1979: The Great Backlash

Imagine how the world looked on January 1, 1979. Soviet Marxism appeared anything but fragile. The Moscow regime, which had dispensed altogether with God, individual freedom, and the spontaneity of markets, was buoyed by sky-high oil prices. CIA analysts deemed it an economic as well as military superpower, and U.S. President Jimmy Carter's national security staff fretted about Soviet advances in the developing world. From Vietnam to Nicaragua, the dominoes were falling. If you had claimed that the mighty ussr would shuffle quietly off the world stage a few years hence, due in large part to the damage inflicted upon it by a religiously inspired rebellion in Afghanistan and a pope from Poland, you might well have been declared insane. (A few years earlier, a Soviet dissident named Andrei Amalrik had written a book that predicted the imminent demise of the ussr, citing in particular "the extreme isolation in which the regime has placed both society and itself" and arguing that the resulting disconnect from reality would make its collapse "more rapid and decisive" when times grew tough. He was treated, by the very few who took notice, as a crank.)

The Chinese version of communism, by comparison, looked enfeebled. The Maoist fever of the Cultural Revolution was on the wane, but the traumas it had left behind ran deep, and Deng's announcement, in December 1978, that government policy would henceforth be guided by the principle of "seeking truth from facts" struck many as quixotic. No communist country had successfully reformed itself. In the 1950s, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's fitful attempts at de-Stalinization had failed miserably, and, for that matter, so had tentative efforts to do something similar in China.

But Deng was different. Long an acolyte of Mao Zedong who had gradually parted ways with the Great Helmsman's utopian yearnings for permanent revolution, Deng was a hardened political survivor. Twice purged from the senior leadership of the Chinese Communist Party, he staged his final comeback in 1977, in the wake of Mao's death and the arrest of the Gang of Four. His call for a new era of pragmatic problem-solving clearly had a strong emotional resonance for the rapturous crowds that greeted the news of his reinstatement in Beijing. In three 1975 essays—denounced by the Maoists as the "Three Poisonous Weeds"—Deng had taken overtly conservative positions on everything from art to economics. Although he took pains to justify his work as a defense of the true revolution, his supporters understood perfectly well what he meant: a return to tradition, common sense, and efficiency. This amounted to a fairly radical rejection of everything Mao had stood for since 1949.

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