By Hu Shuli
 
As we enter 2008, China’s era of “reform and opening” will be welcoming its 30th anniversary. Lively public debate in the coming year is certain to include a look back at the path traveled during the reform period and discussions about the experiences brought. The saying goes that the past is significant for what it can tell us about the future. This is why we believe it is important that any anniversary commemoration should begin with the premise that we will not forget where it is reform came from. As Lenin wrote, “To forget the past is a form of betrayal.”

So why was it that the Communist Party of China in late 1978 made the enormously significant policy decision that set in motion the movement of reform and opening? Those who lived through the years that separate us from the China of 30 years past know full well why. This is really not a difficult question to answer. But for some years now, there have been prominent arguments in China about the rights and wrongs of reform. In many cases, the question’s basic answer has become taboo, or has been glossed over, or has faded from memory. This has meant many young people find it hard to learn why reform was instituted. It is only with such a “forgetting” that certain people are able to paint the economically stagnant, poor and backward country that China was on the eve of reform as some kind of carefree, utopian land of plenty, a fantasy that can then serve as the object for their nostalgia. Only with such amnesia can certain voices publicly attack the dismantling of the planned economy and the move to the market as “implementing capitalism,” or say that Deng Xiaoping and others were following a “capitalist reformist line.” (see Wu Jinglian’s article in Caijing’s 2008 year-end edition). Belief in reform has been shaken, and there has been a period during which calls have been heard for reform to be halted or even reversed. These are direct outcomes of “forgetting.”

This was why, in his report to the 17th Party Congress CPC Central Committee, General Secretary Hu Jintao presented an account of the roots of reform. He stressed that the party’s second-generation leadership, centered around Deng Xiaoping, embarked on the momentous undertaking of reform and opening because “they faced a perilous situation created by the 10-year Cultural Revolution.” In an article in a recent issue of the central party’s theoretical journal Qiu Shi (Seeking Truth), Hu Jintao set out still more clearly that the internal reasons for reform lay in the serious setbacks and losses that 10 years of domestic chaos had brought upon the party, nation and people. Comrade Deng Xiaoping said that when the Cultural Revolution came to an end, “in terms of the overall political situation, things were in a state of chaos. As for the state of the economy, the reality was that development was slow and the economy stagnant.” The external context for reform was that, during the same period, a new technological revolution surged onto the global stage, pushing the world’s economy to ever-faster growth. The gap between China and the advanced nations was clearly growing wider, and we faced enormous international competitive pressure.

Hu Jintao reiterated a characterization once given by Deng Xiaoping: “We must catch up with the times. This is the goal that reform must achieve.” This provides a penetrating and profound statement of the objective of reform.

That Hu Jintao would twice speak frankly about the disaster wrought upon China by the decade-long Cultural Revolution, which he regards as the internal motivation for launching reform, should prompt our serious consideration. We are reminded of Deng Xiaoping’s thinking on this, the strong sense of impending crisis he felt -- and the pressing desire to revitalize the economy -- in Yu Guangyuan’s piece, which opens the “Memories of Reform” special feature in this issue (see “Drafting a Speech for Deng Xiaoping”). We predict that an important feature of both official and popular commemorations of the 30th anniversary of reform and opening will be to directly address the faults of the old system and the lessons of the Cultural Revolution. There also will be an attempt to summarize the experiences of reform. These will all proceed from a desire to understand the great reform project. The most vital significance of this will be to confirm our belief in reform and give impetus to its continued advancement.

History will not be forgotten. After the 10 years of chaos that reigned between 1966 and ’76, China was in a political mess, society was in an upheaval, and the national economy stood on the brink of collapse. During the same period, the world economy was growing rapidly. The per-capita GDP in one after another developed nation broke through the US＄ 10,000 barrier. China, however, had become one of the poorest countries in the world by 1978, with a per capita GDP of just US＄ 148, much lower than contemporary Pakistan at US＄ 260 and India at US＄ 248. One learns from painful experience; without reform there was no future. Both party and people at the time shared the view that the nation should be restored to vitality through reform.
 
Starting with the third full plenum of the 11th Party Congress, China resolutely cast aside the erroneous “class struggle at the core” line and shifted the focus of work to building the economy. Over the past 30 years, two threads have run right through the whole process of reform and opening: reform that moves away from a centralized, planned economy to a market one; and a transformation from a closed or semi-closed state to fully opening to the outside world. The 30-year road to reform has been long and tortuous. Yet, looking back, it all seems to have gone by in the blink of an eye. The direct result of reform and opening has been China’s economic rise. Between 1978 and 2006, China’s economy grew at an annual rate of 9.7 percent more than 13 times, far higher than world average growth rates of around 3 percent for the same period. The overall size of the economy now ranks fourth in the world. The volume of import and export trade has grown more than eight times, so that China is now the third largest trading nation in the world. The disposable income of urban residents and the gross income of rural residents have each increased 5.7 times since 1978. The number of rural people living below the poverty line has fallen to some 20 million from 250 million. As Hu Jintao has said, “The facts eloquently attest that reform and opening has been the key decision determining the fate of contemporary China, and a road that had to be taken to develop socialism with Chinese characteristics and achieve the momentous revival of the Chinese nation.”

In recent years, the great cause of China’s reform and opening has again faced a complex situation. Domestically, reform moved into deeper waters, where a different pace of political, economic, cultural and social reform saw the emergence of a whole raft of problems. Impediments to reform have been growing, and doubts about the whole reform project have emerged. Abroad, the tide of globalization added new, major variables to contests between various political and economic forces. China’s economic rise is itself part of globalization and has been quietly changing old rules of the game; we now see a sharp contest between these old and new rules. Addressing this new context will be no simple matter. But fortunately, policymakers have already settled upon an overall strategy of continued reform.

In this sense, we may be aware that celebrating the 30th anniversary of reform this year is not a mere coincidence of timing. Reviewing the past for new insight requires strategic courage and wisdom, and we should spur onward along the road ahead.