The Malaysian Insider

NOV 27 — My 35-year journalistic career has been characterised by a deep concern for the fate of communism, for China is a communist country.

My first overseas assignment as a journalist was to Belgrade in 1978 to see if China could borrow a page from the Yugoslav development model. My last — since I am retiring next Thursday — was to Berlin earlier this month to find out what lessons China could glean from the demise of communism in Eastern Europe.

My 1978 trip was closely connected to China's reform and open-door policy. Following Mao Zedong's death in 1976, Deng Xiaoping took over the reins in 1977, inheriting a China traumatised by the Cultural Revolution and close to economic collapse.

Deng realised that nothing short of an overhaul of the economic system would do to lift China from poverty. He saw a possible model in Yugoslavia, the first country in the communist bloc to abandon Stalinism and establish economic links with Western countries.

During Mao's time, China joined in slamming Yugoslavia for its revisionism. Thus, Sino-Yugoslav ties were strained.

Relations began to improve after Mao died. Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito visited China in 1977 and Mao's successor Hua Guofeng returned the visit the following year.

China's state media began running reports praising Yugoslavia. However, it was still too early — and sensitive — to publicly advocate learning from communism's erstwhile “revisionist enemy”.

Deng found a way to get around this. Two pro-communist newspapers in Hong Kong — Wen Wei Po (where I worked) and Ta Kung Pao — were told to send reporters to Yugoslavia. The journalists were to file reports on the positive aspects of the Yugoslav system. Reference News, a domestically circulated tabloid and the only source of foreign news for the Chinese, could reproduce the “foreign reports”. Using this roundabout way, Deng signalled the changes to come but avoided the sensitivities.

Huang Guangyu, who was head of the propaganda department of the Chinese Communist Party's Hong Kong Committee, briefed three of us on our assignment. “All you have to do is to praise Yugoslavia and its system,” he told us.

In March 1978, my colleagues and I were accorded a high-level reception by the League of Communists of Yugoslavia (LCY). Stane Dolanc, who was secretary of the LCY presidium and the No. 3 man in the country, received us.

After I saw the country with my own eyes, several things convinced me that the Yugoslav model was not the way forward for China.

The first was the country's currency exchange rate. While the official exchange rate was set at US$1 to 14 dinars, one could get more than 200 dinars on the black market.

The Zagreb University professor assigned to accompany us was more interested in swopping US dollars than in explaining his country. Both the inflation rate and unemployment rate were in double digits.

Dolanc briefed us on the forthcoming 11th congress of the LCY. It would adopt a new party statute to make Tito chairman for life, he told us.

I was disturbed by this. After all, China had already had a bitter lesson on the dangers of a personality cult. In 1969, then-Defence Minister Lin Biao was handpicked to be Mao's successor. His downfall and death — in an apparent plane crash — came just two years later. China learnt the hard way that a political system built around a cult of personality was neither desirable nor stable.

Lin's case also reminded me of Milovan Djilas. Once tipped to succeed Tito, he paid dearly for his criticism of the party and his calls for more democracy. He was thrown out of the party and into jail many times.

In 1957, he published “The New Class: An Analysis Of The Communist System”, in which he argued that communism in Eastern Europe created a new and privileged ruling class which enjoyed many material benefits.

If Yugoslavia too could produce Djilas' “New Class”, then its system was not one that was worthy of envy or emulation.

On returning to Hong Kong, I did not file the requisite reports praising the Yugoslav model. Huang, the local propaganda chief, spread the word that the reporter from Wen Wei Po was too green for the job.

Yet, 12 years later, Tito's Yugoslavia fell apart. I sighed with relief. At least I did not do China a disservice.

Anyway, the learn-from-Yugoslavia campaign was short-lived. Once Deng gained a firm grip on the party and country at the end of 1978, there was no longer any need to emulate Yugoslavia.

Having endured hunger, personal tragedies and political suffering during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, most Chinese were eager to seize any change, whether capitalist or revisionist.

The trip to Yugoslavia opened my eyes — not to the do's but rather the don'ts of reform.

In the end, Deng's China did it — and rightly so — its own way. — The Straits Times