WITNESS: China's long march from Mao to modernity

Jonathan Sharp first reported in China for Reuters from 1972 to 1974, when he witnessed the stirrings of the nation's emergence from the trauma of Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution. On bike-crowded streets, in spartan shops and among wary crowds of drab-clothed locals, Sharp saw a poor and isolated people groping for a way forward. Now, on the 30th anniversary of the launch of China's economic reforms, Beijing is a car-crowded mega-city of glass and steel buildings and garish consumerism. A short, chain-smoking Communist veteran, Deng Xiaoping, was instrumental in forging that transformation. And Sharp was there to watch him first re-emerge from Mao's shadow.

By Jonathan Sharp

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Amidst the cacophonous consumerism of today's China, it may be hard to imagine that 35 years ago, the sole imported item available in Beijing's main department store was cigarettes. Made in Albania.

And outside in the street that was Beijing's version of Fifth Avenue or Oxford Street, only occasional motor vehicles disturbed the ceaseless stream of bicycles.

There was no doubt about the spartan quality of life in the early 1970s before the onset of reforms under Deng Xiaoping which would eventually transform China into the world's fourth-largest economy. But the perceived tranquility was deceptive.

For behind the walls of the Zhongnanhai leadership compound, an epic struggle appeared to be playing out that would decide China's destiny.

The worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution that broke out in 1966 and formally ended in 1976 were over. In fact Beijing-based foreign reporters in the early 1970s wrote about the Cultural Revolution as if it finished in 1969, and they were not corrected by their minders in the Foreign Ministry.

But the decidedly un-comradely battle which foreign observers believed was being fought out between hardliners and moderates was still going full tilt.

According to those attempting to read the Chinese tea leaves, this conflict pitted hard-left firebrands led by Jiang Qing, wife of the increasingly enfeebled Mao Zedong, and a more moderate group, presumed to be led by Premier Zhou Enlai.

And Jiang and her cohorts, later demonized as the Gang of Four, appeared to be winning.

READING BETWEEN THE LINES

The mass of China's people, perhaps weary of being whipsawed by violent ideological crosswinds, and wary of saying anything that could get them into trouble, docilely followed this struggle in the Communist Party mouthpiece, the People's Daily, pinned up on street-side notice boards.

For months on end, the People's Daily railed against the evils of two men. One, Lin Biao, was an obvious target: his 1971 plot to oust Mao was thwarted and he died in a plane crash while fleeing.

The attacks on the other chief mischief-maker, Confucius, were more puzzling since the sage, who laid down firm precepts on relationships, including those between rulers and subjects and between parents and children, had been dead for 2,500 years.

But Chinese people were well versed at reading between the delphic lines. And anyway they had far more to think about than a behind-the-scenes power struggle taking place in a corner of Beijing that very few people were privileged to glimpse.

The world of the "broad masses," as they were termed, seemed to outside observers at least to be one of adequate, but uninspiring and often rationed necessities.

The government boasted of its iron rice bowl -- a guarantee that the state would supply the basic needs for life, including education, healthcare and housing, at token cost.

The problem was that the economy had little to fill the bowl with. The good news was that whatever was available appeared, to outsiders at least, to be evenly shared out.

Beijingers looked to be adequately fed. Children were rosy-cheeked. Restaurants were busy. Department store shelves were full, if not with any of the goods now taken for granted by today's generation.

The odors pervading Beijing streets were those of old and much-laundered clothes and the garlic that spiced up the dull food. One of the few touches of color in this drab world were the Mao badges worn by many, but by no means all, of the population.

Entertainment was turgid, a staple being the bizarre Cultural Revolution-era Peking Operas stamped with the Jiang Qing seal of approval.

GREAT LEAP BACKWARD

Foreigners were kept at arms length. When a peasant woman near the Ming Tombs accepted a lift from a foreign reporter, the incident prompted an Indian diplomat to record it in his dispatches as if it were some kind of sea change in attitudes to foreigners.

The vast majority of the population, living on the land, was corralled into immense communes, set up in the 1958 Great Leap Forward, a campaign that proved to be a Great Leap Backward, killing tens of millions.

It was also a world of severely limited horizons. Foreigners were met with incredulous stares and, on occasion, mild hysterics. A bus load of foreign reporters arriving in the city of Harbin drew a gigantic crowd.

Chinese people were micro-managed: routine family decisions were vetted by authorized neighborhood busybodies. It didn't pay to offend the current powers that be.

Large areas of the city were off limits, including the enormous History Museum bordering Tiananmen Square. The leadership had presumably not decided which version of China's history was suitable for public consumption.

And there was little sign of economic development. The capital and other big cities seemed to be in a state of semi-paralysis.

There was some movement in Beijing, however, notably in the compounds designated for the foreign community. High-rise blocks were sprouting to accommodate the fast-rising population of diplomats and foreign business people.

Western nations were falling over each other to beat a path to China's door. U.S. President Richard Nixon visited in February 1972, and the U.S. Liaison Office, short of a full embassy but staffed with high-caliber diplomats, opened in early 1973 headed by the statesman-like David Bruce. He was succeeded in 1974 by George H.W. Bush.

Celebrity visitors to Beijing included U.S. actress Shirley MacLaine, who on May Day 1973 strolled through a park hand in hand with Madame Zhou Enlai. Symphony orchestras from Britain, Austria and the United States performed before rapt audiences.

There was a palpable sense that China was loosening up -- albeit at a glacial rate. Boeing 707s and British Tridents began to appear in the wide open spaces of China's airports. A new wing of the Beijing Hotel opened, complete with innovations that included a bar and automatic doors.

Then at a banquet at the Great Hall of the People in 1973 honoring Cambodian leader Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the Foreign Ministry minders nudged the reporters, saying they had a big story in front of their eyes.

That story was the appearance of a diminutive, crew-cut figure, back in the public eye after years in disgrace. That man still had further bitter political wars to fight and win before emerging as one of China's most spectacular agents of change in the 20th century.

That man was Deng Xiaoping.

(Editing by Nick Macfie and Dean Yates)