So does Beijing, which probably explains why Wang and other neoconservatives aren’t in jail for criticizing Deng. The neocons have become a font of favorite ideas for Deng’s likely successor, President Jiang Zemin, who heaped praise on Wang’s 1993 anti-Deng tome, “Looking at China Through a Third Eye.” As Jiang and Vice Premier Zhu Rongji search for ways to revive the lifeless corpus of socialism, they have encouraged the neocons to speak out. Though hardly a unified brain trust, the neocons do agree that China needs a new ideological faith and orderly growth–in short, a halfway retreat from Dengism to the guiding hand of the state.
They would start by narrowing the income gap between the stagnant interior and coastal free-market zones created by Deng. “We should send coal to people caught in a cold winter, not flowers to pretty ladies,” says neocon economist Hu Angang, who calls for massive spending in the countryside–an idea one Western aid expert calls “a Chinese New Deal.” If it sounds like rural populism, its ulterior aim is to slow the ongoing migration of job-seeking peasants to urban areas, which dates to the 1978 launch of Deng’s reforms. Wang Shan calls the 120 million migrants an “an active volcano.”
The neocons know how to tap urban workers’ fears of waidiren (outsiders) and job insecurity. They vow to restore central authority, and use it to transform state enterprises into the main engine of the economy. Jiang, for example, has already adopted a neocon-backed plan to protect an estimated 30 million redundant workers with massive new subsidies. That will effectively reverse Deng’s privatization campaign, which the neocons lampoon as “giving assets away to foreigners.”
The patriotic fervor is already reflected in Beijing’s fulminations against American “imperialism” in the Pacific. “This kind of rhetoric appeals to unsophisticated minds–which this government is full of,” complains a senior Western diplomat in Beijing. “A country as big as China needs something to keep itself cohesive,” responds historian Xiao Gongqin. “Nationalism is the unavoidable choice.”
The neocons face plenty of challengers: from fundamentalists who would revive Maoism whole to liberals pushing for more reform. They will all clash later this year, when the annual Communist Party gathering is due to reconsider its basic beliefs for the first time in a decade. By putting ideology at the top of the agenda, says China specialist Joseph Fewsmith, Jiang has admitted that the crisis of faith can no longer be ignored. And for now, it looks like the neocons will come out on top.
