Chinese Foreign Trade Policy and the Campaign Against Deng Xiaoping

This chapter examines the role of foreign trade in the campaign against Deng Xiaoping by focusing on four major topics: historical background that influenced, shaped, and complicated trade policy during the campaign; specific foreign trade issues illuminated during Pi Deng and their linkage to domestic policy. It also includes the different roles played by various domestic groups; and the impact of the campaign on contemporaneous implementation of People's Republic of China (PRC) trade policy. The Cultural Revolution decisively shattered the image of a monolithic leadership and elite policy consensus in the PRC. Western understanding of China's policy process is necessarily superficial and speculative, especially in the analysis of linkages between domestic and foreign policy. The campaign against Deng discussed trade as it related to self-reliance, an approach that suggests a framework for foreign-domestic policy linkage. Any examination of Chinese foreign trade policy should begin with the concept of self-reliance.