CLM Insights Interview with Robert Suettinger
Robert L. Suettinger. The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. October 15, 2024. 488 pp.
ISBN-10: 0674272803; ISBN-13: 978-0674272804
Insights Interview
What makes Hu Yaobang such a unique Chinese leader? What were his special qualities as a leader?
Hu Yaobang’s background as a poor peasant from Hunan was hardly unique, but many of those who emerged later as Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders were from privileged backgrounds, with some advanced education or military training. Although Hu was intellectually gifted and his Hakka family sacrificed to send him to modern elementary and middle schools, his education was cut short by the 1920s’ revolutionary turmoil in Hunan. His youthful association with the Communist Party led him, at age 14, to join Mao Zedong and Zhu De in the Jinggang mountains rather than to pursue a scholarly career. He was only five feet tall and never weighed much more than 100 pounds, but he was tough, strong-willed, and a “man of the people” who understood the needs of poor farmers at the lowest levels of society. His early schooling in the Confucian classics also gave him some grounding in traditional Chinese values and ethics, which sustained him throughout the chaos of the revolutionary years. He prized his unwillingness to “put on official airs” or to practice the kinds of patriarchal leadership that eventually separated the CCP from ordinary people.
Could you discuss some of Hu’s formative experiences that might have changed how he viewed CCP ideology, practices, and policies?
Hu was one of the hong xiao gui (little red devils) who joined the revolution as a youth, but he was literate and enthusiastic, so he was assigned by CCP leaders to do propaganda and recruitment work in the Jiangxi Soviet. His narrow escape from summary execution during the violent inner-party purges of the 1930s led him to eschew the ready resort to violence that characterized Mao and other early CCP leaders. Hu barely survived the Long March due to timely help from revolutionary friends. In Yan’an, he was an early student at Kang Da, where his intellect and curiosity attracted Mao’s attention and patronage. Hu watched at close range as Mao developed and refined his Soviet-inspired ideological outlook to reflect China’s history and revolutionary experience. He also watched as Mao the teacher became Chairman Mao, who then, under the malign influence of Kang Sheng, devoted much of his effort to purifying and purging the Communist Party. Hu played a reluctant role in the 1945 Yan’an “rectification campaign,” and he watched helplessly as his new wife, Li Zhao, was sequestered and interrogated by the Central Social Department on suspicion of being a Kuomintang (KMT) “spy.” When the war against Japan ended and the Chinese civil war began in 1945, Hu volunteered to join what would become the “Liberation Army” to control territory that had been occupied by Japan. As he rose through the ranks of the political commissars of the North China army under Nie Rongzhen and Xu Xiangqian, Hu saw plenty of action at Datong, Zhangjiakou, Shijiazhuang, and especially Taiyuan, where CCP forces endured heavy casualties. Eventually, he would end his military career in Southwest China, the last area to be “liberated” by the Communist forces in 1950.
Hu is thought to be a close associate of Deng Xiaoping. But your research does not yield evidence to support this view. Can you explain Hu’s relationship with Deng? Specifically, why did Deng pick Hu to be party chief in the early 1980s, how did their relationship become strained in the first half of the decade, and what led to Hu’s dismissal in January 1987?
It was in Southwest China that Hu Yaobang first became acquainted with Deng Xiaoping, who had been appointed by Mao to head the CCP’s Southwest Bureau in Chongqing. Because Sichuan province was so large and populous and was the last redoubt of many KMT forces, in 1950 the province was divided into four administrative districts, and Hu was named administrator and CCP secretary of the North Sichuan District, subordinate to the Southwest Bureau. Deng, with Mao urging him on, ruled the region with an iron fist, eliminating hundreds of thousands of “bandits,” former KMT officials, corrupt local officials, landlords, rich peasants, and other perceived enemies of the regime. Hu, in charge of the smallest and poorest of the Sichuan districts, tried to minimize the social damage from the incessant political campaigns, but he carried them out dutifully and to Deng’s evident satisfaction. Hu and Deng both enjoyed playing contract bridge, but they were members of different age cohorts and came from backgrounds. Even though Hu would be under Deng’s supervision for much of the rest of his life, he never considered himself a protégé of Deng. After 1952, both men were transferred to Beijing, where Deng became Mao’s party administrator as general secretary, while Hu was appointed by Mao to head the Communist Youth League, a position that he did not want but held for more than 15 years. Both men fell victim to Mao’s jealous efforts to cleanse his personal enemies from the leadership ranks of the CCP in the late 1950s and 1960s, but Hu suffered a more cruel fate, being physically abused by the Red Guards on numerous occasions during the Cultural Revolution and then being sent off to a desolate labor reform camp for nearly three years. Hu was again under Deng’s brief command in 1975 when Mao perforce turned to Deng to put together a working government after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Deng did not actually choose Hu, but he accepted Ye Jianying’s recommendation and no doubt recalled Hu’s administrative skills. Their partnership only lasted until a nearly senile Mao turned on Deng once again and ousted both men just months before his own death. Ye would bring both men together after Mao’s passing in September 1976 and the ensuing ouster of his wife and her “leftist” cohorts brought together a fragile coalition to try to restore order. Hu’s esteem for both Ye and the newly appointed chairman of the CCP, Hua Guofeng, enabled him to return to work prior to Deng in 1977. But Hu worked diligently to arrange Deng’s return, and his efficient work in the Central Party School and the Central Organization Department smoothed Deng’s transition to assume principal power at the 3rd Plenum of the 11th Central Committee in late 1978.
What are Hu’s contributions to China’s “reform and opening” in the early
1980s?
Although Deng Xiaoping is generally given credit for, and readily claimed, being the “chief architect” of the reform and opening policies adopted following the 3rd Plenum, in fact he did not appear to have had a detailed agenda beyond altering the CCP’s overall plan from pursuing class struggle—Mao’s goal—to promoting economic progress and the “four modernizations” (agriculture, industry, science and technology, and national defense). Even before Hu was appointed to head a restored Secretariat in early 1980, he was working to bring about fundamental ideological change at the Central Party School via publication of an influential journal called Theoretical Trends (Lilun Dongtai) and studies on the origins of the Cultural Revolution that were aimed at critically examining Mao Zedong’s role in that ten-year fiasco. As head of the Central Organization Department, Hu continued to push for rehabilitation of not only Cultural Revolution victims but also those who had been purged during Mao’s earlier political purges—particularly the “anti-Rightist” campaign of 1957, which had been led by Deng. Along with Wan Li on the Secretariat, Hu supported the restoration of family farming and the abolition of Mao’s cherished commune system—a process that took four years to accomplish in the face of grudging support from Deng and Chen Yun. Hu failed to gain control over the drafting and approval of a Central Committee Resolution on CCP history, which ended up whitewashing Mao’s errors and strained Hu’s relationship with Deng, who insisted that, despite its flaws, Mao’s legacy be preserved.
Another puzzle about Hu is his relationship with Zhao Ziyang. What does your
research show?
That relationship remains controversial to this day, with Hu’s supporters charging that Zhao was complicit in Hu’s 1987 downfall, or at best, failing to support him when he had the chance. After his own ouster and soft detention in 1989, Zhao claimed that he and Hu had had no choice or opportunity to cooperate more closely, and that Deng and Chen Yun were the dominant decision makers, even after the 13th Party Congress. Hu and Zhao were chosen separately by Deng, and they did not have career or personal associations during the war years or during their early PRC experience. In what is called the “Deng-Hu-Zhao system” after the 12th Party Congress in 1982, Zhao, as premier was largely responsible for economic policy, and he resented Hu’s occasional forays into economic policy-making, complaining to both Deng and Chen. Hu seemed to have had a high regard for Zhao’s administrative abilities, and the two cooperated well in turning back the so-called “spiritual pollution” campaign of 1983. But Deng turned to the party elders when the social stresses of the rapid modernization caused social discontent in late 1986, and Deng mercilessly purged Hu in early 1987, turning the party leadership over to Zhao.
Might another “conscience of the party” like Hu emerge from inside the elite ranks of the Chinese system today?
I do not think so. Hu Yaobang was a remarkable individual—intelligent, resourceful, and effective as a leader of large bureaucracies—and his conscience, moral core, and values still are widely recognized within the party and the society at large. Even more than 35 years after his ouster, he remains the object of some public affection and recollection. But he was atypical of those who preceded and followed him as general secretary. The CCP is an organization designed for and devoted to the acquisition and maintenance of power. It is, like all Leninist political organizations, susceptible to zero-sum personal struggles for dominance, utilizing the military, law enforcement, and bureaucratic and propaganda resources of an increasingly wealthy, technocratic mega-state. Its leader faces challenges from peers who are familiar with the manipulation of power and who are eager to displace the top man. Xi Jinping has intensified many of the flaws in the CCP’s bureaucracy, and at a huge cost, leading particularly to the failure of many important economic and social policies. This has resulted in his disparagement by both party elites and ordinary citizens. The moral authority that Hu acquired but did not use is a thing of the past. The failure of the CCP’s moral leadership hangs like a pall of fog over a country that has both the history and the capacity for global leadership.
