8

Beijing and Zhongnanhai (1952–6)

After liberation, I was happy with our successes but I was also responsible for some of the mistakes. I was a leading cadre, not a junior one, and from 1956 I was General Secretary. At that time seven photographs were on display in China and mine was one of them.¹

After less than three years in Chongqing, Deng was summoned to the capital to serve in the central government, initially as both a deputy minister of finance and vice-premier under Zhou Enlai. Deng and his family left Chongqing on a bright sunny morning at the beginning of August 1952 and, bidding farewell to friends and colleagues who had accompanied him to the airport, he took leave of the noisy city and his home province to which he had become even more attached during his time as Party secretary. A two-hour flight in an Ilyushin aircraft took him to an airport in the western suburbs of Beijing where he was received by staff from the central offices of the Communist Party. They escorted him along Xizhimen Avenue to the accommodation that had been allocated to him and his family. It was a traditional Beijing courtyard house (siheyuan) behind the Imperial Palace (Gugong) and close to Coal Hill (Jingshan). It adjoined the house in which Nie Rongzhen and his family lived. Nie, like Deng, was a native of Sichuan and was a successful Eighth Route Army commander who would be promoted to the rank of Marshal of the PLA in 1955: the Nie and Deng families got on well. Deng was now firmly installed as part of the new political elite with whom he would mix socially as well as professionally.

Before long the Deng family moved even closer to the centre of power – into Zhongnanhai, the walled estate to the west of the old Imperial Palace where the most senior leaders lived and worked. The new house was an old-fashioned courtyard house in Courtyard 3 on the western side of Huairentang (the Hall of Cherished Compassion), a building that is now used for major Party meetings. There were four typical imperial courtyard buildings in Huairentang, surrounded by bright red walls with blue and grey tiled overhanging roofs. Deng’s immediate neighbours in these sumptuous surroundings redolent of imperial splendour were Li Fuchun, Tan Zhenlin and Chen Yi, founding fathers of the new state. In two courtyards to the east of the Huairentang lived Dong Biwu, Politburo member and sometime president of the Supreme People’s Court, and the diplomat and early CCP member Wang Jiaxiang. Behind the hall lived only one family, that of Liu Shaoqi. The residents of Huairentang were members of a ‘great revolutionary family’, but as conflicts developed over Mao’s policies in the latter part of the 1950s it was by no means a happy family and Zhongnanhai became a hothouse of political intrigue and conflict.²

The new People’s Republic urgently needed experienced individuals to spearhead the drive for postwar economic reconstruction. It was not easy to find the right people: the existing financial and industrial elite had been largely loyal to the defeated Guomindang regime so Mao and his advisers looked for politically reliable leaders within the Party and the army. With his high-profile military career, his proven administrative ability and his successful track record in economic organisation in the base areas, Deng was a natural candidate. The relationship between Mao and Deng went back to the Central Soviet government in Jiangxi in the early 1930s and although Deng always claimed that he had never been part of a ‘Mao faction’, by 1949 Mao regarded Deng as his protégé and had followed his career with great interest. There were no discernible ideological differences between Mao and Deng (largely because Deng was never overly concerned with theory or ideology), but his political and personal style of work and his approach to government were very different from that of Mao, and Deng would eventually become part of the opposition to the chairman.³

Only days after his arrival in the capital, at a meeting of the Government Administration Council (Zhengwuyuan, the forerunner of the State Council) on 7 August, Deng took up his appointment as vice-premier of the Government Administration Council and deputy head of the CCP Finance Committee – his aptitude for financial affairs in the Taihang Mountains had been noted. He was minister of finance from 18 September 1953 until September 1954. These were powerful roles in government and Party bodies, two of the key elements in the new political structure created as the CCP moved from its revolutionary and wartime mode into a quasi-constitutional form of rule. The military was the third element and Deng already had an established position in the army. His immediate superior was Zhou Enlai, his old comrade in France and Shanghai, and they formed a new political partnership in Zhongnanhai.⁴

National budget (1954)

Recollections by former subordinates and colleagues shed light on Deng’s approach to his work. Rong Zihe, a deputy minister of finance who had served for eight years in the army under Deng, recalled that his chief respected Mao Zedong and was adept at marrying Mao’s vague political instructions with practical tasks. In December 1953 when the Ministry of Finance was working on the draft national budget for 1954, Rong was called in by Deng and asked about Mao’s key instructions on the budget. He told Deng that there had been many instructions and that the ministry had compiled and printed a booklet of them, but in broad outline they could be summarised under three headings: ‘adequate revenue’ (shouru dazu), ‘tighten up on expenditure’ (zhichu dajin) and ‘allow leeway for unforeseen circumstances’ (liuyou yudi). These sound more like the principles of a cautious accountant than a revolutionary romantic like Mao. Deng approved and included them in a report in June 1954 which argued for a reliable and stable financial basis for the national budget and linked this with Mao’s directives on increasing production. The actual income for 1954 was more than had been estimated and expenditure slightly less, so the People’s Bank was able to use this surplus to make loans to industrial and commercial enterprises, relieving a shortage of capital that had existed in 1953. Deng’s contribution was his political astuteness and authority rather than any financial expertise but he respected the knowledge of his specialists and was able to frame authoritative political statements in a way that allowed their views to be given sufficient weight.

Deng met Rong and other senior Party figures in the ministry when necessary and received oral reports from the deputy ministers on a weekly basis. Deng was conscious of the fact that the majority of cadres in the ministry were fiscally cautious and after the summer finance meeting of 1953 he uttered a homily for which he was to became famous: ‘Don’t allow one snake bite to make you so afraid that you won’t touch the well rope for ten years.’ If their work took into account current conditions and his decisions were wrong then the responsibility would be his. However, if their work was not based on the economic reality they would be to blame.

In his Ministry of Finance, there was a clear demarcation of rights and responsibilities which allowed his subordinates to work effectively and boldly. He insisted on clarity, precision and clear statistics and would not tolerate ambiguity or vagueness. Deng was respected and his deputies felt able to report to him accurately; this was not the case with Mao, whose subordinates often told him what they thought he wanted to hear.

Deng took the CCP’s culture of criticism and self-criticism very seriously. He taught his staff that the Ministry should expect criticism from others; if the criticism was justified they should accept it, if not they should be prepared to argue the problem through as quickly as possible. They should not allow complaints and criticisms to build up because the time would come when it was not possible to clear things up. Staff who came into the office on business were not afraid to joke and even be ironic or critical. If Deng heard about criticism he would make enquiries, but if he was reassured that it was just banter he would let the matter rest. Deng was supportive of junior staff, even when they had been severely criticised, and was willing to address concerns even about his most cherished policies.⁵

Purge of Gao Gang and Rao Shushi

A serious challenge by Gao Gang and Rao Shushi to Mao’s leadership emerged in the second half of 1953 and dominated party meetings until the National Party Conference (Quanguo daibiao huiyi) – not a congress (dahui) – of March 1955 at which Gao and Rao were formally expelled.

Shortly after Deng’s arrival in Beijing the leadership had initiated a process of restructuring in which powerful regional leaders including Gao Gang, Rao Shushi, Deng Zihui and Xi Zhongxun (the father of President Xi Jinping) were transferred from their regional power bases and moved to posts in the capital. Rao arrived in Beijing from Shanghai in February 1953 and Gao moved from the north-east the following November. Both had been highly regarded by Mao, especially Gao, and they resented the fact that in the party hierarchy they were subordinate to Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi.

A draft document prepared on 10 March 1953 by Zhou at Mao’s instigation proposed a further restructuring of economic responsibilities. This was approved by the Central People’s Government on 28 April and Deng was given the important but unglamorous portfolios of supervision, ethnic minorities (because of his experience in the south-west) and personnel. Gao Gang had lost much of his authority but also concluded that Mao had lost confidence in Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi. Early in autumn 1953, Gao and Rao began to oppose the restructuring openly ‘by launching an unbridled attack on Liu Shaoqi and slandering him’.⁶ To their critics, including Deng Xiaoping, they were simply trying to improve their own standing at the risk of splitting the party. The enmity between Gao and Liu went back a long way and Gao was taking the opportunity of settling old scores.

The conflict unfolded over the course of two critical meetings. Mao brought Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping in to support him at a meeting to discuss financial matters between 6 and 11 August 1953. At the second National Organisational Work Conference that took place in September 1953, Liu Shaoqi had to defend the work of his Central Organisation Department against Gao and Rao. Gao and Rao also schemed behind the scenes and tried to win over Deng Xiaoping, arguing that Liu should be removed. Deng backed Liu and, with Chen Yun’s support, reported the matter to Mao, alerting him to the seriousness of the threat posed by Gao and Rao.

In December 1953, Mao proposed that Liu Shaoqi should deputise for him while he was away from Beijing on holiday. Gao Gang vehemently argued that he should be the one to take over. On 24 December, at a meeting of the Politburo, Mao complained about the existence of two separate ‘headquarters’ in Beijing, his own and a shadow one run by Gao Gang. He demanded party unity and an end to the plotting. Gao and Rao were openly criticised at the Seventh Plenary Meeting of the Central Committee in February 1954 and were expelled from the CCP in March 1955, Gao posthumously, as he had committed suicide in August 1954.⁷

Preparations for Eighth CCP Congress

Deng’s role in the Eighth National Congress of the CCP, held in Beijing from 15 to 27 September 1956, was a clear indication of his elevation to what is now referred to as the ‘first generation central leadership with Mao Zedong as the core’. There was no indication that he was anything other than a staunch and loyal supporter of Mao. The Eighth Congress was the first since 1945 and therefore the first since the Party had taken power. There were many reasons for the delay. It could be blamed partly on the civil war and military action to consolidate CCP rule. It could also be blamed on the Korean War, which diverted the CCP leadership from plans for control and reconstruction. However, the most important reason was the purge of Gao Gang and Rao Shushi.

This unpleasant and unseemly feud benefited the next phase of Deng’s career. He was appointed secretary-general of the Central Committee (Zhongyang mishuzhang) in April 1954 and also replaced Rao Shushi as head of the Party’s powerful Central Organisation Department. He presented the report on the Gao Gang and Rao Shushi affair to the National Party Conference of 21–31 March 1955 on behalf of the Party centre. He never repudiated the actions of the Party leadership and as late as 1980 would maintain that Gao Gang was a deceitful plotter and that exposing him and Rao Shushi was essential to avoid harm to many cadres. At the conclusion of the affair he was firmly on the side of Mao but also allied with Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai. This served him well for 12 or 13 years, but would eventually bring him down in the Cultural Revolution when Mao turned against Liu.⁸

The Eighth Congress of the CCP, held in Beijing from 15 to 27 September 1956, was significant because it legitimised the Party leadership that controlled China during the late 1950s and early 1960s. That leadership fell apart in the Cultural Revolution and the Ninth Congress would not be held for another 13 years. The Eighth Congress, in the words of the Party History Research Centre, ‘was held at a time when socialist transformation in China had been in the main accomplished and the Party was faced with a new situation and new tasks’. The key tasks were economic development, especially industrialisation, the strengthening of the authority of the CCP) but also ‘to gradually and systematically work out a complete set of laws and improve the socialist legal system, and further broaden socialist democracy and vigorously combat bureaucracy’. ‘Due to the fact that the Party at that time lacked sufficient mental preparation for building socialism in all spheres […] many correct ideas advanced at the congress were not put into effect.’ ⁹ In other words, serious conflicts were emerging within the Party leadership as Mao Zedong began advancing his own radical interpretation of Marxism–Leninism and the cautious advocates of economic and legal development were marginalised.¹⁰

On 31 March 1955, following an instruction from Mao, Deng produced a document proposing that the congress should take place in the second half of 1956. He submitted it to Mao, who returned it with a note that read: ‘Comrade (Zhou) Enlai to review and return to Xiaoping for implementation. In my view we can explain it in this way, only a few words need altering.’ Although Mao had overall responsibility, it was Deng who originated key documents and piloted them through the highest echelons of the CCP leadership. Although the bureaucratic procedures of the CCP are not intrinsically fascinating, it is worth examining in detail how Deng used them to build up his authority.

In early October 1955, at the Sixth Plenum of the Seventh Central Committee, Deng tabled the revised document. With the thoroughness and precision for which he was becoming well known he outlined the background, the key elements of the agenda, the election of delegates and other matters. He was deeply involved in all the minutiae of congress arrangements, including the scheduling of the speeches, the checking and approval of drafts, the selection of delegates and the preparation of congress bulletins. On 21 April 1955 Deng submitted to Mao his list of names for membership of the committee to draft the report on the new Party Constitution and the Constitution itself. This was approved by the Politburo on 12 May. The members of the drafting committee for the political report were to be Liu Shaoqi, Chen Yun, Deng Xiaoping, Wang Jiaxiang, Hu Qiaomu, Chen Boda and Lu Dingyi. Members of the committee drafting the Party Constitution and the Report on the Party Constitution were Deng Xiaoping, Yang Shangkun, An Ziwen, Liu Lantao, Song Renqiong, Li Xuefeng, Hu Qiaomu, Ma Mingfang and Tan Zhenlin. Only Deng and Hu Qiaomu were members of both of these drafting committees and Deng’s control over the documentation was crucial.

Li Xuefeng was secretary of the Secretariat and one of Deng’s closest colleagues and, as a member of the Central Committee and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) Standing Committee, attended most of the drafting meetings. He recalled Deng’s evident enthusiasm for, and competence in, the work on the Constitution. Deng even convened a meeting on the eve of his visit to Moscow to attend the historic Twenthieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956. On his return on 23 March 1956, Deng Xiaoping met senior staff of the Secretariat to discuss elections to the Eighth Congress.

The main work on the revision took place in April and May 1956. On 2 April Deng entered the meeting room at 9 am and announced that they were going to discuss a first draft; although he only had a small audience he spoke with great enthusiasm. He chose his words with care but did not hesitate to speak his mind and continued talking until 12.15 when they took a break. Within eight days they had completed a first draft and also a second one which incorporated revisions by members of the drafting committee and the Politburo.

Further meetings discussed the list of delegates to attend the Congress, a list that took five months to finalise. On the afternoon of 12 April he called another meeting, this time of key staff in central government organisations (zhongyang jiguan) to explain the process. It was then discussed at a meeting of the Politburo chaired by Liu Shaoqi on 19 April. Deng’s authority was being developed by persistent and detailed hard work in the bureaucracy.

One of the most delicate political issues was the attendance of Wang Ming at the Congress, and Deng worked tirelessly to resolve this. Wang had been Mao’s principal opponent in the 1930s and had lived in Moscow until 1949 apart from a brief period in the early 1940s. He was an outsider, but his status as a Comintern official had to be considered. On 31 July Deng drafted a letter on behalf of the Central Committee, at its summer retreat in Beidaihe, to send to the ailing Wang Ming. The letter informed Wang that the Eighth Congress would begin on 15 September and that he had been selected as a delegate for the city of Beijing. The Central Committee hoped that he would attend if his health permitted. Wang Ming did not respond, so on 6 August Deng drafted a telegram to Li Fuchun who was visiting the Soviet Union, asking him to call on Wang and inform him of the dates of the Congress. If Wang were not able to attend on health grounds, Deng asked whether he would submit his thoughts in writing. Wang Ming had no alternative but to make his position clear and on 8 September his belated response was rapidly handed over to Deng. Wang asked for his profound regrets to be conveyed to the Central Committee and the delegates and requested that they grant him leave of absence on the grounds of ill health. Mao agreed and authorised Deng to circulate this to delegates.

Wang Ming was elected as a member of the Eighth Central Committee, as he had been of the Seventh. Looking back at the Eighth Congress 40 years later, Li Xuefeng interpreted this as an expression of collective leadership in contrast with the move towards one-man rule by Mao that soon became apparent. The regulations for selecting candidates for membership of the Central Committee were changed. Previously, names for consideration had been drawn from the leadership of the military and the six Great Administrative Regions [liu ge daqu] into which China had been divided between 1949 and 1954. This system had enabled Gao Gang and Rao Shushi to accumulate power, but, after the work put in by Deng and his colleagues, anyone was permitted to propose names and over 400 were put forward, yielding a much wider range of candidates.¹¹

As the date of the Congress approached Deng ran more meetings on the revision of the Constitution to resolve detailed issues that had arisen. This was difficult and time-consuming, but those involved were able to make suggestions without fear of being intimidated and felt that they were working to enhance democracy and collective leadership in the Party. One issue was Deng’s wish to devolve military and State Council matters to another body, but Mao insisted that the Secretariat should handle everything. As a result the power of the Secretariat and of Deng extended into these areas as well.

Documents drafted by Deng Xiaoping were always succinct and clear, influenced by his experience in issuing orders on the battlefield. On 15 August 1956 he drafted the following communication for the Central Committee at Beidaihe:

(1) The Eighth Congress will convene on 15 September. (2) It has now been decided to hold preparatory meetings for the Eighth Congress from 1 to 14 September. (3) Please inform all delegates that they must be sure to arrive in Beijing by 31 August and report to the Central Committee General Office. (4) The Central Committee has determined that alternate delegates elected by all districts and work units shall all without exception attend the Eighth Congress. Please instruct them to arrive in Beijing at the same time.

On 22 August 1956, the Seventh Plenary Session of the Seventh Central Committee was introduced to the underlying principles of the constitutional revision by Mao, who underlined the number of different versions that had come and gone and argued that this was a triumph for inner-Party democracy. Mao had emphasised the need to set out the general approach and principles underlying the Constitution before going into detail but Deng said that this was not always possible and that a document like the Constitution needed to be argued over character by character. Mao nodded his approval: he was notorious for being impatient with details, whereas Deng was in his element drafting and redrafting documents. Even at a meeting of this level Deng was prepared to correct Mao and Mao was prepared to accept his comments.

After the full meeting of the Central Committee Deng sat at his desk to ponder the circular that he had been instructed to draft and send to regional Party committees. There were still important details to be ironed out, including the number of vice-chairmen; whether there should be a system of permanent representatives in the Party leadership as there was in the National People’s Congress; the nature and authority of the Secretariat and how often the Party congress should meet, but he had been given the authority to proceed, as long as, in Mao’s words, the Party Constitution ‘fully embodied legality and the mass line’. Deng used the circular to highlight these outstanding issues and solicit comments. When responses had been synthesised, Mao arranged to meet Deng one evening to discuss them and within a few days Deng was in a position to report to Mao, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai and Zhu De with a revised draft of Clause 37 that dealt with the structure of the central organisation of the Party. By 10.00 pm on 10 September, with the Congress only five days away, Mao was still deliberating, but eventually responded to say that only Clause 3 needed further attention – the addition of three characters. Mao looked critically at Deng’s revisions, but his alterations were usually on points of style rather than content.

Three days before the Eighth Congress convened, Deng had personally checked and approved the procedure to be adopted. The conference would open each day at 2.00 in the afternoon and close at 7.00 in the evening; speakers must all report their names to the platform and speak for no longer than 20 minutes unless the presiding chairman agreed otherwise; voting on congress decisions would be by two shows of hands, for and against; and the election of the Central Committee would be by secret ballot. This attention to detail and meticulous, even pernickety, approach to the mundane but essential groundwork for meetings assured him a measure of control that he would not otherwise have been able to achieve.¹²

Deng at the Eighth Party Congress

On 16 September 1956, there was a solemn and expectant hush in the main conference hall of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference building as the presiding chairman announced that Deng Xiaoping was about to present his report on the revision of the Party Constitution to the Second Session of the Eighth Congress. It was followed by enthusiastic applause as Deng strode to the speaker’s podium, wearing a grey zhongshan jacket: he positioned himself in front of a bank of six microphones, put on his spectacles and began to read his report. The Xinhua News Agency reported that ‘Deng Xiaoping’s report was 29,000 characters long; it took two hours and fifteen minutes to read and he was interrupted continuously by enthusiastic applause’.¹³ There were 1,011 delegates assembled in the hall (15 had tendered their apologies). Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Zhu De were sitting in a row, apparently concentrating on the text while Deng spoke.

The report emphasised the Party’s policy on the ‘mass line’, democratic centralism and opposition to ‘idolatory’ (chongbai) of individuals and warned against complacency and bureaucracy. Deng had drawn lessons from observing the Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, held in Moscow from 14 to 25 February and renowned for Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ denouncing Stalin’s brutal despotism and the ‘cult of the personality’. The Moscow conference, Deng argued, demonstrated clearly the dangers of deifying individuals, and he pointed approvingly to Mao Zedong’s strictures against singing the praises of individual leaders and to the need for strengthening the collective leadership of the Party. There was much applause at this point, but Deng went on to say that the deification of powerful individuals was a long-standing social phenomenon in China and it would be surprising if it did not exist within the Chinese Communist Party.

Deng was following the general line of the international communist movement and attacking Stalin’s dictatorship, but he was also criticising the tendency, already apparent within the CCP since the early 1940s, to treat Mao as a local version of Stalin. In the autumn of 1956 Deng could use Mao’s own words to attack the Mao cult, which did not reach its height until a decade later in the Cultural Revolution.

Speaking in 1997, the last year of his life, Deng reviewed the evolution of leadership of the CCP since 1935:

Our Party’s leadership collective (lingdao jiti) was formed step by step after the Zunyi Conference (1935) and it was comrades Mao, Lu, Zhou, Zhu, and Ren Bishi. After comrade Bishi’s death comrade Chen Yun was added. By the Eighth Party Congress, a Standing Committee of six had been established – Mao, Liu, Zhou, Zhu, Chen, Deng – and later Lin Biao was added. This collective leadership lasted until the Cultural Revolution.¹⁴

On the surface the Eighth Congress had succeeded in creating a unified leadership suitable for a ruling party (zhizheng dang), rather than a contender in a revolutionary war. The leadership had recovered from the debilitating conflict with Gao Gang and Rao Shushi and the Congress set out rational and achievable policies for development following the success, by common consent, of the first Five-Year Plan. This was the story for public consumption, but the underlying reality was serious conflict within the leadership. Mao was deeply dissatisfied with the direction in which the Party and government were heading and there was a concerted attempt by some of his most senior colleagues to reduce his authority. He was also growing increasingly disenchanted with the CCP’s notional allies in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which provided the models for the political and economic institutions of the People’s Republic, and was turning his attention to forging a distinctive Chinese form of development.

In spite of the prominence that had been given by the Politburo to Mao’s April 1956 policy paper, ‘On the Ten Major Relationships’, at the Eighth Party Congress, in the words of the trenchant anti-Communist Jesuit analyst Laszlo Ladany, Mao’s ‘wings had been clipped’ and the Congress was ‘dominated largely by the men of the Party machine’ around Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. In the new Constitution, largely the responsibility of Deng Xiaoping, which was presented to the Congress, Mao’s status as party chairman would be significantly reduced. All references to the ‘thought of Mao Zedong’, which had appeared in the preamble to the 1945 Constitution, were excised and, as Jürgen Domes argues, the new Constitution ‘provided for institutional safeguards for a more open process of internal Party decision-making’. Former political adversaries of Mao were given greater prominence and, although Mao remained a member of the powerful Secretariat, he was to be one member among five in the Politburo Standing Committee, rather than its chairman as he intended. Deng Xiaoping may have begun the Eighth Congress as a protégé of Mao but by the end he had demonstrated a degree of independence and was more closely allied with Liu Shaoqi as part of the group arguing for a broader political base in the party.¹⁵

Secretary-General and General Secretary

At the Seventh Plenum held two days before the Eighth Congress, Mao raised the question of appointing a deputy chairman and general secretary for the CCP and proposed Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping for the two posts. The Central Committee had agreed informally that there should be four deputy chairmen – Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De and Chen Yun; there was also general agreement on the need for a general secretary, and Deng Xiaoping was the obvious candidate. These appointments would provide a counterbalance to Mao within the Central Committee.

Smoking as he spoke, Mao acknowledged that these appointments were necessary for long-term stability: he was politically astute enough to recognise that they would restrict his power and he was not enthusiastic about devolving authority. He suggested that he, Zhu De and, to some extent, Liu Shaoqi were ‘bit part players’ who were not qualified to be ‘leading actors’, but should play supporting roles and assist where necessary. Zhou Enlai, Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping were not considered to be ‘bit part players’.

Deng, sitting bolt upright, made his response to Mao’s proposals crystal clear. The position that Mao had set out had many positive aspects: (1) the security of the Party and the state – ‘wind breaks’ would be useful if anything unexpected happened; (2) the appointments would prevent problems of succession such as those that had followed the death of Stalin; (3) considerations of age, health and energy might mean that certain individuals would not always be able to continue to play central roles. Mao was not mentioned directly in this discussion but everyone in the room, including Mao, knew that the discussion was about him. He was 63 years old and his health was poor, although it had recently improved. In the draft of the revised Party Constitution that Deng had submitted to Mao on 5 August, Clause 37 that dealt with these new appointments simply read ‘Deputy Chairmen – various’ and Mao had added ‘plus one General Secretary’. Mao still regarded Deng as a potential ally or at least as a useful counterweight in the power struggle that was developing within the Central Committee.

On Mao’s insistence, Deng was appointed general secretary (zong shuji) of the Party’s Central Committee, whereas previously his title had been secretary-general (mishu zhang). There is virtually no difference in the English titles but the zong (‘general’) in the Chinese title of the new post indicates higher status and greater authority. Deng, with modesty which may have been genuine or merely conventional, wondered aloud whether he was suitable for the honour of being general secretary and said he was ‘fearful and in awe’ (chenghuang chengkong) of the challenge but that he would accept it if ‘the work of the revolution required it’. Mao countered that ‘general secretary’ was more in line with foreign conceptions of the work that Deng was already doing and that if everyone thought he was suitable then he was suitable. He proceeded to give his reasons why Deng should accept the appointment, his ‘propaganda’ as he called it.

In my opinion Deng Xiaoping is a fair and reasonable man: like me, he is not without his faults but he is reasonable. He is able and capable at his job. Can we say that he is good at everything! Hardly! Like me there are many things that he has done wrongly and many things that he has said that he should not have. But comparatively speaking he is pretty good at his job. He is quite thoughtful and quite reasonable, a kind and honest man who does not frighten people. He says he is not good enough for the job but I think he is and, as for his suitability, that will have to depend on public opinion but from what I have observed he is quite suitable. There will be those who are not satisfied with him, just as there are those who are not satisfied with me. I cannot believe that Deng Xiaoping has never offended anyone but generally speaking he takes the overall situation into account and is kind, reasonable and impartial when dealing with problems. He is very hard on himself when he has made mistakes and says that he feels ‘fearful and in awe’; well, he has been through internal party struggles.¹⁶

Although sometimes presented as a supportive speech, this is hardly a ringing endorsement of Deng. At best Mao is damning Deng with faint praise and, when describing Deng’s good points, he uses the word bijiao which means ‘fairly’. He compares Deng’s faults with his own but also emphasises Deng’s fairness and kindness, which are not words that many in the Party would apply to Mao. Mao thought of Deng as a youngster (he was 52) and a member of the ‘young and vigorous faction’, and if he was not completely Mao’s man, he probably hoped that this promotion would ensure that he became so.

Deng was appointed general secretary and also elevated to full membership of the Central Committee. At the first plenary meeting of the new Eighth Central Committee on 28 September 1956, he was elected to the Politburo and its Standing Committee as well as to the post of general secretary. The Standing Committee of the Politburo had six members – Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping. At the age of 52 Deng had become a member of the most powerful political body in China. As general secretary he directed the work of the Secretariat for ten years, a period that he regarded as the busiest of his life.

There were still disagreements about Deng’s precise role as general secretary. Li Xuefeng, who was also elected to the Central Committee in 1956 but later supported Mao during the Cultural Revolution, suggested to Mao that the Secretariat over which Deng would preside worked for the Politburo and should only have responsibility for the distribution of military and State Council documents. Sensing an attempt to undermine the position of the man on whom he was now depending for support, Mao insisted that the Secretariat was an organ of the Central Committee and that any type of work dealt with by the Central Committee could be handled by the Secretariat and therefore by Deng, especially issuing any documents in the name of the Central Committee. Deng’s remit was very broad and would later be extended even though he indicated his willingness to devolve some of his duties – he was never a voracious bureaucratic empire-builder. Mao sanctioned this expansion of role of the Secretariat, and the consequent concentration of power in Deng’s hands, and in return he required support. Although he rarely criticised Mao publicly, Deng was not an unquestioning acolyte, and the chairman desperately needed a henchman. This quality of loyalty rather than any ideological alliance with Mao Zedong had propelled Deng to high office. It is difficult to pin down Deng’s philosophy during this period (or indeed at any time). He was a loyal servant of the Party, which was ruling in the orthodox manner based on the experience of the Soviet Union. Although he had been involved in internal disputes, notably the purge of Gao and Rao, there is no suggestion that he had any ideological differences with them: it was just a question of loyalty to the Party and the leader.¹⁷