Rise of a Model Bureaucrat

Zhao's tough job is to prove "the superiority of socialism"

The Central Committee is of the opinion that he is a suitable choice and worthy of our trust." With those words, China's Communist Party Chairman Hua Guofeng last week formally announced to the National People's Congress that, as expected, he would step down from his top government post to make way for a new Premier, former Sichuan province Governor Zhao Ziyang. Hua also made it official that seven Vice Premiers, including the architect of the transition, Deng Xiaoping, would retire from their government posts; among their successors will be the Westward-leaning Foreign Affairs Minister, Huang Hua. But it was the appointment of Zhao that best symbolized the rise of a pragmatic, younger generation to power, as TIME Peking Bureau Chief Richard Bernstein reports:

Over the course of last year, Sichuan province, Deng's home, emerged as a national model for China and Zhao, 61, as a model bureaucrat. Zhao had been denounced during the Cultural Revolution as a "stinking landlord element" (his father had been a landowner in Henan province) and was paraded down the streets of Canton in 1967 with a dunce cap on his head, a type of experience he shared with a number of other Chinese leaders. He disappeared for four years; then, in 1975, after serving in both Inner Mongolia and Guangdong province party posts, he was sent to Sichuan, as Party Secretary and Governor.

With the evident approval of Deng, Zhao pioneered many of the programs that have now been approved as policies for all of China. "We must adopt whatever is most effective," he said. "We must never cocoon ourselves like silkworms." He favored practically everything that Chairman Mao Tse-tung had opposed--free markets for agricultural products, competition among enterprises, bonuses and higher salaries for workers to spur productivity. He introduced experimental measures into some 100 factories, allowing profits to be used in part for reinvestment or for better working conditions. So successful were Zhao's policies that, to no one's surprise, he turned up in Peking earlier this year as a member of the Standing Committee of the all-powerful Politburo and as Vice Premier in charge of the government's day-to-day workings.

Zhao now faces the formidable task of making China's backward economy productive and of shaking up a stifling bureaucracy. He has his work cut out for him. Recently, for example, a foreigner imported a car. The exercise involved three visits to the Public Security Bureau, three to the country's only insurance company, three more to the customs office. The final mandatory stop--the car must be clean before it can be licensed--was at Peking's only car wash, where the bill came to $40. Exclaimed a Chinese intellectual on hearing the story: "I'll wash that car for half the price. If I could wash just three a month, I'd make my present salary."

Chairman Hua says that China will soon begin to demonstrate "the superiority of socialism," but at the moment it is all too easy to see the inefficiency, the mediocrity produced by lack of competition, and the sluggishness of the bureaucracy. The national travel service is both rigid and expensive: it refuses, for instance, to make a hotel booking unless a visitor agrees to bear the cost of hiring an interpreter to escort him from the airport to the hotel. Many visitors do, of course, need such a service, but those who do not must take it anyway. Reservations on the national airline are almost impossible to make. Factories tend to be dirty, basic maintenance of machinery woefully inadequate. Produce markets are erratically stocked, often with bruised and wilted fruit and vegetables.

The Chinese are being encouraged to study hard and think boldly. Yet if a worker goes to a library in a big city to borrow a book about art, he will in most cases be told that art books are available only for members of the official artists' societies. If a university or research institute wishes to order some books or magazines from abroad, it is not permitted to do so directly but must submit the request to higher authority for approval.

One particularly unpleasant feature of life is what the Chinese call qiang xing da pei, or forced distribution. It means simply that if one wants to buy a particular "item in a store, the clerk, who is eager for a productivity bonus, may insist on the purchase of an additional, slower-moving item as well.

Other difficulties derive from the enormous power that a person's work unit, the local authority over his life, has over what should be private matters. Permission of the unit is necessary to study abroad, to visit relatives in another city, even to get married or divorced. In one case in Peking a few months ago, a husband and wife wanted a divorce. The husband's unit agreed, the wife's did not; it took months of arbitration before the two were finally allowed to separate. Nothing is more saddening than the life of thousands, perhaps millions, of married couples who live apart because the bureaucracy has randomly assigned husbands and wives to work in different cities. It is an ironic fact of life today that as a result of somewhat relaxed emigration policies, it can be easier for someone to become reunited with a close relative abroad than with one who is living in China.

But there is no doubt that the political atmosphere is more relaxed and economic conditions better than they have been in years. There is cynicism, to be sure, and millions of Chinese would undoubtedly emigrate if given the chance. But there is also an astonishing lack of bitterness toward the regime, even among those who suffered terribly during the past two decades. Indeed there is an almost palpable desire among the Chinese to restore the greatness of their civilization. That kind of patriotism provides Premier Zhao, who also suffered during the Cultural Revolution, with a powerful asset as he sets himself to the chore of making China's "Four Modernizations" work.

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