The first effect of the movement (combined with the government attitudes I’ve mentioned in the last post) was, of course, that there was a massacre and a crackdown on the movement. What were the lessons learned and what was the aftermath of the crackdown, however?
The CCP learned the relative benefit of nipping any incipient protest movement quickly and decisively in the bud before it has the opportunity to elicit wider support. The party had allowed divisions at the head of the party to prevent decisive action being taken early enough and decided that this had been the prime cause of the undue magnitude of the eventual bloodshed required. The very early attention to the suppression of the Falun Dafa (or Falun Gong) movement can be viewed as a direct result of this new calculus.
At the same time the party also learned that it had lost the power to influence the views of large numbers of especially urban people merely by formally requiring them to think a certain way (if indeed it had ever truly possessed this power). In other words it would have to address concerns as they arose by correcting the problems (for example by rooting out complained-of corruption and dealing with inflationary pressures and relative poverty). ‘Dealing with concerns’ had the added benefit of further isolating such dissidents as proponents of the Falun Dafa and democrats.
Jiang Zemin was the man Deng brought in at this point to rebuild a grassroots party organisation that would be worthy of being listened to again. He also worked to make to economy work better (to isolate the democrats). The party was being conformed to the tastes of the leadership and not the other way around.
The rest of the world also learned something about China in 1989 and that was that this was not the end of history yet. China was not becoming like the West as quickly as some had imagined it was. They saw that an internationally engaged China remained illiberal for the time being and still lacked a basic concern for individual human rights in contrast to its recent more liberal image internationally. Deng had been named Time’s ‘Man of the Year’ in two separate years (1978 and 1985), to give an example of how sanguinely he had been widely viewed. The CCP was now again seen, then, as an unreconstructed authoritarian party and government by the Western mainstream media which had created the liberal benign image. Deng’s image was similarly tarnished although it must be said that many Western pundits had never actually bought what was now revealed to be the false image. He was now a dictator and China was uninterested in human rights. The mainstream media's pendulum had thus swung in the other direction and this view was perhaps equally unrealistic.
The other thing the West learned was that there was actually a large group of people in China possibly interested in something like western-style democracy.
The upshot of the crackdown internationally was that the West condemned it and China defended it. Until 1991 their official excuse was not an excuse at all but special pleading that it was an internal matter and thus no concern of anyone but the Chinese.
In 1991, however, an effort was finally made to publicly defend it. The party released a ‘white paper’ called Human Rights in China. In it the party made the claim that China was interested in human rights but that it had different priorities from the West. There were three strains to its formal argument:
1) Socialist - This strain has less credibility now than when it was written (when
China was still relatively less capitalist than it now is) and is therefore now deemphasised in the argument. The argument was along the lines that capitalist polities allocate rights according to class making equal rights in the West a bourgeois myth so rights under socialism are obviously more equal in reality making democracy and human rights guarantees unnecessary. The guarantee of the right to full employment was once a special pride of the CCP but such economic rights began to be eroded as early as in the 1979 labour market reforms. The problem with this argument was always that the facts never completely matched the theory in China in any case. There were always as wide disparities of income and opportunities in China as anywhere (the countryside was still especially poor at this time), which issues democracy, an independent judiciary and human rights guarantees might well be required to adequately address;
2) Developmental - These last two strands were of course the neo-authoritarian
arguments. The Chinese were not yet ready for political rights in this first developmental part. In the meantime, so the argument went, we are doing well at economic rights per the requirements of the 2nd UN Covenant on Human Rights of 1966 (the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights), which are more important in this stage of development. These rights (deemed collective rights) included the right to education, healthcare, a decent standard of living, community and social services, employment, equal pay for equal work, the maintenance of cultural traditions and security. Development that required authoritarianism now would both support economic rights and permit political and legal reform later in support of rights deemed individual rights provided for in the 1st Covenant (on Civil and Political Rights). Opponents of this strand of the argument regard this as unconscionable cherry picking of rights as they say all rights are equally important (and also depend on each other for their strength) regardless of the level of economic development. They also reckon China should commit itself to a time certain (based on any development criteria) when all rights would be protected, if they want to play that game (and don’t believe an authoritarian government would be the best authority to decide on any timing of this in any case – they would probably never decide on it, they argued); and
3) Asian Values - Or possibly Chinese or East Asian or Confucian values. It’s yet
again that idea that some rights are more equal than others but this time not for reasons of underdevelopment. This time it’s for reasons of culture and East Asian context. Lee Kwan-Yew in Singapore, Suharto in Indonesia, Deng in China and Mahathir Mohammed in Malaysia first raised this argument more or less together in the early 1990s. Lee was the earliest and strongest advocate followed in rough order by Mahathir, Suharto and Deng. Human rights agreements and international campaigns were a new form of Western cultural imperialism in this strand of the new Chinese argument and for the other proponents of the Asian Values view of rights. Historical, national, regional, religious, social, economic and cultural contexts needed to be considered more than they had been in formulating the rights. This position (of emphasis on family, community, stability, authority and development and avoidance of the alleged morally and socially decadent Western worship of the individual) was supported by 44 Asian governments in the Bangkok Declaration of 1993. The arguments against were basically that this is moral relativism with no other purpose but to justify a clearly unsatisfactory status quo that keeps rulers in their current positions of power, modernisation had rendered a lot of the argument meaningless and modern conditions required modern solutions to address potential abuses of power and corruption. The problem for this argument in turn was that it was Western, hypocritical and contained unrealistic and arguably imperialistic expectations. Needless to say, perhaps, the debate is ongoing.
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