 |
|
hardcover $35.00
Oxford University Press, Usa
Paddyfield.com
Powells.com (USA)
More reviews by Kerry Brown
Readers may purchase reviewed books from Paddyfield.com, Asia's online bookseller.North American readers may prefer to buy US editions from Powells.com.
|
|
|
Breaking Through by Li Lanqing
Believe it or not, Chinese politicians are becoming more and more like their western counterparts in at least one respect: writing lengthy memoirs once they have left office. Former Premier Zhao Ziyang's recorded recollections of his time in office were published to great fanfare earlier in 2009. But their news value was because of the promise contained in them that they might reveal something more about the chaotic and mysterious events in the leadership up to the Tiananmen Event in June 1989. Li Lanqing's offering is from a Politburo member and former Vice Premier who served for almost a decade till 2003. Somewhat tellingly, Zhao Ziyang's name does not appear once in his account, despite the fact that it covers a period, 1978 to 1984, when Zhao was a key player in economic policy making in the central government. Li explains the early cut off date for his memoir with the somewhat ingenuous excuse that making it cover a further period of time would have meant an amount of work and analysis he was not able to undertake. But, to more cynical observers, it also means that he avoids hitting the very sensitive events that occurred from 1987 onwards. Li did not rise to the heights he did, and serve there with no major problems, for nothing, and this speaks volumes about his cautiousness.
This 400-plus page book is special because of who it has been written by -- a former elite Communist leader in China. And the style is not bad. Li has a sharp wit, and picks up on some of the absurdities he came across as a leader before 1978, while working in a factory in the planned economy. But the story rendered here of the impulse to reform from 1978, and the key stages of that process, is overwhelmingly orthodox, and fits in with the current narrative of post 1978 China offered by the Party in its main documents and policy pronouncements. Deng Xiaoping is the hero of this story, the man who saw what needed to be done after Mao's death in 1976, and then set about building the consensus in the party to do this. Mao Zedong is left on his pedestal, with a couple of areas of Li's account even praising Mao for being the earliest promoter of economic reform, thwarted in his desire by a recalcitrant outside world, and leftists within the government led by his wife. After supplying this framework, Li then moves to detail.
On the creation of joint ventures and the rule of law, Li has some interesting insights. He also supplies a lot of detail about the construction of the Special Zones, or Special Economic Zones as they came to be called, and how early opposition to them as being nothing more than western enclaves to reintroduce capitalism back into China were overcome, particularly by Party Secretary of Guangdong province Xi Zhongxun, who was the father of current favourite to be the next leader of China Xi Jinping. If Li is to be believed, and his account taken at face value, the early years of reform were a highly deliberative process, where the elite leaders knew what they were up to but just needed to find the best way to achieve their aims. He describes the first delegations that were to venture abroad in the late 1970s, and the ways in which what they saw on their travels roused them from their apathy and made them strive to do better. What is perhaps missing in Li's account, and what Deng certainly recognised, was the ways in which once the state had removed some of its restrictive economic control the natural ability of Chinese entrepreneurialism came to the fore, even in the countryside. Li talks largely of the reform of the urban and industrial economy. He does not touch the more profoundly revolutionary changes in the countryside.
And because of his specific role, based at the time this memoir covers in Tianjin as a Vice Mayor, in charge of relationships with foreign commercial partners, this account perhaps creates the impression that foreign capital and know how were more important than in fact they were. Even as a Vice Premier in the 1990s, Li's key role was to be in charge of economic policy making and the internationalisation of the Chinese economy. His period of real power covered the era in which China finally joined the World Trade Organisation. His memoirs are in many ways a justification for why opening up to the outside world was important, and why it continues to be something Chinese leaders and people need to hold fast to. Those who wish for deeper analysis of this complex process and some understanding of its dynamics, successes and failures, would need to hold the words here in frame with a number of others, include the excellent one contained in Huang Yasheng's Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics which partly covers this early period of reform. But for historians it is better to have the story of major leaders in their own words than nothing at all. One looks forward to the possible offerings from Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao when they finally leave office, now that the precedent has been set of Politburo leaders giving an account of their years at the top.
Kerry Brown
08/12/2009
| |
|
