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Thirdly, Deng stands for the preservation of what he regards as the essentials of socialism. These are the leadership of the Party in the political sphere and public ownership of land and capital in the economic sphere. But it is clear that he has little use for egalitarianism ("equal pay for unequal work") and is prepared to overlook /dogma that the employment of labour by a private employer is "exploitation". Wage and salary differentials are widening in China and many people are now employed in private concerns. It is also the case that his defence of the campaign against "bourgeois liberalisation", as I heard him expound it to Mr Heath in mid-April, is a low-church rather than a high-church defence. The campaign is necessary to prevent "total westernisation", which is unacceptable because it would threaten the social stability essential to economic progress. He did not talk about preventing "reaction", "counter- revolution" or retrogression from a higher to a lower "historical stage". Perhaps he would not have done during a talk with a senior Western politician. But I have detected no sign of talk of this kind in what he has been saying to other foreign visitors, including visitors from Communist countries.
14. Having said all this, I return to the questions I asked in paragraph 2. What will be on the agenda for the Thirteenth Party Congress? In what atmosphere will the Congress take place? How is it likely to turn out?
The Agenda of the Thirteenth Congress
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15. It is certain, I think, that two subjects will be on the agenda. These are political reform (or reform of the political structure) and the composition of the Thirteenth Central Committee. On political reform, I would expect the Congress to debate a document which develops the themes about which Deng has been speaking. Any such document would be bound, I believe, to trace the relationship between political reform and economic reform and to describe the relationship between the reform programme as a whole and the campaign against "bourgeois liberalisation". On this second relationship, I would be surprised if it departed from the line which was taken in a recent editorial of the "People's Daily": that the rejection of reform would lead to the denial of the four cardinal principles* (the alleged target of "bourgeois liberalisation"), but that the rejection of the four cardinal principles would lead to the denial of reform. The logic of this is that the rejection of reform would put socialism at risk, by making it less successful and therefore less popular; and that the rejection of socialism would put reform at risk, by depriving it of the environment of political stability necessary for its success. There would be something in each of these propositions, so that what at first sight looks like a meretricious piece of dialectics may embody genuine sentiment. In any case, the formula is ingenious, yoking together those who are enthusiastic about reform and those who hanker after democratic centralism and five-year planning as they were practiced in the 1950s.
* Adherence to the socialist road, the people's democratic
dictatorship, Communist Party leadership and Marxism-Leninism- Mao Zedong thought.