Taking the Peking-Moscow Express

...The possibility of greater autonomy for factory managers has been mooted, but in practice Gorbachev has not challenged the concept of mandatory state economic planning that for decades has proved inimical to productive efficiency...

...The first Russian stopping point is Zabaikalskaya, a town of gray brick apartment blocks...

...But Brezhnev was always talking optimistically...

...The half dozen soldiers, armed with pistols, scarcely look up as the train passes a thin red and white striped metal gate that defines the border between the two Communist countries...

...To root it out, General Secretary Hu Yaobang called together 8,000 senior Party, government and military officials last January...

...Aside from some experimentation with team farming, his leadership still has not touched an agricultural system so lethargic that the Soviet Union must import billions of dollars in grain every year (partly, it is true, to feed meat animals...

...They organized a campaign that was to meet the problem head on, starting at the highest levels of power and including the children of top authorities who were using their fathers' influence to profit from illegal business...

...Further, Deng and his associates acknowledge that a modern industrial society depends critically on thcdiffusion of information...

...Yet without radical renovation, it is inconceivable that the Soviets will ever match Western farm productivity...

...Such disparities are not surprising, though, when one considers that the common worker's monthly wage in the Soviet Union is about $250 compared with $25 in China...

...Thus far Gorbachev's impact has been mainly a matter of style—his leadership gives an impression of vigor and candor after the feebleness of his predecessors...

...Although Deng regards Soviet troop concentrations along the frontier as China's prime security threat, his long-term investment strategy for the country is geared toward the civilian sector rather than the military—an inversion of the Kremlin's priorities...

...The resulting delay of an hour or two is inevitable for all trains making the Soviet-Chinese run...

...If the Manzhouli-Zabaikalskaya crossing is typical of the 6,000 mile long frontier, it is the Soviets who are the more watchful, suspicious and defensive...

...Then the Soviet passengers filling this "Russian train" (a "Chinese train" also makes the round trip weekly, moving through Mongolia to Siberia) pile into a heavy Tsarist-built brick and plaster structure, now used as a station, whose stained wood paneling shows its 80 years...

...Perhaps of greater significance is the fact that despite their 10:1 advantage in persona] income, the Russians' diet is not manifestly superior to that of the Chinese...

...Less than 20 years ago, following several border clashes, Mao Zedong's appre-hensiveness over Soviet designs reached such proportions that he ordered millions of Chinese to shovel out extensive underground factories, hospitals and military installations in the north...

...First- and second-year university students are being pulled from their studies in the fall to supplement a rural labor force that lacks both the equipment and the organization to gather the harvest...

...The central leadership is, of course, not implicated...

...At state-run meat stalls, butchers hack apart beef carcasses with hand axes large enough to take off a head...

...If it is by no means certain that Gorbachev intends to restructure the Soviet economy so radically or quickly, at least the Soviet people—who for generations have been waiting in line for a comfortable life— seem heartened by the fact that he is likely to preside at the Kremlin for the next 15-20 years...

...New red brick houses are sprouting up in villages that may be poor and backward by Western measures, yet possess considerable vitality compared with their Russian counterparts...

...To combat bureaucratic inertia Deng undertook a "rectification" of the 42 million-member Party in 1983...

...By summer it had yielded only the daughter of an inconsequential Central Committee member...

...COMMUNISM IN TWO WORLDS Taking the Peking-Moscow BY MARK HOPKINS MIKHAIL S GORBACHEV Moscow For the traveler from the People' s Republic of China to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the contrasts begin at the frontier...

...On the other hand, the Russians are conspicuously entering the automobile age...

...One officer, obviously unable to read English, pages through my copies of Newsweek and the International Herald Tribune, looking at the photographs and advertisements...

...Chinese customs and immigration officers, dressed in recently restyled black uniforms and white hats, stroll through the cars collecting passports (to be returned one hour later) and making cursory checks of berth cabins...

...Before, we all knew that the dishonest people were making money and living well...

...Accordingly, Chinese diplomatic statements emphasize the need for tranquillity at the Soviet border...

...Fences and barbed wire entanglements trace a no man's land lined by a string of wooden guard towers...

...The drive for political reform appears to have two institutional goals: The first is to separate the government and Party bureaucracies, thereby isolating the recalcitrant middle and lower level Communist Party functionaries whose standing is threatened by the rise of autonomous managers...

...That is why Russian travelers rush off the train at Manzhouli to stock up on relatively inexpensive and better crafted Chinese woolens and cottons...

...The 16-coach Peking-Moscow Express, which takes six-and-a-half days to traverse northern China and Siberia, stops on the Chinese side of the border at the desultory town of Manzhouli as dawn breaks...

...The time remaining to Deng to work his transformation of Chinese society is not unbounded: He turned 82 in August, and freely admits to foreign visitors that his physical stamina is waning...

...From Manzhouli a newly attached black steam engine pulls the train at little more than walking speed to the border, another 15 miles...

...To boot, Deng has forced the retirement of aging generals, many of them regarded as skeptical of his reforms...

...Its code name is "political reform...

...A Chinese accomplice, lacking political protection, was shot...

...But nothing was done about it...

...The strategy was launched at a pair of meetings in July, one of which was sponsored by the Central Committee's Higher Party School...

...This is partly because Chinese officials have not yet learned to manipulate the levers of bank credits, taxes and budgets that control a supply and demand economy...

...It is heavy with ill-educated and simply illiterate Communist Party functionaries who have scant sympathy for the Deng Xiaoping version of their country's future...

...In Siberia, clumps of squat log houses appear much the same as they did 20 years ago to one who has traced this route before...

...So they have resisted the implementation of his "second revolution" by creating political logjams wherever possible...

...But the obstacles to reform are more daunting in the USSR than in China...

...At the actual boundary, a token contingent of People's Liberation Army troops, dressed in pea green cotton uniforms and matching tennis shoes, mans a small one-story outpost...

...Meanwhile, as the economic reforms released vast amounts of money across China—some coming from foreign investment—corruption began to flourish on an equally vast scale...

...The political reform campaign has already resulted in the ventilation of harsh charges against the conservative bureaucrats: They are being castigated for "flouting law and democracy," trampling on civil rights, and using their power for personal enrichment...

...Vegetables in the Irkutsk peasant free market, carefully nurtured on private plots, are double the price...

...The presence of a solitary young soldier at one end of the asphalt platform seems almost gratuitous...

...His two-month disappearance from the public view last winter engendered rumors that he was ill...

...Looming in the background— when Deng took charge in the late '70s and now—is the Chinese Army...

...Each car is lifted off its wheels by hydraulic machines as crews move new trucks into place...

...The Russian version of jeans fetches 100 rubles—the equivalent of $135...

...But the greatest obstacle to the changes Deng has been attempting to bring about in these areas is the element of Chinese society that has the most to lose from them—the bureaucracy...

...Neither are the clothes in Soviet stores...

...And where Mao's brutal decade-long offensive unleashed in 1966 sought at bottom to turn the clock back in China, Deng seeks to release the entrepreneurial instincts of tens of millions of Chinese...

...Nonetheless , the members of the clerisy who have responded to the call to "Let a hundred flowers bloom together and a hundred schools of thought contend" are conspicuously unanimous in their admiration for Deng's reforms...

...Indeed, Soviet newspapers teem with stories of corrupt officials, from ministers on down, getting booted from their posts, expelled from the Communist Party or jailed...

...The economic impact of the differing Chinese and Russian strategies is readily apparent to the passenger on the Peking-Moscow Express...

...Avoiding the word "purge" and its unpleasant connotations, the campaign focused on the "Leftist" opponents who survived the revamping of the Chinese power structure that attended Deng's rise to power in the late '70s following the defeat of the Gang of Four...

...Since this is likely to be Deng's final Congress (he would be 88 for the subsequent one in 1992), he can be expected to make a bold play to secure China's new course...

...There is a practical motive for this: The social and economic programs that have been put forward require far more discussion if they are to be fully understood than did Mao's single-track edicts...

...Where the train pauses to let customs officers board, young Soviet border guards in khaki raincoats, black boots and visored service caps maintain a vigilant watch along both sides of the track...

...Four Mark Hopkins, a specialist in Soviet and Eastern European affairs, has spent the last two years in China...

...One is a Central Committee meeting scheduled to be held later in the fall, where political and economic measures will be the key agenda items and promotions of junior officials will probably be determined...

...Deng's ambitious program of financial and industrial reform, set in motion in October 1984 and aimed at eventual restructuring of China's economy as a vaguely defined market system, have not fared so well...

...The proliferation of these "unhealthy tendencies," it was warned defensively, threatened the very life of the country's new course...

...Moreover, they have taken root among the peasantry, whose individually operated agricultural enterprises represent something of a bulwark against future backsliding toward a collective farm economy...

...He announced on his return to Peking that he was considering the best moment to step down, adding that the need to show his reforms do not depend on his personal influence suggested an early retirement date...

...Once 4 million strong, its ranks are being trimmed to something under 3 million...

...even the most prosperous peasant farmer has only begun to dream of the day when he will be able to buy a pickup truck to bring his produce to market...

...its weaponis "the masses"—that mystical force invoked time and again in China to achieve political objectives seemingly at the will of the people...

...The traveler arriving in Moscow on the train from Peking inevitably finds himself thinking that politically Gorbachev stands roughly where Deng stood in 1979-80, when he was in the process of consolidating his power base and preparing to introduce his ambitious agricultural changes...

...What Deng appears to be engaged in, then, is tantamount to a second Cultural Revolution, without the violence, loss of life or gross social disruption spawned by the first...

...The criticism in the emerging run of commentaries is clearly intended to put conservatives on the defensive...

...Also targeted for attack were bribery, blackmail, speculation, smuggling, black marketeering, prostitution, "decadent" capitalist ideology, and bourgeois liberalism...

...There the train empties to let workers in greasy overalls change coach trucks from the narrower Chinese to the wider Soviet gauge...

...This has not always been the case...

...The meat is decidedly better than the pork the Chinese stir-fry with oil and greens, but it is not 10 times better...

...Held every five years, the Party Congress is the forum in which long-term policy is framed...

...small Lada's and Moskvich's are far more prevalent than a dozen years ago...

...Foreign cigarettes, shoes, sunglasses, and dollars are on the black market price list...

...Its share of the national budget has been cut from a high of 17 per cent in 1979 to about 10 per cent today...

...That signaled its having official sanction—unlike the ill-fated "Democracy Wall" movement of the late 1970s, a spontaneous grass roots demand for broader human rights in China...

...Travelers are told they must relinquish all printed material for inspection...

...They crowd against glass display counters to make last minute purchases of Chinese-made blankets, decorated T-shirts, and scarves in bulk...

...camping knives are confiscated because, the officials explain to their owners, they are dangerous weapons that even Soviet citizens may not possess unless they are registered with the police...

...Right past Zabaikalskaya, four low-slung battle tanks aim guns at practice targets to the south, toward China...

...An additional, less concrete aim is to extirpate the "feudalistic" thought that the intellectuals say characterizes the Chinese mentality and accounts for the concentration of power and the submissive-ness of the citizenry...

...While the leadership was concentrating on beating down the excesses occasioned by its policies, the bureaucracy was happily letting the economic measures themselves sink in an administrative bog...

...The spectacle of the General Secretary breaking from his arranged schedule to mingle with citizens on the street and solicit their opinions—as Gorbachev did recently on trips to the far eastern Soviet cities of Vladivostok and Khabarovsk—has not been seen since the days of the ebullient, less sophisticated Nikita S. Khrushchev...

...The Chinese people, who have appreciably benefited from Deng's innovative leadership, arc on their part keenly aware that his advanced age renders their future disturbingly uncertain...

...A concomitant development has been the revival of the "Hundred Flowers" policy toward artistic and intellectual expression...

...Granted, the Russian manner of dressing today, albeit in dubious taste, is more varied and colorful than the monotone blue and gray Mao suits that continue to be the norm for the Chinese outside of maj or cities...

...The Deng Xiaoping regime maintains a markedly more relaxed posture...

...In Irkutsk, a rail center of600,000 celebrating its 300th anniversary as a city, Soviet citizens line up along Karl Marx Boulevard to buy the spotted green apples, bruised tomatoes and squat cucumbers that are produced on communal farms...

...For one thing, the Soviet bureaucracy is stronger and more deeply entrenched than its Chinese counterpart...

...But from the border all the way to Moscow there is hardly a new house to be seen except for sporadic knots of veekendistas, small wood frame cottages put up by the more privileged city dwellers outside cities like Krasnoyarsk and Novosibirsk...

...China's preeminently successful agricultural initiatives make sharp contrast with the Soviet stalemate on this front...

...One Russian who was headed for Moscow on the trans-Siberian Rossiya (to buy a new kitchen lamp, among other things) told me: "It is true that Brezhnev was tough once like Gorbachev...

...Bu t a man's poorly constructed thick winter coat costs nearly a month's salary, and a woman's badly tailored synthetic fiber dress two weeks...

...Gorbachev tells us what is wrong...

...The Chinese press is fond of portraying Gorbachev's domestic policies as mimicking Deng's...

...The Soviets have plowed two wide black earth strips roughly 50 yards apart that stretch along the border as far as the eye can see...

...For another, the redoubtable Red Army is unlikely to permit its size and influence to be cut back as the Chinese Army's was...

...Dengists and allied intellectuals, recalling an address made by the diminutive leader six years ago, now publicly proclaim that without political reform, economic reform will ultimately fail...

...There is no mistaking that Deng's stewardship has produced a climate of hopeful change in China that Mikhail S. Gorbachev is just beginning to cultivate in the Soviet Union...

...That meeting will set the stage for the far more important Communist Party Congress to take place in the fall of 1987...

...The anti-corruption crusade fizzled, too...

...In Moscow a middle-class Russian says in praise of Gorbachev that "honest people can walk confidently now...

...Youths in China can easily pick up coveted blue j eans foraweek'swagesat free markets spun off by China's lucrative textile export business with Hong Kong...

...Soviet planning is the antithesis of Deng's vision of a socialist free market economy...

...Now they are fearful of what will happen to them...

...Amid the ensuing discussions the word "faction"— anathema in the Communist Party lexicon—appeared in the press, as did the words "reformist" and "conservative...

...After amassing much political clout during the Cultural Revolution, the Army has seen its power in the Politburo and the Central Committee reduced considerably under Deng's regime...

...Things start to look different just beyond a set of yard-high block concrete Russian letters: "CCCP" (USSR...

...she was sentenced to 17 years imprisonment for shady dealings with a French automotive firm...

...In a remote Siberian city like Irkutsk, Western-made clothes are in such demand that young people working a lively black market offer $30 and up for whatever jackets, sweaters and pants foreign tourists are willing to sell...

...It was becoming clear to all that high-level preparations were being made to confront the resisters head on...

...But there is no one among the younger ranks of political leaders who enjoys Deng's military prestige, and knowledgeable Chinese say privately that the Army could very well emerge as a power broker after his retirement...

...In any event, the USSR's superpower commitments preclude any substantial reductions in its military budget...

...The area, marked by signs in Chinese and English warning away trespassers, is deserted save for a few soldiers atop a seven-story concrete watch-tower who survey the distant Soviet landscape with binoculars...

...The campaign, now nearing its end, seems to have foundered: A mere handful of Party members have been punished, and the state-run press still exhorts the Party to cleanse its collective mind of "Leftist" thinking...

...The reformist camp, recognizing that it needed time to search for effective opposition, decided upon a period of "consolidation...

...Indeed, the torpid demeanor of the Chinese near one of the most heavily armed frontiers in the world makes them seem almost fearless by comparison...

...To date, however, there has been little substantive economic reform under Gorbachev...

...Admittedly, southern Siberia is not the agricultural heartland of the Soviet Union...

...Peasants in China's rural areas, freed from collective agriculture by the dismantling of Soviet-style communes begun seven years ago, have exploited family farming and green markets to raise their living standard well above the subsistence level that used to prevail...

...Soviet industry has also remained remote from any serious attempt at structural reform...

...He has been able to overcome predictable opposition from the military by exploiting his own formidable status as a veteran of the Long March...

...The Chinese are firmly in the bicycle era...

...In fact, Deng Xiaoping has arrived at a strategy that will be played out over the coming year...

...Certainly they are loath to see their administrative prerogatives eroded by his liberalizing measures...

...Rank and file Party members who refused to denounce the Maoist Cultural Revolution, and to support domestic reform and an open door policy, were to be stricken from the rolls...

...Rolling fields have been cleared of the clusters of small brick houses that dot the farmland farther back...

...The customs officers brusquely order passengers standing in coach corridors back to their cabins and poke flashlights into wastebins and toilets as well as under carpets and seats...

...Two upcoming events, though, will provide Deng and his supporters with opportunities to begin the transfer of power to a younger generation of reformist leaders in the hope of assuring the remolding of Chinese society...

...Rumors and some facts circulated in Peking about the offspring of Politburo members reportedly under investigation, but savage infighting among reformists and conservatives over exactly whose children were to be sacrificed served to dissipate the campaign's force...

...The second is to channel more authority to the heretofore rubber stamp legislatures—starting with the National People's Congress—in an effort to fragment power cliques...