China packages past reforms to guide its present

By Chris Buckley

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.