite of the continuing politicised obsession with "whom to love and whom to hate", they seem to be -- China's rising generation could be unbeatable: just take the secondary schoolchildren of Britain and multiply by 25.
top
Let a few flowers bloom
p. 30Emily MacFarquhar
Educational reform ranks high for China's pragmatic leaders, because they see it, rightly, as a necessary input for economic development. Cultural reform is also useful insofar as it restores popular morale. But as the Chinese keep reminding us, the republication of some Chinese and western classics and the revival of some pre-cultural revolutionary plays is not to be confused with "vulgar liberalisation"; there would be no clear political utility and possibly some disutility in that. For these reasons, China's much publicised cultural thaw is one of the lesser changes introduced by the Hua regime.
Like the new industrial and educational policies, the new line on culture is essentially a pre-cultural revolutionary one. Although socialist realism had already taken hold then, certain hangovers from the past - like elaborately costumed Peking opera - were still allowed. Such operas have not come back to Peking since the overthrow of the Gang of Four, but they are appearing in some provinces: foreign visitors were invited to an old favourite, complete with emperors and courtiers, in Szechwan in October. Also being revived are regional dramatic forms like the evening of Hunanese comic dialogues we watched in Changsha. When our interpreter had stopped laughing long enough to interpret there emerged from under the slapstick a thundering political message. But light relief was what the audience came for, and light relief is still got.
There was never a light moment, however, in the two other examples of post-Mrs Mao theatre we were taken to see. A "nationalities" programme of non-Han songs and dances featured such typical traditional love lyrics as ode to Chairman Hua:
You are our good leader
We love you from the bottom of our hearts
Come back Chairman Mao
Join us Premier Chou
Let us celebrate together
Chairman Hau, Chairman Hua, We will follow you in the forward march.
This particular show, with English subtitles thoughtfully provided, may have been produced mainly for foreign visitors to the Canton fair (have the Chinese really not yet understood how all this sounds to non-Chinese ears?). But the dramas designed for domestic consumption are hardly more subtle.
Take today's people's choice, the operatic tribute (there is also a ballet on the same theme) to an earlier Mrs Mao - not the notorious number four, Chiang Ching, but the glorious number two, Yang Kai-hui, who was shot by the Kuo-mintang while her husband was away making revolution and also making the acquaintance of wife number three.
This uplifting tale of revolutionary martyrdom is in the "I have come for the rent. But I can't pay the rent" school of mannered heroics. It differs from the banned "model" operas of the last Mrs Mao only in the pointed choice of heroine. And only the apotheoses of the 1960s Mao cult can rival its final scene: martyr poised on platform signifying heaven/the moon; at her feet, wreaths laid out as in the new Mao mausoleum; in the background, Peking's gate of heavenly peace shining gold on red; in the air, the International played first as lament and then as victory anthem.
Stirring stuff. What it stirred up in may mind was turbulent thoughts about the contrast between the stage revolutionary, simple and elegant in white mandarin-collared blouse and black skirt or straight grey cheongsam, and her shapeless blue sisters in the audience. Why shouldn't today's Chinese women dress like Yang Kai-hui? Not because a dress or a skirt requires more fabric than the standard uppers and lowers - less, my Chinese companion volunteered. Not because traditional Chinese styles (minus the slinky Hongkong cut) can be called bourgeois. Only because they have not yet been sanctioned by the well-tailored males in Peking.
Unisex uniforms meant something at one time; they were symbols of both women's liberation and the puritan ethic. But today they serve mainly as a reminder of how Chinese women have been offered the burdens of liberation but few of the fruits.
There is no question that women now do a fair share of the work in all spheres of Chinese society. Or more than their share: the girls handling lathes, running spinning machines and assembling trucks were just about the only flat-out workers we saw in those shambolic factories. But where women are now scarcer than ever is in positions of power.
Five years ago, when I asked about female representation on ruling committees, the answer was always that the target was a third although the actual numbers, regrettably, lagged behind. Today targets are no longer even mentioned. For good reason. Even in a model unit like the agricultural brigade at the Taching oilfield, where women form 85% of the labour force, their share of places on the party committee is 16%.
Women's lib is clearly on China's back burner. One reason is the anti-feminism that has been churned up by the campaign against the one woman who managed to seize real power, Mrs Mao. Another is the first-things-first mentality of the leaders, who have other, more pressing, issues on their minds. Women will almost certainly do badly in the reshuffling of revolutionary committees that is now taking place, because Teng Hsiao-ping and his friends are out to pack the committees with experienced old cadres, which invariably means men. The new politburo elected in August, 1977, has one statutory woman as an alternate member; the central committee has 14 women out of 200 full members.
But women are better off than five years ago in one important respect: they are having fewer babies. China's population growth rate is, as always, a matter of hot dispute among demographers, but the consensus is that it is now no higher than 1.5% overall and below 1% in most cities. This is the result of one of the world's most comprehensive birth control programmes in one of the world's most conformist societies. The drop in the birth rate will mean a marginal increase in women's employment and a trimming of their second jobs in the home. It should also free them earlier in their careers to take on greater responsibilities. But that will depend on male willingness to let them in on the act.
Taking stock
The end of 1977 is not a happy tallying-up time for the Hua regime. "Great order" remains an elusive goal. Frustrated with conventional means of control, local leaders have resorted to brutal object lessons: executions of "bad elements" and rally trials of "followers of the Gang of Four". The National People's Congress, originally scheduled for this autumn, has been postponed until the spring, to give the politburo time to sort out its differences over appointments and to enable lower-level revolutionary committees to reshape themselves along approved lines.The tone of the "third battle" against the remaining radicals is getting more, not less, strident, with no end to the purges in sight.
These political hiccups are not simply a distraction from the economic task in hand: they hold the key to China's development over the next decade. What China needs now, even more than a sensible industrial policy or a sound educational system, is a period of sustained political peace. This is the lesson of the past decade which most, but not necessarily all, of Hua's colleagues seem to have grasped. Hua's job, as the youngest member of his own top team, will be to ensure that the coalition holds together long enough and strongly enough to survive not only personal rivalries but also the inevitable loss of his currently indispensable septuagenarians: the 79-year-old mediator, Yeh Chien-ying, and the 73-year-old policy-maker, Teng Hsiao-ping.
But, 15 months into their term, Hua and company have already given China two great gifts. They have ushered it through the unsettling transition from the reign of the god-king Mao to an age of man-sized rulers. And they have freed it from the high-blood-pressure politics it had endured for the previous 10 years. Every Chinese one meets is grateful for that.
The anxious giant has relaxed. But not quite enough to fulfill the tantalising promise given by a Chinese in London on the eve of our trip: "You will find great changes in China, Mrs MacFarquhar. Now we Chinese can really talk." Not really, not to western journalists, not yet.