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                                                                              ╚January 1, 1979

Man of the Year

Teng Hsiao-p'ing:Visionary of a New China



Teng Hsiao-p'ing opens the Middle Kingdom to the world

   "China? There lies a sleeping giant. Let him sleep, for when
he wakes he will move the world."

                              -- Napoleon Bonaparte

   The project is vast, daring, and unique in history. How
could there be a precedent for turning 1 billion people so
sharply in their course, for leading one-quarter of mankind
quickstep out of dogmatic isolation into the late 20th century
and the life of the rest of the planet? The People's Republic
of China, separated so long from the outer world by an
instinctive xenophobia and an admixture of reclusive Maoism, in
1978 began its Great Leap Outward, or what Peking's
propagandists call the New Long March. The Chinese, their
primitive economy threadbare and their morale exhausted by the
years of Mao Tse-tung's disastrous Cultural Revolution, hope
to have arrived by the year 2000 at a state of relative
modernity, and become a world economic and military power. They
may not arrive, or arrive on time, but their setting off is an
extraordinary spectacle of national ambition.

   The Chinese venture acquired a fascinating new dimension
at year's end. The U.S and the People's Republic ended seven
years of gingerly courtship that began with the Nixon-Kissinger
initiatives. In simultaneous communiques from Peking and
Washington, Chairman and Premier Hua Kuo-feng and President
Carter announced that the two countries would exchange
ambassadors and begin normal diplomatic relations. The
normalization opens potentially lucrative avenues of trade and
new perspectives on world politics, even though it will be a
long time before Peking joins Washington and Moscow as a capital
of first-rank global power.

   The motive force behind the campaign to get the world's
oldest continuous civilization to the 21st century on schedule
is not Mao's titular successor, Hua Kuo-feng, 57, but Vice
Premier Teng Hsiao-p'ing, who also holds the titles of Vice
Chairman of the Communist Party and Army Chief of Staff.
Although he ranks only third in the Peking Politburo (after Hua
and ailing Marshal Yeh Chien-ying, 80, the figurehead Chief of
State), Teng is the principal architect of what has become known
in Chinese rhetoric as the Four Modernizations -- an attempt
simultaneously to improve agriculture, industry, science and
technology, and defense. Because of the tremendous enterprise
he has launched to propel the nation into the modern world, Teng
Hsiao-p'ing (pronounced dung sheow ping) is TIME's Man of the
Year for 1978.

   Tough, abrasive, resilient, Teng, 74, has made more
political comebacks than Richard Nixon. Twice, at Mao's behest,
he was purged by his radical enemies, and his last
rehabilitation was only 17 month ago. Teng commands a broad
power base among the senior officers of the People's Liberation
Army as well as wide support among China's bureaucrats,
technocrats and the intelligentsia. The last two were precisely
those elements of Chinese society that, like Teng, were the
chief victims of the Cultural Revolution. Besides his
constituency, Teng has extraordinary energy and executive
skills. As a party member for more than 50 years and a veteran
of Mao's original Long March, he also possesses a moral
authority that no other Chinese leader can command, an authority
based partly on his refusal to bow before the political winds of
the past two decades.

   Teng works in a wary, complementary partnership with Hua.
The Hua-Teng relationship has a kind of model in the roles and
personalities of Mao and Chou En-lai, who was Teng's sponsor and
protector. While Mao was a visionary and Hua remains his
dogmatist and disciple, Chou, like Teng, was a flexible realist.
There is still undoubtedly personal as well as ideological
conflict between Ten and Hua. Hua, for example, approved Teng's
second purging, but now apparently endorses the Four
Modernizations. In a sense, Hua may play chairman of the board
to Teng's chief executive officer.

   Other men attracted greater attention than Teng Hsiao-p'ing
in this varied and violent year. After an uncertain
apprenticeship that saw his popularity rating drop to 30% in
the polls, President Jimmy Carter was able to recoup through his
foreign policy victories. At his Camp David summit, Carter
appeared for a while to have achieved a miracle for the Middle
East -- a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt. But at year's
end the negotiations were frustratingly stalled. Poland's Karol
Cardinal Wojtyla, the athletic, scholarly Archbishop of Cracow,
became the first non-Italian Pope in 4 1/2 centuries; in tribute
to his gentle predecessor, Albino Cardinal Luciani, who held the
keys to St. Peter for little more than a month, he took the name
John Paul II. In California, a retired industrialist, Howard
Jarvis, saw the state's voters approve his tax-slashing
Proposition 13 -- a symbol of widespread middle-class anger at Big
Government. A crazed cult prophet, Jim Jones, imposed a
poisonous "white night" of murder and suicide on his followers
that left 913 dead in the jungles of Guyana.

   War, peace and terrorism dominated the headlines. Lebanon's
capital was a battleground once more, as Syrian forces in Beirut
tried to crush militant right-wing Christian armies. Cambodia
and Viet Nam set about invalidating the domino theory (if Viet
Nam goes Communist, the rest of Southeast Asia will go too) by
slashing at each other's throats in border war instead of
pursuing a common ideological expansion. The Shah of Iran's
37-year reign was shaken by week upon week of riots. In Italy,
the Red Brigades kidnapped former Premier Aldo Moro, held him
for 54 days, then shot him dead and left his body in the back
of a car on a Rome street. In the Soviet Union, human rights
campaigners Anatoli Shcharansky, Yuri Orlov and Alexander
Ginzburg went into the Gulag.

   A humanly happier, if ethically problematic, event occurred
in England. The first baby ever conceived outside the human body
was born 8 1/2 months after doctors there united sperm and egg
in a laboratory petri dish and then implanted the embryo in the
mother's womb.

   Yet these events were not nearly as significant as the
Chinese decision to join the rest of the world. The Peking
People's Daily cheered on the modernization drive in evangelical
rhythms: "The Chinese peoples's march toward the great goal of
the Four Modernizations echoes from the foothills of the Yenshan
Mountains to the shores of the Yellow Sea to all corners of the
world and has aroused world-wide attention. We are setting out
to conquer on our New Long March the mountains, seas, plains,
oilfields and mines of our motherland. We want to scale the
heights of science and technology. We want to develop normal
trade relations with other countries of the world."

   To accomplish the journey, Teng and his backers have
embarked on what sometimes looks suspiciously like a capitalist
road. The new doctrinal slogan might be formulated thus: "Let
one hundred business deals blossom, let one hundred foreign
investors contend." Although very few Chinese have acquired much
individual freedom as part of the new enterprise, they are
discarding, without ceremony, much of their old ideological
baggage. Gone is the once sacred Maoist principle of national
self-reliance and independence from outside resources. Chinese
managers have heretically embraced such impure capitalist
devices as meritocratic promotions and other special treatment
for their best and brightest. A people that has traditionally
regarded all foreigners as barbarians has opened its gates to
the outer world; 530,000 tourists visited the Middle Kingdom
last year. So did thousands of capitalists dowsing for new
markets and investments in this promising territory. Perhaps
the two most startling pieces of symbolic revisionism: the
Chinese are planning to construct a golf course on the
outskirts of Peking, and have given Coca-Cola exclusive rights
to sell in the People's Republic.

   After dwelling so long beyond the world's gaze, the Chinese
suddenly seemed everywhere, bargaining intensely, cutting deals,
eager to learn how the rest of mankind makes things work. In
August, Hua visited Eastern Europe, where he gaily danced a hora
with Rumanian youths. That spectacle on their European front
did not amuse the Soviets, who keep 43 of their best combat
divisions tied down along their 4,500-mile border with China.
Teng went to Japan to ratify a peace and friendship treaty,
pledging amid champagne toasts to "let bygones be bygones." He
then flew to Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore, signing
scientific exchange agreements and preaching endlessly against
Soviet "hegmonism" (imperialism). Later this month, Teng will
visit the U.S. to give dramatic personal confirmation of the
new Chinese-American relations.

   On their junkets, Chinese delegations carried elaborate
shopping lists whose extravagance may far exceed the limits of
the Chinese budget. Although China's international credit rating
is excellent, the country has never dealt in the lofty sums now
being discussed. The Chinese hope to finance their
modernizations through development of oil exports, through joint
ventures in which they pay off their debts in goods manufactured
in foreign-built mainland factories, and through their immense
human resources: manpower and discipline. One shadow over the
New Long March, however, is doubt that the primitive Chinese
economy can rouse itself to meet the price. One freewheeling
guess is that the Four Modernizations could cost $800 billion
by 1985. The Chinese consumer market may be a long time in
developing. Despite all the current capitalist visions of the
new market opening upon the mainland, it may be years before the
Chinese can afford to pay for all they want. Among other
things, Chinese oil reserves, on which Peking heavily counts to
earn cash, are afflicted by a number of serious technical
problems, including a high wax content and great difficulty on
extraction owing to geological structure.

   But the Chinese are proceeding with ambitious vision. In
February, Japan and China signed a private trade agreement worth
$20 billion; China will export oil to Japan in exchange for
Japanese steel and factories. In a ceremony last month at
Peking's Great Hall of the People, Teng attended the signing
of a seven-year, $13.5 billion trade and cooperation agreement
with France. Its projects include French help in developing
Chinese communications satellites and TV broadcasting, the
modernization and extension of a steel complex, and the
construction of power stations, a magnesium plant and other
facilities. Most important, France landed an order for two 900-
megawatt nuclear power plants, at nearly $1 billion each.

   The Chinese went to the Swedes for cooperation in mining,
railroads and telecommunications, to the British for $315
million worth of coal-mining equipment, to the Danes for help
in improving Shanghai and other ports. They browsed in
Sweden, France and England for modern weaponry with which to
rearm the badly equipped military forces. They will probably
make only a few selective purchases at first, because of their
shortage of capital. Chinese and Americans kept up brisk
negotiations. Coastal States Gas Corp., a U.S. firm, agreed to
buy 3.6 million bbl. of Chinese crude, the first shipment to
arrive early this year. In accordance with its aim to double
annual steel production to 60 million tons in 1985, China
signed an agreement with Bethlehem Steel for the development
of an iron mine at Shuichang, in Hopei province.

   The wall that has so long imprisoned Chine in its immense,
opaque privacy collapsed so fast that some imaginations
projected a regretful vision of the Middle Kingdom overrun by
Instamatics and McDonald's. (In fact, the Chinese have consulted
McDonald's executives about possible fast-food techniques for
use in China.) Inter-Continental Hotels plans to build within
three years a chain of 1,000-room hotels, complete with swimming
pools and saunas, in Peking, Canton, Shanghai and other major
cities. Hyatt International has proposed the construction of
hotels with a total capacity of 10,000 rooms. Pan American and
several other airlines have entered bidding for landing rights
in China to bring in the tourist trade on a major scale.

   The Chinese are taking crash courses in foreign languages.
More than 1 million copies of Radio Peking's English course
have been sold in the capital. Some 10,000 Chinese students
will be dispatched to study overseas, a development that will
exert a profound, lasting effect on Chinese culture as the
students return. Some of the cultural juxtapositions are
startling: Haute Couture Designer Pierre Cardin went to China
and received permission to stage two fashion shows there in
March. When Teng went to Japan, his wife and the wives of four
other officials on the trip were turned out in trimly cut silk
jackets and pants, an elegant change from the monochrome Mao
suits that were for year's the Chinese women's revolutionary
uniform.

   Chinese stage shows and movies are in rapid transformation.
The Peking Cinema College reopened this year after having been
suspended for twelve years. The country's first X-rated film,
a Japanese movie about prostitution, was shown to Chinese
audiences and even defended by the Kwangming Daily, which said
that it "greatly enlightened and educated the Chinese audience."
The newspaper went on to argue that young people must be freed
from the straitjacket of the Cultural Revolution. "The great
spiritual wealth created by mankind were strange to them," it
said. "They never heard of such names as Boccaccio,
Michelangelo, Hugo and Mozart. Young people's minds were locked
up in airtight cells. Now the prison has been smashed."

   In a brief, astonishing display of what that liberty might
produce, posters that attacked Mao, praised Teng and alluded
favorably to the economic achievements of Taiwan went up at the
end of November on Peking's "democracy wall." In remarkably open
conversations with foreign newsmen, citizens of the capital
asked searching questions about nonsocialist political systems,
evincing particular interest in that of the U.S. Finally, a wall
poster addressed to Jimmy Carter appeared on democracy wall.
"We should like to ask you to pay attention to the state of
human rights in China," it said. "The Chinese people do not want
to repeat the tragic life of the Soviet people in the Gulag
Archipelago. This will be a real test for your promise on human
rights." The poster concluded with greetings to "your wife and
family," and was signed "The Human Rights Group." Authorities
removed the poster within a few hours, an indication that its
message was unsanctioned. Liberalization has its carefully
defined limits. The phenomenon of democracy wall, for all its
air of spontaneity, had a quality of official orchestration
about it.

   None of China's new international gregariousness should
obscure the bleak totalitarianism with which it maintains
internal discipline. The discipline may be eased at times, but
the mechanisms of control, especially through the Pao-wei
forces, the secret police, remain at government disposal. In a
report in November, Amnesty International, the human rights
organization based in London, recorded a number of legal
outrages. A teacher named Ho Chun-shu, for example, was said to
have been executed at the beginning of 1978 for writing and
distributing a "counter-revolutionary pamphlet." Last June,
however, China released about 110,000 people who had been jailed
since Mao's "antirightist" crackdown in 1957.

   It is an index of a new Chinese sensitivity to foreign
opinion that in November the People's Daily in Peking ran a full
page of five articles outlining human rights criticisms and
urging that new civil and criminal codes be adopted to protect
these rights. "In some places," said the People's Daily, "the
legal rights and interests of citizens are badly infringed.
Rations are cut. Private property is taken away, rural markets
are closed down, and legal economic activities are not
guaranteed. All of these things can still happen."

   What makes this sudden extroversion so fascinating is that
China, from its earliest times, has been largely obscured to
outside view and comprehension. Under its succession of imperial
dynasties, the Chinese defined the world as "all under heaven"
and themselves as celestials of the Celestial Empire.
"Throughout the ages," wrote Lu Hsun, "the Chinese have had only
two ways of looking at foreigners: up to them as superior beings
or down on them as wild animals. They have never been able to
treat them as friends, as people like themselves." China
traditionally looked inward, suffering a foreign presence only
when it was too weak to do otherwise. And during the half-
century after the first Opium War (1839-42), during the
Japanese Occupation of the 1930s and 1940s and during a brief
infatuation with the Soviet Union in the 1950s, the Chinese may
well have concluded that their prejudices were validated.

   Nonetheless, China has felt the hunger to modernize before.
Near the end of the Ch'ing dynasty in 1898, under the Emperor
Kuang Hsu, the Chinese tried to imitate the Japanese Emperor
Maeiji's transformation of Japan, from feudalism in the last
half of the 19th century. In the early days of Sun Yat-sen's
Republican China, an effort to streamline the society with
foreign help ended in a bitter failure that eventually turned
China toward puritanical socialism. The Chinese, wrote Historian
C.P. FitzGerald, "became disillusioned with the false gods of
the West. They turned restlessly to some other solution."

   After the People's Republic was founded in 1949, following
a generation-long civil war between Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang
and Mao's Communists, China eliminated chronic unemployment and
controlled the country's wanton inflation. But there were major
disruptions. Mao's Great Leap Forward (1958-60), with its
preposterous backyard pig-iron furnaces and bureaucratic romance
of communal farms, left the country in depression and famine.
Less than a decade later came the Cultural Revolution, a three-
year Maoist spasm of revolutionary zeal against the onset of
complacency and bureaucracy. The Cultural Revolution dislocated
nearly every institution of Chinese life, many of which still
have not recovered. A case can be made that Mao lived too long.
The Great Revolutionary died at 82, an enfeebled puppet. His
legacy, after the Cultural Revolution, was a ramshackle economy,
a badly equipped military and an educational system in which
intellect and learning had been superseded by a dank, Orwellian
passion for proletarian ideology.

   Teng's modernization campaign has its origins in Premier
Chou En-lai's report on the work of the government delivered at
the Fourth National People's Congress in 1975. It was the
Premier's last publicized appearance outside a hospital (he died
of cancer a year later). Chou sketched plans to improve China's
agriculture by 1980 as part of "the Four Modernizations" that
would "turn a poverty-stricken and backward country into a
socialist one with the beginnings of prosperity in only 20
years or more." That report (and the Four Modernizations slogan)
is widely believed to have been the work of Ten Hsiao-p'ing, the
little bureaucratic survivor, tough as a walnut, who was Chou's
protege.

   It is difficult for Westerners to understand how so vast
a population can psychologically reverse itself so quickly. It
is like trying to imagine an aircraft carrier turning on a dime.
Over the years, of course, the Chinese have been required to
perform wrenching changes of allegiance, as friends became
enemies and onetime heroes of the revolution underwent their
metamorphoses in the character assassins' wall-poster invective
that declared dissidents to be "insects," "pests" or "ferocious
feudal monsters." The process had bred measured of confusion,
sophistication, cynicism and nimbleness in the Chinese.

   But the Chinese character instinctively believes that life
constantly swings between extremes, that the law is always
change, reversal. The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the most
popular classical and historical novel in China, begins this
way: "They say that the momentum of history was ever thus: the
empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide."
In any case, the Chinese leaders, preparing for a reversal of
nearly everything for a reversal of nearly everything that Mao
Tse-tung taught, have proceeded by subtle indirection to
prepare the masses for de-Maofication.

   Beginning with their arrest in October 1976, members of the
radical Gang of Four, led by Mao's widow, Chiang Ch'ing, have
been held responsible for everything from crop failures to the
shortage of sidewalk cafes. Many of the accusations are
justified. But in China now, when a foreigner mentions the Gang
of Four, it often happens that the Chinese with whom he is
talking will hold up five fingers and say, "Ah, yes, the Gang
of Four." The small subversive joke reflects what most Chinese
accept: that Mao not only permitted but encouraged the
activities of his wife and her radical friends.

   In turning toward modernization, Teng and his backers are
attempting the delicate task of desanctifying Mao's memory
without besmirching it completely. With doctrinal legerdemain,
they put forth the line that Mao's philosophy was basically
correct, but that it was distorted and misapplied by his onetime
heir apparent Lin Piao -- now the most vilified historical
figure in China -- and the Gang. Mao's sponsorship of the
Cultural Revolution is excused on the grounds that he was aged,
infirm and confused.

   In their guardedly complementary roles, Hua and Teng have
so far managed to bridge the chasm between the sanctified but
turbulent Maoist past and the future. Hua, who owes his career
to Mao and honors his memory, pronounces, "Politics is the
commander, the soul of everything, and failure to grasp
political and ideological work will not do." During a conference
not long ago, when Hua expounded Mao's philosophy, Teng
retorted, "There are those who, day in and day out, talk of
nothing but Mao Tse-tung's thought while failing to grasp even
its most fundamental elements: practical experience, the
empirical method and the combination of theory with practice."

   Neither the Hua nor the Teng faction has an effective
majority on the Politburo. Both seem to understand that a
doctrinal bloodletting at this time over the debunking of Mao
would endanger the overall modernization program, on which both
sides basically agree. Thus an apparent compromise has been
struck. When posters appeared in Peking describing Mao's rule
as "fascist" and "dictatorial," Teng pronounced soothingly,
"Some utterances are not in the interest of stability and unity
and the Four Modernizations." He told visiting American
Columnist Robert Novak: "Every Chinese knows that without
Chairman Mao there would have been no new China. In the process
of achieving the Four Modernizations, we must be good at
comprehensively and accurately grasping and applying Mao
Tse-tung thought. There should be liveliness and ease of mind
in the political life in our country."

   In fact, the Chinese are being conditioned with some care
to accept doctrine so heretically un-Maoist that it could have
got a person imprisoned or executed a few years ago. One of the
first essentials has been to deprogram the deeply rooted
suspicion of things foreign. Hence the Kwangming Daily's recent
line: "It is completely un-Marxist to adopt the foolish attitude
of being complacent and arrogant and of uncritically excluding
foreign science, technology and culture. We advocate learning
from the strong points of all nations."

   Another movement under way is the rehabilitation of persons
considered "bourgeois." Kwangtung Radio announced that at
Canton's Rubber Plant No. 7, "six former bourgeois owners"
discharged during the Cultural Revolution have been rehired and
assigned to administrative and production jobs. This is a clear
application of Teng's pragmatism: it is a person's technical
knowledge that the new China wants, not his political purity.

   The Chinese emphasis on efficiency and competence can
sometimes sound like an American political campaign against Big
Government interference. The provincial radio station in Kansu
complained in November: "There are too may inspection groups at
company, bureau, municipal and provincial levels." The station
objected that the number of slogan banners displayed at
factories is often used as the criterion for judging whether the
plant is dong well. In addition, "there are too many meetings."

   A call has gone out for correct book-keeping. During the
Cultural Revolution and its aftermath, said the People's Daily,
leaders were interested only in "political accounts, not
economic accounts. As a result, accounting work was greatly
weakened and financial management was very confused."

   Management of the highest order will be needed to achieve
the Four Modernizations. Of these, agriculture probably has the
highest priority; it is also the most difficult. The Peking
leadership has set a goal of producing 400 million tons of
wheat, rice and other grains by 1985 and for achieving
substantial agricultural mechanization by 1980. Both goals seem
too ambitious. Though land in China is intensively cultivated
and Chinese farmers are known for their innovation and
diligence, yields lag far behind those of other countries.
Peking has conferred with foreign farm experts, including U.S.
Secretary of Agriculture Bob Bergland, about new seed varieties,
the use of insecticides and the exchange of specialists. While
the Chinese have made some progress toward mechanization, they
need more than 1 million additional tractors, 320,000 trucks,
at least 3 million combine harvesters, new drainage and
irrigation machinery repair and maintenance. The hardware will
be difficult to get, since farm equipment is normally bought
with surplus capital, which China must ordinarily use to
purchase grain from abroad. Result: China is likely to remain
a net importer of grain, and the rationing of edible oils and
other staples will probably continue.

   Foreign investment and technical aid will go far in
bringing China's industrial capacity into the 20th century,
the goal of the second modernization. Imitating such developing
countries as Singapore and South Korea, the People's Republic
has invited foreign companies to establish assembly and
processing plants inside China. The Chinese work cheap -- at
about $25 a month, one-fifth of the average wage for an
unskilled factory worker in Hong Kong.

   But the problems of industrializing a country so primitively
equipped are huge. China's gross national product was only $373
billion in 1977, compared to $1.889 trillion for the U.S. The
Chinese per capita income was a lamentable $378. A generator
plant in Harbin uses lathes, punch presses and milling machines
that were built two and three decades ago in Czechoslovakia,
East Germany and the Soviet Union. Japan builds 94 cars per
worker per year; in China the comparable figures are one car,
one worker. Steel, the essential building component for heavy
industry, is regarded as a precious metal in China. The
production goal for 1985 is 60 million tons; last year it fell
just short of the halfway mark. Teng is characteristically
candid about the problem. He refers to lo hou (lagging behind).
"If you have an ugly face," he says, "there is no use pretending
you are handsome. You cannot hide it, so you might just as well
admit it."

   One of the areas hardest hit by the turbulence of the
Cultural Revolution was science/technology; the finest minds
were sent to the country to learn egalitarianism and pig
farming. Intellectuals until recently were branded as "stinking
persons of the ninth category." (The first eight categories
being the other loathsome characters to be got ride of:
renegades, spies, capitalist roaders, landlords, rich peasants,
counter-revolutionaries, bad people, rightists.)

   As a result, the Chinese pool of scientists and engineers
who kept up to date on their various fields grew perilously
small. Teng's modernization drive now aims at rehabilitating
scientists who were shunted to other work, at re-establishing
research institutes and academies. According to one report, in
Szechwan province alone 12,000 scientists and technicians have
so far been returned to their old jobs from unrelated
professions.

   Despite the political depredations of Maoist anti-
intellectualism, the Chinese are probably more confident of
progress in this area than in any other of the Four
Modernizations. The initial Chinese objective is the
establishment within five years of research network for the
basic sciences, then a system of modern laboratories that will
press on with research into what the Chinese (who have a sort
of political fetish for numbers) call the Five Golden Blossoms:
atomic science, semiconductors, computer technology, lasers,
and automation. In March, Vice Premier Fang Yi reported an
eight-year timetable for China to begin the launching of space
laboratories and probes.

   Teng seems to have recognized the tumble-down state of
Chinese learning. Today there are only about 630,000 university
students in a population of 1 billion. Nationwide examinations
for admission to universities were dropped in 1966 as part of
the egalitarianism of the Cultural Revolution. Now they have
not only been reinstated, but they have become rigorous and
uniform. Elite schools have been established and given the best
teachers and facilities. Among teachers, ranks and titles have
been restored. Salary increases and other perquisites have been
adopted. But the intellectual infrastructure of China is still
cripplingly weak.

   The fourth modernization, that of the military, will be
almost as difficult to accomplish. Although it has the world's
largest standing army (about 3 1/2 million), China's military
machine is primitive, at least 20 years behind those of the
superpowers. China's most potent bomber is the antiquated TU-16
of 1954. The People's Liberation Army has no antitank missiles,
no armored helicopters and no modern battle tanks. Its nuclear
warheads are mounted on intermediate-range missiles with a range
of no more than 4,000 miles. Although China's navy is the
world's third largest (in terms of manpower, not of ships), it
is also outdated: its two nuclear-powered submarines, for
example, carry no missiles.

   China's obsessive military concern remains the U.S.S.R.,
just as Moscow's prevailing concern is the nature of Peking's
goals. Peking's new open door policy toward the rest of the
world will make it a stronger and more flexible rival of Moscow
in the years to come. By simultaneously cultivating ties with
Western -- and even Eastern -- Europe and with Japan, China is
developing flank protection on two sides of its Soviet enemy.

   The emerging pattern exasperates Moscow. Among other
things, the Soviets profess astonishment that the West is
willing to sell weapons to an unreliable China that still speaks
of the inevitability of war. At the same time, the Russians seem
willing enough to accept the normalization of relations between
the U.S. and China, so long as the new friendship does not
produce a tacit anti-Soviet alliance. Warns Georgi Arbatov, a
Soviet expert of U.S. policy: "You cannot reconcile detente with
attempts to make China some sort of military ally of NATO." A
Western diplomat also cautioned: "I wonder if an economically
and militarily powerful China by the year 2000 would be an
unmitigated blessing for American interests. Would a China
strong enough to threaten Russia in nuclear terms not constitute
any threat to us at all?

   The U.S. normalization of relations with the People's
Republic brings to full circle an extraordinary one-century
course of American involvement in China. It is a history of
passionate infatuation and ruthless exploitation, of missionary
zeal and often of tremendous mutual incomprehension. The cycle
started with the education in Hartford, Conn., of China's first
foreign students in 1872. Eventually, as Dean Acheson wrote,
"hardly a town in our land was without its society to collect
funds and clothing for Chinese missions ... Thus was nourished
the love portion of our love-hate complex that was to infuse so
much emotion into our later China policy."

   If there was condescending benevolence on America's part,
there was also a deep cultural fascination -- on both sides.
Eventually many Americans seemed to have found in Chinese
society forgotten revolutionary hopes transplanted from their
own, and many Chinese discovered an unsuspected delight (even
Mao finally did) in the mobility and openness of American
society, the antithesis of China's own introspective and
hierarchical world. In the last 1970s, many Americans are
inclined to forget their view of the Chinese, during the Korean
War, as a menacing ant-people in quilted jackets swarming across
the Yalu River and brainwashing American innocents.

   The  most fascinating thing about China now is that it is
a society facing almost infinite possibilities: No one, perhaps
least of all the Chinese, knows how the tremendous experiment
will end. Talking to a Japanese political delegation in Tokyo
last October about a territorial dispute, Teng remarked: "Let's
put it off for ten or 20 years. After that, who knows what kind
of system we'll have?

   For the moment, Teng, Hua and their Politburo colleagues
seem too intent upon the task of modernization to jeopardize it
by making aggressive noises, either to foreigners or to
themselves. The consensus among Sinologists is that Teng is
indeed the man in charge; he holds enough power to be able to
take his revenge on old Radical enemies, but still operates
within constraints. "There are still some people in the
Politburo who probably don't like the trends," says A. Doak
Barnett of the Brookings Institution. "But these same people are
also uneasy because of their past complicity, so to speak, in
the purges of Teng. I think they will now be very careful in
voicing their dissent."

   Some Sinologists have long predicted that China would swing
away from the ideological conflicts of Mao's last days to some
form of pragmatic modernization. "The extreme emphasis on
utopian social goals," says Barnett, "was asking more out of a
population than any population can be expected to give." Still,
there is a very real danger that the Peking leaders could
oversell their program to the Chinese people and thus provoke
disillusionment and bitterness if there are no noticeable
changes for the better in the next few years.

   The Politburo clearly faces very hard decisions on how to
allocate what are limited resources, considering the size of
the task. If China must import 10 million tons of grain to feed
its people by 1981, argues Swarthmore College Sinologist Kenneth
Lieberthal, it will be almost impossible for the country to
carry out its industrialization program at the speed it
foresees. Also at issue will be what happens to the Four
Modernizations if Teng dies before they are well under way. The
basic Teng-Hua conflict would then be unresolved. In
Lieberthal's formulation: "While all current Politburo members
desperately want rapid modernization, Teng and his supporters
are willing to transform China at a greater cost to the core
values of the Chinese Revolution than are Hua and his
supporters."

   TIME Hong Kong Correspondent Ross H. Munro, who until last
December was a resident reporter in Peking for the Toronto Globe
and Mail, has a more optimistic perspective:

   "Teng can be seen as setting up booby traps for any neo-
quasi-Maoists who might try to renege on the commitment to
modernization and try to return China to insularity. When Teng
is dead, China will still have commitments to foreign creditors
that will force it to continue pushing exports and internal
economic development. When Teng is  dead, there will probably be
tens of thousands of bright young men and women in China who
have been exposed to foreign teachers and foreign ideas and who
will resist any return to xenophobia and romantic Maoism. And
there may even be a military that will be unable to function
without parts and technology from Hamburg or Los Angeles. Teng
is thus beginning to lock China into the non-Communist orbit. If
current trends continue for a decade, it is hard to conceive of
China extricating itself from the orbit even if the modernization
drive falters within the country."

   And what of Teng himself, the persistent heretic who gives
lip service to the ideas of the Great Helmsman but who violates
their spirit? Speaking as a historian and not as Carter's
National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski offers one
answer. "Any large system of thought and practice," he says,
"lends itself to so many divergent interpretations that it is
possible to be both a continuator and a dismantler of a certain
ideological system at the same time. Trotsky and Stalin charged
each other with being betrayers of Leninism, and each claimed
to be the true inheritor of Leninism. In some respects, both
were right in both instances." Perhaps inadvertently, Mao once
gave his blessing to this kind of interpretation with his
famous quote before the misbegotten great Leap Forward: "Let a
hundred flowers blossom, let a hundred schools of thought
contend."

   In an essay called the Hedgehog and the Fox, British Social
Theorist Isaiah Berlin divided the world's thinkers into two
categories, using as his guide an enigmatic fragment from the
Greek poet Archilochus: "The fox knows many things; the
hedgehog knows one big thing." Mao was quintessential hedgehog,
a visionary with one organizing determinist principle to which
he insisted the great diverse Chinese reality must conform.
Hedgehogs like totalitarian worlds. Foxes can tolerate
diversity, variety, change, disorder, the sheer plurality of
life. It may be fateful for China's future that Teng Hsiao-
p'ing, who languished for years in the shadow of China's
hedgehog, is most certainly a fox.