Deng and the Wild Pragmatism

Deng and the Wild Pragmatism

By: Erreh Svaia

Caprine Dispersion

"Purged" twice during Mao's "Cultural Revolution" in China, for Mao, Deng was a "reformer" and many of Deng's policies went against what Mao was supposed to be the country, Deng was removed from power central, isolated for a short time and after the death of Mao, Deng Xiaoping managed to maneuver properly to regain political strength and to leave out the strong cards designated by the Communist Party of China to seize power, in a moment of great disappointment with respect to the policies of Mao and the Party, which had put the country at a disadvantage, Deng knew how to "sell" his vision to the Politburo, his search for “truth from facts”, his controversial initiatives, despite many of them going against the nature of the party, had reactivated the economy in several regions far from the political center of the country, it was time for Deng, to demonstrate if he was able to implement them nationally, his maxim on the lack of importance "in the color of the cat ", as long as it kils mice, summarized his powerful and iconoclastic vision of applying what he had seen in a country like Singapore (with the help of the great Lee Kuan Yew) in a great country like China, a pragmatic vision that sought to combine the socialist ideology with a free market approach, nothing simple for a nation that had lived for decades under the dogmatic vision of Maoism, but in the case of Deng, his vision and mission were clear, open China to the world, or fall into obsolescence of the Soviet Union, which at the beginning of the 80s, was beginning to be evident, for this, the "Beijing Spring" would be the first step in a route towards internal opening, allowing a certain degree of criticism towards the party in power, and towards the outside, gradually allowing the entry of foreign investment, events that would become a strong inspiration for many closed economies that saw in Deng's China, a sign of a new global dynamic that was to come.

For Deng, the seemingly opposite forces of planning and the markets really lacked that differential that the dogmas pointed out with great insistence, Deng did not see a planned economy as a requirement of socialism, nor did he see the market forces outside planning, for what in pragmatic vision was the sure possibility of combining them to obtain the best of both worlds, somehow Deng was able to understand the maximum vision of someone like Marx who was looking for the final liberation and maximum development of the means of production, for this Deng sought to generate ideas and reforms from the bottom up, contrary to what happened during the period of Soviet "liberalization" in which initiatives detonated from top to bottom found great resistance and failure.

Deng was able to identify two key variables in the future development of China, the first, the enormous productive capacity of the country, a colossal machine that had everything to become a commercial monster and that had to look for the opening of the markets and the high competitiveness, second , the search for a strengthening in the domestic market to serve as a second engine and ensure growth at all costs of the country, Deng's vision was successful, and thus China would gradually advance to open its borders and become a powerful exporter of goods, that, while the population was improving their standards of living and was generating a robust internal market that would become the envy and the example of many other nations that would follow similar routes.

Part of Deng's legacy would be his pragmatic handling of the economy, his total openness to experiments such as the so-called "one country, two systems" that gave Hong Kong some latitude and closely watched the growth of that region through trade, and It sought to adapt it to the socialist dynamic, opening the way to the current politics and nature of China, which today celebrates the free market, globalization, competition, productivity, capitalism and socialism under a very particular Chinese version, in a world with a population worried to the extreme by the uncertainty experienced in the year 2008, and before the emergence of false "nationalist-populist" prophets, it would seem that Deng's pragmatic vision, and the "Chinese Way" could be imposed in a world that requires certain security, pragmatism and connectivity, added to the discipline and control developed in this Eastern colossus, in the largest political laboratory (South Asia), the world's economic and social community, which has seen the birth of this kind of "hard-line capitalism with a planned orientation towards the free market", led by the "4 Asian tigers (South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan)" who have also embraced their own version of democracy, transparency, the fight against corruption and the rule of law to bring an enormous human mass to improve the standards of living, the future points to Lee Kuan Yew and Deng as the great visionaries of what is yet to come.