Deng vs Xi

A fascinating conversation with a diplomat who recently came from Beijing primed me for the widely anticipated address by Xi Jinping to mark the 40th anniversary of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms — and how the event was accompanied by a subtle but tense confrontation between memory of Deng the reformer and Xi the consolidator of power.

There were three signs of this tension, the diplomat said. The first was the opening of an exhibit in China’s National Museum on Tiananmen Square. A display on the reform era featured 10 photos apiece for Deng, and his successors Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao — and, in vivid contrast, many, many more for Xi Jinping.

The second was the account of China’s premier, Li Keqiang, visiting Singapore on the 40th anniversary of Deng’s visit to that city-state. The cause for diplomatic interest was that, during a conversation with Lee Hsien Loong, Li supposedly quoted Deng. But when the conversation was reported in Beijing, the state media substituted a quote concerning Xi instead of Deng.

The third was the publication of an extended article by a prominent academic putting forward the argument (long informally held as the actual state of affairs, but it seems only formally presented as an idea now) that a kind of social contract exists between the Chinese people and the Communist Party of China, premised on the ability of the party to continue improving the lives of the people. This article was to have been signed by many more academics, who eventually decided to be prudent and not attach their names. The article ended up scrubbed from the Chinese internet.

Of these three incidents, only the first seems to have percolated outside the diplomatic confines of Beijing. Last November, writing in the website Radii, Jeremiah Jenne took note of the opening of a “glittering celebration” of the 40th anniversary of the “Reform and Opening Era.” It was mainly about Xi and hardly about Deng, who was reduced to a corner display, with nooks for Deng’s two immediate successors.

The uneasy relationship between Deng’s posthumous reputation and Xi’s ongoing efforts to accumulate and consolidate power seems to have been on display even earlier. In August, Quartz featured a report by Tripti Lahri on some tweets from a journalist, Benjamin Carlson, who visited a display on the 40th anniversary of Reform in the National Museum of Art of China. The journalist found it remarkable that the largest example of socialist realism in art portrayed Xi surrounded by an admiring throng — with only a hazy representation of a statue of Deng in the background. Equally remarkable was that the second-largest painting featured Xi’s father, portrayed standing up pointing at a map (“on where to set reform in motion”), with an admiring, “rapt” Deng seated. In contrast, the 30th anniversary exhibit had featured Deng “everywhere.”

And even earlier than that — at the end of last year, according to a November article in the Financial Times (FT) by Lucy Hornby — the opening of an exhibit in Shenzhen had featured a frieze portraying Deng’s tour, which kicked off the Reform Era. Then, during the summer, the museum closed for renovations, and when it reopened, the frieze had been replaced by a big quote from Xi in Chinese and English. In September, the quote was then replaced with a quote from Deng and Xi; and, in November, the original frieze was put back.

The thesis of the FT article is that the reason for the tension between the deceased Deng and the living Xi is the feeling of Xi that his father, who had a falling out with Deng in the late 1980s, had been robbed of credit for the reforms in Shenzhen in Guangdong province, of which Xi Zhongxun (Xi Jinping’s dad) had been in charge after the Mao era. This explains the painting so prominently displayed in the National Art Museum—and apparently removed “after it sparked a furore on the internet.”

Xi had found reverence for Deng useful when he was first consolidating power, but after Xi Jinping Thought was enshrined in the constitution along with the abolition of term limits, he has more obviously harked back to Mao rather than Deng. But there remain tensions within the Communist Party keenly watched out for by observers, particularly as critics and rivals are purged, the economy slows down, and unease has arisen, to a certain degree, about Xi’s aggressive approach to foreign affairs and domestic control.

In this regard, with signs and symbols substituting for hard information, the dip in regional stock markets after Xi’s speech marking the 40th anniversary of reform has been taken to be significant.

[email protected]