Deng Didn't Downright Democratize, Duh.

Balancing Development with Democracy

Shaohua Hu explored Deng's policies and politics in this article. Essentially Deng wanted a communist government, like Mao, but saw a lot wrong in the system. He wanted to lead the government and the people in a different way but not with a different way.

Deng's leadership differed in a number of ways:

1) He focused on economic reform. Unlike Mao, Deng thought that as long as people were fed, had jobs, had money, they would be happier than having, say, the right to vote

“It does not take Marx of Maslow to understand why a piece of bread serves a hungry person better than a piece of ballot-paper.”

2)Deng took the focus off of the class-based struggle Mao enhanced. This meant that people would no longer resent the rich but rather work for everyone's good

3)Deng rehabilitated Mao's counter-revolutionary opponents. Mao had failed to get riud of his opposition effectively. This was something Deng made sure to do.

4.) Deng made communists less ideological and more practical. He helped the party members realize that the design and structure of every system was not the most important facet as long as it did what it was supposed to.

5.) Deng opened China up to foreign investment and the world. He knew this would be necessary if China was to emerge as an economic world power. Mao feared this.

Essentially, Deng found a way to make communism meet people's needs the way Mao's communism didn't. Mao made everyone focus on an illusion communism as equaling everyone but Deng showed people that this was not reality. He combated this by making economic reforms that put more control in local and private hands where the individual and the market could make or break a person's prosperity. This allowed people to be happy with their own efforts in the economy while not worrying about their involvement and freedom in politics.

It should not be said that Deng made no political reforms. He did make elections more free locally and reformed the judicial system to be more fair. He knew stability of politics was necessary for the economy to maintain its stability. He did not believe that political reform was necessary in order to bring about social and human rights reforms. He famously stated

"Change in the system. Not change of the system."

This worked for a while until Tiananmen Square happened in 1989. Students and intellectuals demanded rights for themselves and more rights within the current systems. Even still they were not demanding a change to democracy. This movement was squashed as they left peasants out of it and allowed Deng to show the rest of China how wrong the protesters were.

The result was that people unconditionally accepted Deng's communism as long as their economic interests continued to be protected. However, this was doomed to be a short-lived success. As political thinkers have studied in the past, once economic reforms take hold and people become stable with basic needs, they begin to look for more freedoms elsewhere. Because the poor were now fed, the has the energy to realize something else was missing.

This leads us to the protesting of human rights and other ideas happening in Pei's China. People have all the economic growth in the world but feel the government is still treating them bad. Deng may have worked his entire reign to make communist China stand with economic freedom but his intended efforts will lead to an unintended end.