TOUGH NEW MAN IN PEKING

Eternal glory to Comrade Chou Enlai, great proletarian revolutionary of the Chinese people and outstanding Communist fighter!

So, in part, read the official announcement issued last week by Hsin-hua, the Chinese press agency. Soon after, it appeared again on the black-bordered front page of Peking's People's Daily; it was broadcast, preceded by solemn music, every half-hour on radio stations throughout China. In Peking, the elevator girl in an office building used by foreign journalists burst into tears when she heard the news. Headlines appeared in newspapers throughout the world, and messages of condolence started pouring into the Chinese capital. In a rare gesture of sympathy and respect, the flags at the U.S. consulate in Hong Kong and at the staid, very British Hong Kong Club flew at half mast, as did all the red banners in China. Chou Enlai, for a quarter century Premier of the State Council of the People's Republic of China and the able administrator of Chairman Mao Tse-tung's policies, was dead of cancer at the age of 77. A memorial service, with no foreign dignitaries present, was announced for Jan. 15.

According to the official obituary issued by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, he had been suffering from cancer for almost four years. It had been widely thought that Chou had had heart attacks; the obituary was the first official word that cancer prompted his virtual retirement from public life in June 1974 to a secluded hospital in Peking. Chou apparently played a role in some major policy decisions up until the last few months of his life, but most of his responsibilities had already been entrusted to First Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-ping, who will almost certainly be appointed Premier. True to his reputation as an administrator par excellence, Chou apparently managed even his own passing from the political scene with dexterity. Sinologists expect no power struggle over Teng's assumption of higher office--at least not soon.

Yet Chou's death raises important questions about China's future. How long will the succession he so patiently stage-managed endure? Will Teng and his fellow bureaucrats carry on Chou's moderate policies? Most important of all to those outside of China, will Chou's belief in cautious detente with the U.S., Japan and Western Europe, and his unremitting hostility toward the Soviet Union continue to guide foreign policy?

As long as Chou remained alive, even gravely ill on a hospital bed, the policies pursued by Teng Hsiao-ping bore the stamp of the Premier's authority. For many world statesmen--notably including Henry Kissinger--Chou personified what they would like China to be: reasonable, flexible, nonaggressive (see obituary, page 30). With the Premier's death, China lost half of the remarkable team that symbolized the People's Republic both to its own people and to those outside. Now only Mao remains, mentally alert at 82 but frail, slack-jawed and slurred of speech.

Teng has impressive credentials as a wily politician and a pragmatic administrator. Yet he lacks the almost spiritual aura enjoyed by Mao and Chou as architects of the New China. Moreover, Teng does not enjoy a large power base of his own. His leadership depends on the approval of the aging chairman and the apparent consent of factions within the party whose often bitter quarrels were effectively stilled by Chou.

In practice, Teng is the "new man" in Peking, even though it may be odd to so describe a veteran of 71 who has spent most of his life in China's political wars. The U.S. has always been fascinated by China, whether it was seen as an ally, a fanatical adversary or, as now, a somewhat remote power that has entered into some limited foreign policy partnership with the U.S. In an increasingly difficult world--Indochina lost, Russian detente severely strained, Southern Europe threatened by Communism, and murky battles looming with the Third World--the U.S. basically wants to know whether, in the long run, China will be friend or foe. The man who will shape a large part of the answer is Teng.

That fact alone represents one of the most astounding personal turnabouts in recent history. A few years ago, Teng, rather than standing in line for the premiership of China, was in deep and seemingly irremediable disgrace. In the early 1960s, before the cataclysmic Cultural Revolution, Teng was Secretary-General of the Communist Party and one of the most powerful figures in China. But in 1966 he was ruthlessly attacked by the Red Guards and the radical factions in the party that spurred on the Cultural Revolution. In accordance with China's political style, Teng was not officially denounced by name, but there was no mistake that he was the man accused of being "the No. 2 party person [after still-disgraced Liu Shao-chi] taking the capitalist road."

Teng's rehabilitation in 1973, a move that had to be approved by Mao, attests to Chou En-lai's determination to rebuild the governing hierarchy in the wake of the Cultural Revolution's devastations. But clearly Teng's ascent to the pinnacle of China's huge bureaucracy is equally due to the fact that he is a tough, shrewd and talented administrator--just the kind of man needed by Chou and Mao to help pull the bureaucracy back together.

After his visit to Peking in December, Henry Kissinger was asked what he thought of Teng. "Teng* and I get along fine," Kissinger replied. "Teng is a different man than Chou Enlai. He's more bureaucratic. He's more direct. He's more pragmatic. Teng is extremely intelligent."

Things obviously have changed since the two first met, when Kissinger reportedly referred to Chou's heir apparent as "that nasty little man." Ruthless and arrogant, the tiny (4ft. 11-in.) Vice Premier is considerably different in style from his urbane predecessor. He lacks Chou's subtlety and sinuous charm, not to mention his manners. In the middle of a conversation, he will often expectorate noisily into a handy spittoon. "You must forgive me," he may say. "I am just a country boy."

Teng's public statements are also direct and unabashed. At one banquet in Peking last autumn, Teng--a notably anti-Soviet hard-liner--criticized the Russians so harshly that Moscow's Ambassador to China stalked out without bothering to finish dessert. Teng was less irascible but equally blunt in warning the U.S. against the dangers of detente when President Ford visited China last December. "Rhetoric about detente cannot cover up the stark reality of the growing danger of war," he declared. Teng evidently relishes his new power. Shortly after his rehabilitation, visitors to China said he seemed a bit hesitant and unsure of himself. Now, say more recent visitors, he seems confident and very much in command.

Teng likes to hint that he was merely a poor farmer's son. In fact, he was born in Szechwan to a well-to-do family. Like Chou, Teng went to France on a work-study program when he was 16. Before he left Paris six years later, he had joined the Chinese Communist Party. He returned home (by way of Moscow) to become a guerrilla commander after the Communist split with Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang in 1927. Also like Chou, he is a veteran of Mao's legendary Long March, which until recently was essential for anyone hoping to rise high in the party hierarchy. In 1954, after service as Minister of Finance and Vice Premier, Teng was named the party's Secretary-General. At that time he was almost unique among China's leaders in being personally close both to Mao and to party bureaucrats like Liu Shao-chi, the former chief of state who fell into disgrace because of his "revisionist" policies.

During the early 1960s, Teng presided over a gradualist, agriculture-oriented, economic-recovery program that undid much of the chaos of Mao's Great Leap Forward project. Apparently he had some differences with Mao over economic policy. "For the purpose of increasing agricultural production," Teng declared in 1962 in a now notorious phrase, "any by-hook-or-by-crook method can be applied. It doesn't matter whether a cat is black or white so long as it catches mice." At the same time, he also suggested that "the dictatorship be diluted and democracy be expanded," a remark that was later interpreted as a direct challenge to Mao's belief that the party's reins of power should never be relaxed.

In light of his links with the entrenched bureaucracy, it is not surprising that he became a victim of the purges spawned by the Cultural Revolution. Red Guard pamphlets mercilessly denigrated him as a dissolute, high-living potentate who used his high office to indulge his gluttonous tastes and his bourgeois devotion to bridge and mah-jongg; it was said that he frequently commanded special planes and railway cars to bring his card-playing cronies along on jaunts round the country. At one point he was driven through the streets in a truck with a dunce cap pulled over his ears, jeered at by a screeching, vengeful mob of Red Guards. Eventually he confessed to all the charges against him and admitted that his "thought and attitude were incompatible with Mao's thought."

Teng was forced to resign his party posts, and for nearly seven years he was in effect a nonperson. Some Sinologists believe that Teng spent his years of obscurity reading the works of Mao, Marx and Lenin and visiting communes and factories "in order to gain empathy for workers and peasants." He was, however, spared hard physical labor out of consideration for his age. In April 1973, he suddenly reappeared at a banquet in Peking and was led to his seat by Mao's niece Wang Hai-jung, now a Vice Foreign Minister. By the following January, Teng had been fully rehabilitated, appointed Chou's Vice Premier and listed as a Politburo member. His leadership role was officially sealed when Teng led a Chinese delegation to the U.N. special session on raw materials in New York in 1974. When he boarded a plane in Peking for the flight to the U.S., he was seen off by virtually the entire Politburo.

His trip to the U.S. was a message to the rest of the world that, as Chou En-lai withdrew from public life, Teng would become China's principal international spokesman, the man who would handle the substantive discussions with the stream of foreign leaders who still make their way to Peking's Great Hall of the People.

The Administration's response to Chou's death was a verbal sign of the importance Washington attaches to Sino-American relations and, by indirection, of the hopes it has that Teng will continue Chou's policies. President Ford called Chou "a remarkable leader who has left his imprint not only on the history of modern China but also on the world scene."

By contrast, the Kremlin, which for years has portrayed Chou as Mao's anti-Soviet henchman, found no cause for mourning. Pravda noted Chou's death in a one-inch, six-line item near the bottom of page 5, beneath a routine story about the Common Market; the paper gave less space to Chou's death than it did to a Cabinet shuffle in Ecuador and a Burmese campaign against smuggling. The brevity of the announcements and the absence, at week's end, of official comment indicated that the Russians were proceeding with their customary caution. Like Washington, Moscow presumably expects no immediate shift in China's stance toward the Soviet Union. Still, Moscow knows well that there are those in Peking, especially in the military, who feel that a continued confrontation with the Soviet Union is unproductive and expensive.

These policy revisionists may have been responsible for a symbolic act that both surprised and pleased the Russians. Several weeks ago, China released three Russian helicopter pilots it had captured inside Chinese territory almost two years ago. Some Sinologists interpreted that gesture to mean that Peking was receptive to improving relations with Moscow. There is no doubt also that many Chinese are dissatisfied with the slow pace of Sino-U.S. "normalization." Moreover, as the cool reception accorded Kissinger on his last visit to Peking unmistakably indicated, most Chinese, Teng included, are clearly upset that the U.S. has refused to draw back from its policy of detente with the Russians. The worst possibility from Washington's standpoint is that Peking, feeling that the U.S. is not an effective bulwark against the Soviet menace, will decide to come to new terms with Moscow. Despite their differences, China and Russia are both Marxist states for whom capitalism is the enemy.

Indeed, it is the view of some informed Sinologists that once Mao has died, China will become far more flexible in its relations with the Russians. According to Sino-Soviet Expert Donald Zagoria of Hunter College, Mao's anti-Soviet obsession squelched several initiatives aimed at reconciling the differences between Peking and Moscow. On one occasion in 1966, Japanese Communist leaders attempted to get the two sides to agree to a joint communique concerning the Viet Nam War. Mao ridiculed the Chinese who were involved in the effort as "weak-kneed people." Eventually, however, pressures for reconciliation could mount. The benefits of a rapprochement with Moscow would include reduced defense expenditures, technical aid and, of course, the virtual elimination of the prospect of a nuclear war. Despite his frequent denunciations of the Soviets as "social imperialists," even Teng might in the long run find these benefits difficult to resist.

Such a drastic turn in Sino-Soviet relations could upset the structure of U.S. foreign policy, which, to some extent, has involved a balancing act between Moscow and Peking. But even if the Chinese settle some of their differences with Moscow, they will surely not return to the relationship the two countries had before their break in the 1950s, when China acquiesced in virtual Soviet domination. Whether or not there is an eventual Sino-Soviet detente, the immediate future will probably be marked with continued bitter hostility. Even before his precipitous fall during the Cultural Revolution, Teng was one of the leading anti-Soviets on China's Central Committee. Equally important, men long closely associated with Chou dominate China's Foreign Ministry and control its policies. Foreign Minister Chiao Kuan-hua, who has held the office since November 1974, had long been one of Chou's closest proteges; he is also believed to have a very close relationship with Teng. U.N. Ambassador Huang Hua and U.S. Liaison Office Chief Huang Chen, both members of the Central Committee, were hand-picked by Chou for those posts.

In the hands of such pragmatic diplomats, Chinese foreign policy is likely to retain Chou En-lai's approach: pragmatic, outgoing and de-emphasizing ideology. Enjoying formal relations with well over 100 countries--including cordial ties with most of the key countries in its own region like Japan, the Philippines and Thailand--China is unlikely to return to narrow xenophobia.

On the domestic scene, China will no doubt continue to stress production without sacrificing revolutionary fervor. China's press, for example, has been filled recently with Maoist exhortations --all distinct echoes from the radical rhetoric of the Cultural Revolution --about the crucial importance of political education and the necessity to remain vigilant against "revisionist" ideas. Party officials take seriously the problem of retaining ideological purity and preventing the leadership from hardening into a "new class" of privileged bureaucrats. In recent weeks two high education officials, Tsinghua University Chief Lu Ping and Education Minister Chou Jung-hsin, have been angrily accused by students of "revisionist" practices--meaning too much emphasis on technical excellence and not enough on ideology. Two weeks ago, in the traditional New Year's editorial, China's newspapers celebrated the achievements of the Cultural Revolution.

Nonetheless, that same editorial advocated very un-Cultural Revolutionary means to attain China's goals; it banned the forming of "fighting groups" and declared that major issues of right and wrong "should be settled through debate." Most China watchers feel that the delicate balance struck by Chou between pragmatism and ideology--or between expertise and Redness--will endure.

Confidence that moderation may prevail in China is inspired by the success of a number of policies favored by Chou and carried out by Teng. China's trade deficit of more than $1 billion in 1974 was significantly reduced last year by cutting back on foreign imports. Meanwhile agricultural policy, as managed by Teng, has produced happy results: there has been a highly creditable 7% annual increase in grain production since 1972. Steel output has also risen by an impressive 10% a year since 1971, while oil output last year was about 25% higher than in 1974. So long as Teng's economic policies prove successful, it will be difficult for radical factions in the party to mount an effective challenge to his leadership. Moreover, Teng, who also holds the post of Chief of Staff of the armed forces, is highly respected by China's powerful regional military commanders--another advantage he holds over potential radical adversaries in the party. Last year, when radical leaders were unable to quell labor disturbances in several Hangchow factories, it was Teng, with military support, who successfully took charge of ending the troubles.

Still, there remains a good chance that the future will bring factional challenges for Teng. The dominant group in China now consists of bureaucrats, led by Teng, whom Chou En-lai carefully restored to high positions after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. These tough veteran bureaucrats constitute a rather exclusive club. Despite abundant official rhetoric urging cooperation among the young, the middle-aged and the old, there have been relatively few opportunities for the young within the party. Of the 19 current Politburo members, one is 90, two are over 80 and four others are over 70. Most of the others are believed to be over 60. In China, where 60% of the people are under 25, gerontocratic rule could eventually cause explosive friction.

The bureaucracy's inveterate enemy remains a radical clique centering around Mao's wife Chiang Ching; perhaps by exploiting the dissatisfactions of youth, this group can in time make another serious bid for power. These potential frictions will probably not develop until Mao passes from the scene. Says Boston University China Scholar Merle Goldman: "Just as Chou's power came ultimately from Mao, so does Teng's."

Eventually a plenary session of the National People's Congress will have to be held to designate Teng the new Premier. Similarly, there will have to be a Politburo meeting to elect party Vice Chairmen to replace both Chou and another top leader, Rang Sheng, who died one month ago. A strong candidate is Chang Chun-chiao, 63, the onetime Shanghai radical, who has decided to cooperate with the moderates.

Teng has more enemies than Chou ever had. Many party veterans recall that in the mid-1950s, Teng rose to power by in effect stepping over the dead body of the pro-Soviet Kao Kang, who was then a key member of the Politburo and supreme ruler of the provinces in Manchuria. Kao reportedly committed suicide in a Peking prison after Teng's brutal denunciation of him at a 1955 Central Committee plenum. But if Teng is worried about any long knives, he has not shown it. He is even indulging his old epicurean tastes. Just recently his favorite Szechuanese restaurant in Peking, the Chengtu, reopened, and is packed daily. It had been closed since Teng fell into disgrace back in 1966.

* The Secretary pronounces the name "Teeng"; actually, "Dung" is correct.

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