China packages past reforms to guide its present

BEIJING (Reuters) - As China battles an economic downturn that could erode Communist Party control, its leaders are embracing events of 30 years ago to reaffirm reformist policies that took the nation from Mao jackets to business suits.

Beijing this month celebrates the 30th anniversary since the start of "reform and opening up" in 1978 with a torrent of speeches, conferences and propaganda spectacles.

The message is plain.

"Today, only if we promote reform and opening up can we solve the problems that emerge as we advance," the official People's Daily said on Monday.

The celebrations focus on a famed Party leadership meeting when, according to the propaganda, pragmatic Deng Xiaoping wrested control from Maoist die-hards and set the country on a bold course of market reforms that has extended up to now.

"At a time when there has been debate about whether China has been right in choosing reform, and whether reform should continue, the central leaders want to stress their commitment," said Han Gang, a historian at East China Normal University in Shanghai who specializes in the period.

Yet the history being celebrated comes swaddled in myths fostered by a Party that packages its past as a succession of wise leaders. Scholars sifting through interviews, memoirs and documents describe a much more complicated course that defies clear divisions and neat endings.

As the current Communist Party chief, Hu Jintao, vows a new tide of reforms to counter China's current woes, chipping away at the historical myths matters, said Wu Si, editor of China Through the Ages (Yan huang chun qiu), a Beijing magazine.

"If you present the past as the perfect, simple summation of what China needs now, then you don't need new medicine," said Wu, whose magazine publishes memoirs challenging many Party taboos.

"But if you see it in a different light, then you can see the need for a fresh prescription."

A NATION OF EPIC MEETINGS

In the same way that some nations celebrate epic battles, China's bureaucrat-rulers celebrate their epic meetings as milestones of national progress.

The Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party marks China's shift from the turmoil and isolation of Mao Zedong's radical Cultural Revolution (1966-76) to an era of pragmatic reforms and economic opening.

The formal meeting of 290 senior officials lasted five days from December 18, 1978, but it was preceded by a less formal "working conference" from November 10 that Chinese textbooks record as the moment when the tide began to turn in favor of reform.

Official accounts describe how revolutionary veterans who had suffered under Mao's capricious power pushed aside the meeting agenda to press their demands that loyal but persecuted officials be rehabilitated.

Mao's milder successor, Hua Guofeng, fixated on guarding the legacy of the Cultural Revolution, was taken off guard by this eruption of demands, these accounts say.

Deng -- a canny survivor purged but spared by Mao -- emerged to overshadow Hua as the true leader. Deng's vision of pragmatic economic reform came to dominate and his speech to the work conference and the communique from the Plenum then set China's course of "reform and opening up."

A STORY TO CLING TO

Deng (1904-97) was undoubtedly a key figure in his country's transition for Mao's turbulent era and undoubtedly the events of December 1978 played a big part in that transition.

"Deng was a revolutionary veteran with experience in the military, foreign policy, the Party organization, even finance," said Ezra Vogel, a professor at Harvard University now working on a biography of Deng.

"He'd also had years in the political wilderness to think about his views ... So Deng had honed his views by this time to an unusual degree."

But a growing pile of memoirs, documents and witness accounts shows that Deng was being frank when he likened reform to groping across a river, said Vogel and other historians.

Deng came to support the farming reforms -- now celebrated as the bold opening act of reform -- in a faltering way.

The 1978 meeting expressly opposed threatening Mao's communes by encouraging the spread of family-contract farm plots, and Deng began to endorse the family-contract reforms only from 1980.

Nor was Hua, who died this year, the die-hard foe of change portrayed by many, said Frederick C. Teiwes, a professor at the University of Sydney who is co-writing a history of the period.

But an official love for stories with clear-cut heroes and villains has often obscured the complexities of Chinese politics, said Teiwes.

"There's this need for the Party to have a narrative that people can salute," said Teiwes. "They've got their story to explain the period and they cling to it."

Even the phrase "reform and opening up," now so prominent in anniversary propaganda, was not used in 1978, said Chen Ziming, a former publisher and dissident who is studying the period.

"The idea of reform and opening up only became widely current from 1987," said Chen.

"In China, messy history is always being dressed up to look neat, but politics is always more complicated than that."

(Editing by Nick Macfie and Dean Yates)