The 80s and early 90s (an overview of Deng Xiansheng's later years)

In the 80s the children destined for the universities had been moulded by their schools to be ‘red’ and yet increasingly they were being influenced by Western ideas and dissatisfied with their low potential incomes in this period of a China in as much flux as in Mao’s time (if in the opposite direction in a sense). They began to question the idea of Communism itself, in these conditions. They began, too, to seek the changes that they wanted.

This is really what produced such a ‘culture fever’ (along with the stultification brought about by the so-called CR). Now was clearly the time to examine the culture. Now it was really possible, as free from repression as the Chinese had ever really been in China.

This was really, of course, mainly a phenomenon of the university system and this was still the system of the ruling classes. Fang told the students what they really thought they already knew (that the Communist system and Marxism were out-of-date) but he drew a wide following for doing it, all over China. He lectured on freedom and democracy all over. Meanwhile in the relative party centre Hu Yaobang proved to be a man of the people in a way most senior CCP officials of the time were not. He also sympathised more with both the plights and ideas of the masses than the others did.

In December 1986 many of the students of Hefei, Beijing and Shanghai declared in demonstrations that they had had enough and demanded freer elections (remember the 1980 experiment and its roll-back in 1986). This resulted in a number of incidents of beatings by police. In Shanghai alone, more than 30,000 students had protested with the support of many of the local population and this probably should have given someone a clue.

In defiance of the threat of beatings, students in Beijing continued their protests until 1 January 1987 and marched on Tiananmen Square where the police were ready. They had apparently watered the square so that the resulting ice would be treacherous for the students and make it easier for the police to knock them over.

They duly knocked them over while Hu publicly defended them. For his trouble he in turn was duly (and publicly) ousted by means of a specially advertised Chinese Central Television (CCTV) announcement. The repression of others including Fang soon followed in an orchestrated campaign. At the centre Zhao, the other Deng ‘puppet’, took over Hu’s lead party role, then, leaving his premiership to Li Peng.

Zhao and Li then had plenty of economic problems to deal with and one measure meant to alleviate some of them, the new ‘one child’ policy, first announced in 1979, was causing problems of its own.

The policy was neither well received nor well enforced in this period in the countryside. Farmers still needed sons to provide for them in their decrepitude and it was not legal to abort girls. Nevertheless there was a degree of enforcement. Police sometimes escorted recalcitrant women (still trying for an elusive boy) to hospitals to have their fallopian tubes compulsorily tied.

With Decollectivisation and ‘opening’ had come rural unemployment together with the increase in wealth in the SEZs that furthermore were at first mostly concentrated in the south – the north was getting a somewhat raw deal. The ‘iron rice bowl’ in the cities was causing problems because it had the effect of being a disincentive for hard work. The final main issue was the inflation that became problematic in 1988.

The leaders were more frank about these problems than Mao had perhaps ever been but the people were unimpressed by mere candour. At the same time there weren’t really many legal protest avenues.

With Hu’s death in 1989 the Beijing students were finally moved to bring their concerns to the government in the only ways they knew how: demonstrating in the square and presenting a petition outside Hu’s official funeral that took place as I mentioned in an earlier post in the Great Hall of the People.

This petition idea of course hails back to the time of the emperors and is part of a centuries-old tradition. Untraditionally the petitions were snubbed although perhaps it’s reasonable to say that a funeral probably wasn’t an appropriate time or place to present a petition. Nevertheless the petitioners gave the petition-giving attempt quite a traditional flavour and the snubbing, regarded as arrogant by many, was therefore a spur to further righteous protest with more people involved.

On 26 April the party had been sufficiently irked to proclaim via a People’s Daily (Renmin Ribao) editorial that the student movement was ‘turmoil’ – there were shades of a suggested return to the CR and Red Guards in that accusation with all the attendant opprobrium hinted at. In the past this might have cowed the students but in their already heated condition this time it merely angered them. The police seemed powerless (or perhaps unwilling) to suppress this protest movement.

So protest continued and to add insult to injury, as far as Deng was concerned, the day before Gorbachev was due to arrive in Beijing to officially consolidate a ‘thaw’ in Sino-Soviet relations (and when the world’s press were gathered to record that auspicious event) some of the students began a very inauspicious hunger strike. Also students for all over China (not to mention many Beijing workers from all parts of Beijing) were beginning to descend on Tiananmen Square to amplify the public insult.

Zhao was conciliatory and in these circumstances that led to his own immediate ouster. He and other leaders had met with student leaders (including hunger strikers clearly impaired from their physical ordeals) but all of these meetings had ended up being confrontational, such was the mood of the times.

The mood for radical change never caught on in the countryside, however (however affecting the scenes of emaciated striking students undoubtedly were) and this was a key factor in allowing the party to have a free hand in dealing with the movement. The day after Zhao’s ouster, martial law was declared.

Although at first the PLA moved slowly the crackdown was ultimately heavy. It occurred on the evening of 3 June and the morning of 4 June. At least 2,000 supporters of the students were probably killed on the streets surrounding the square attempting to defend it. The students themselves were mostly able to flee and flee they did. Some of their leadership were able to flee the country and the other known leaders were ultimately arrested.

International initial reaction was quite swift. Governments around the world condemned the PRC government’s violent suppression of the movement. Many Western companies and governments scaled down their operations within China.

Deng’s reaction to the reaction was unrepentant, however. As he evidently expected, the international mood was soon able to be restored to more or less its former state quite rapidly as, internationally, China was as needed as it needed.

China was soon to enter a period of unprecedented growth with international support that Deng began to explicitly promote again as soon as in 1992 in his “Copy Shenzhen [SEZ]” campaign following from his tour of various areas he decided were worthy of being copied including the Shenzhen SEZ. His lead role indicated a return to power of the reformist faction that the events of 1989 had only briefly discredited.

The politics of Asian values were already in evidence as the government was able to draw on local prejudice and nationalist sentiment to assert that foreign human rights concerns were really disguised Western imperialism re-packaged. The added advantage was a new kind of regional solidarity now available after the end of the Cold War that was able to be nurtured based on defence against alleged Western threats (especially the threat of US hegemony in Asia) allegedly merely disguised as human rights activism.

In the meantime, Deng gave the following expression to his ongoing faithfulness to both socialist doctrine and Dengism that can serve as his last word in this history:

If we don’t persevere with socialism, don’t reform and open up, don’t develop the economy, don’t improve people’s livelihoods, then this can only be the road to death.

More on Deng’s Political Reforms and Chinese Cultural Debates in Days of Deng

The move to a new generation of leadership gave the party an opportunity to review its path on three main axes: capitalist v socialist methods, bourgeois v proletarian culture, and Long March veteran v new generation ideas. The party was thus divided now into ‘reformer/Dengist’ and ‘conservative/Leftist/Maoist’ camps based along these axes. The Dengists tended to be on the capitalist/bourgeois/new generation ends of the spectra though Deng himself was of course of the Long March generation, a fact he was able to use to maintain respect for his position even from those of his own generation who may not have agreed with it.

The early 1980s were in various ways the high water mark for the reformers but Deng was nevertheless often forced to make concessions to the conservative side. The June 1979 Electoral Law, which led to direct elections at the county/city and town/city-district level for the People’s Congresses in 1980, gives one example of what this meant. Direct elections for the two higher levels would still not be held. The law specifically required that there be more candidates than positions at the elections and provided for a free nomination process (by four voters) free of pre-screening by officials, a right to campaign and distribute campaign literature and a right to a secret ballot. Many non-party candidates contested the 1980 elections, debates took place and criticism of the party during the campaign by candidates who were subsequently elected was not uncommon.

There was a limit, however: the Four Cardinal Principles. If a party official decided that a candidate was in breach of any of these rules it was within her/his power to replace the candidate with a party appointee. Wang Juntao, a young physicist, was such a candidate. He was elected to represent Beijing University but replaced for breach of the principles. Along with the appointee, another ‘opposition’ candidate for Beijing University was in fact elected and the Hunan Teachers’ College voters also elected at least one. The freedom allowed at this election (such as it was) has not been allowed since.

It followed from Deng’s idea (actually quite a Maoist notion) of “seeking truth from facts (實事求是 – shi shi qiu shi)” that a degree of opportunity for relatively free intellectual debate was allowed and people were allowed to get creative with Marxism (that had been a feature of Mao’s own genius after all). The ideas of Marxists living in the West that gave a humanist critique of Maoism were considered acceptable to discuss. They were along the lines that Mao had unnecessarily not allowed his people sufficient freedom and thus unnecessarily alienated them. Again indicating the ongoing strength of Deng’s conservative opponents, Mao’s main speechwriter (and a prominent conservative), Hu Qiaomu, was permitted to give the CCP position on this western perspective. He said “we practice a socialist and collectivist form of humanism, not bourgeois individualistic humanism” thus putting western Marxists in their places as far as Hu was concerned (though he too had suffered under the CR).

A third example of the strength of the conservatives is the fact that the campaign against spiritual pollution (Qingchu Jingshen Wuran) and the education campaign to create a ‘spiritual civilisation (精神文明 – Jingshen Wenming)’ were permitted in 1983 and 1984. Along with social and cultural pollution coming from the West the idea was to root out ideological pollution as well (while leaving the ‘good’ economic inputs coming from the West).

In debates that occurred in the Deng era in the cultural arena Maoism (critical as it was of feudalism) was criticised as itself a vestige of feudal culture. Su Shaozhi extended the criticism to the then current CCP political culture calling its autocracy and what he called its “monotruthism” an influence of feudalism – they were influenced by “feudal remnants”. He argued that ‘true’ Marxism was really more like the Western version and more ‘democratic’ with open debate and pluralism.

In the meantime, historians and other scholars were permitted to study and discuss the pre-1949 era history and culture again after a period of relative repression of intellectual inquiry in these fields and they revised previous opinions.

More generally what came to be referred to as a ‘culture fever’ began to be pervasive in Chinese intellectual and social life after many repressive years culturally.

The film and televisual arts resurged. New TV productions of classics like Journey to the West and Dream of Red Mansions were popular.
The so-called ‘5^th generation’ of filmmakers, Chen Kaige and Zhang Yimou among them, began a period of flourishing, sometimes making films critical of aspects of the official revolutionary history and/or of actions of the historical actors themselves. Zhang’s Red Sorghum presented an interesting new view of the Chinese defeat of the Japanese. It showed the people resisting the Japanese occupation and not being led by the party.

River Elegy (He Shang) was an influential television documentary series that has been accused of encouraging the students in their so-called attempted counter-revolution of 1989. It was particularly critical of the inward looking nature of the Chinese culture and also slammed it as feudal, backward and destructive.

Politics and Political Theory in the PRC and Deng

Firstly let’s have some (neo) liberal theory ala Fukuyama. Free markets lead to a free people/middle class who then seek political liberalisation and control of the state by means of democratic reform. Then the reforms they want happen as a weakened state succumbs to the magic force of individual freedom, Deng allowed free markets, therefore democracy would eventually be forced upon him QED history is now ended. Where could this theory (admittedly very simplistically stated) go wrong? There might be obstacles to the political reform that the theory may be too incomplete to envisage and indeed there have been.

The first might be the lack of information flow that authoritarian regimes are able to bring into non-existence. The second might be cultural constraints: people might for example value peaceful illiberalism over revolutionary liberalism that might involve much more violence.

This would all be debated albeit illiberally within Deng’s illiberal reformist state.

The first debates as I noted initially helped Deng because the main initial target of democracy wall activists was the Gang of Four. I also noted that Deng quickly closed down the wall when he began to perceive the liberal thought it contained being widely disseminated didn’t accord with his own interests. Wei’s fifth modernisation made him the first dissident of the Deng era and it was also the idea that finally made the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989 and not democracy inevitable, not yet at any rate.

It wasn’t as simple as Deng opposing all reformist talk all the time however. The 1980s can be viewed as the decade of a repeating liberal/illiberal loop with liberal thinking alternately encouraged, ignored and then discouraged by Deng. It must have suited Deng to be able to present himself as a kind of middle of the road compromise candidate as he consolidated his strength offering at different times something to everyone from the hard core authoritarian leftists to the most radical of the democracy reformers.

Wei could accuse Deng of becoming another Mao and Deng couldn’t easily disprove this by permitting Wei to say that without penalty (as it was he got 13 years’ gaol for ‘counter-revolutionary’ activities) but he could permit some criticism.

Was the picture of the lone man in front of four tanks in Tiananmen the best symbol of Deng’s final political legacy? Or will political liberalism finally ‘catch up’ as the above neoliberal theory supposes and be his final legacy? Did Deng weaken his state with his reformism supported by democracy activists in a kind of ‘zero sum game’ that will ultimately give this picture the power to turn humans into superhumans capable of overthrowing it? Will the internet and/or events in the Arab World and Myanmar also influence this picture?

Let’s back a little back. The wall activists were saying down with Mao and the CR and the Gang of Four but what was Wei saying in particular that Deng finally couldn’t have?

Firstly in Democracy: the Fifth Modernisation Wei was getting ahead of the game too far. Deng had proposed four modernisations and Wei had to add a fifth.

Secondly he claimed in a ‘big character poster’ and another article that Deng would have to become like Mao who he had opposed. He was arguing that the system (that therefore needed to change) caused this (making him a prominent dissident throughout the Deng years – at one point in the 1980s he emerged from gaol only to be re-gaoled soon afterwards).

What did Deng have to say about political freedoms? Firstly Deng had no special interest in or desire for democracy to come about especially quickly (if at all). His first duty as he saw it was still to Marxism in some form. Deng’s response when critical posters began to re-emerge in 1980 was to amend the constitution to ban them. Ironically, such posters were actually first specifically made constitutionally protected during the supposedly more repressive CR years.

Deng propounded his Four Cardinal Principles in March 1979 as the limits of debate. Debaters had to be following the socialist road for the PRC, accept the maintenance of the dictatorship of the proletariat for some time, acknowledge the rightful leadership of the Communist Party leading in that and adhere to Marxism-Leninism Mao Zedong Thought (as expressed before 1957) in any theory of government in the current socialist phase that always precedes Communism in Marxist theory.

He also produced four legal reforms in June 1979 at the 2^nd Session of the 5^th National Party Congress (NPC) defining ‘crimes’ for the first time in the history of the PRC in a criminal code and limiting the definition of ‘counter revolutionary’ crime, enshrining for the first time the notion that ‘all citizens are equal before the law’ (including non-party members) in a new procedural law, regulating and regularising joint ventures (especially with foreigners) and providing for an electoral law at the lower two levels of the People’s Congress structure.

In the following year at the 3^rd Session of the 5^th NPC (as is the practice) matters of party discipline were up for discussion (the criminal law did not apply to party members so a member had to be expelled before it could be applied to her or him). Deng called for reform there to reduce over-concentrations of power with individuals by means of holding multiple positions especially in both the party and the government, further separate party and government functions, provide for a retirement age for senior functionaries and succession and further guard against abuses of power by the further strengthening of internal party discipline by means of appropriate sanctions. These reforms were especially overdue given the continuation of criminal impunity of party members. The intra party codes would now be strengthened to mirror the criminal codes (as now formally promulgated) somewhat closely.

Party members continued to be permitted to be government officials, just with less dual posts. With regard to the retirements of people of his generation (he was in his mid 70s (having been born in 1904)) he set an example by retiring as vice-chairman of the party (though he intended to continue wielding all the power behind the scenes – he took the title ‘paramount leader’).
The two official leaders came from the next generation. They were Hu Yaobang (born in 1915 – CCP General Secretary from 1981 to 1987) and Zhao Ziyang (born in 1919 – Premier from 1983 to 1987 and CCP General Secretary from Hu’s fall in 1987 to 1989). Zhao had been somewhat instrumental in the successful agricultural reforms in Anhui leading to him being brought to Beijing.

Next week: causes and effects of Tiananmen.

From Mao to Deng

Just a little more today on what changed and what didn’t:

The first thing to note was a sense of grief and a hole to fill was left for so many Chinese by the death of Mao after he had effectively (and otherwise, it must be said) ruled China for a generation. Deng’s form of hole-filling by radical reform proved to be another kind of revolution for the many who had never known any system other than Maoism.

China still was (as it still is today) both relatively poor and relatively isolated in world terms but progress had been made (and would continue to be under Deng’s reforms). Mao’s and Deng’s goals weren’t really so different after all. China would be strong.

But many of the Chinese needed a rest as much as many others remained restless. Continuous revolution was not fun for everyone. Virtually every year since 1949 it must have seemed a violent major purge or at least a personal denunciation was liable to be just around the corner.

The CR was one of many of these types of occasions as my earlier posts record. Deng himself was a prime example having, himself, been purged and rehabilitated more than once. The violence of millions of Red Guards had barely subsided when Mao died, the Gang of Four instated their own purges, Hua had them arrested in turn in his best Mao imitation and the retributive purges continued even as Deng assumed control.

But Deng seemed inclined to lower the boom on terrorist government (at least on Mao’s scale) and there must have been many sighs of relief on all sides. Even the Red Guards themselves who ultimately felt betrayed by Mao (who had finally banished them to the countryside, remember) now breathed more freely.

Deng was a CCP man, though. So what did this mean? There would always be enemies of Communism that needed to be rooted out, that’s what.

Ironically some of the most prominent of these enemies of Communism turned out to be disillusioned Red Guards. One of the first acts of rebellion they became involved in if not against Communism then at least against the current system (even before Deng had had the chance to spell out how he intended to reform it) was the Democracy Wall movement that began in Beijing in 1978 and remained centred there. Many of those now involved in the movement were of course first politicised when they had become Red Guards during the CR.

Refreshingly, Deng announced his approval of the movement (Mao had done something similar, though, with his ‘Hundred Flowers’ comments – could Deng be trusted any more than Mao?) And in this case this was just before he assumed power. As had occurred with Mao, expressions of approval of an ideological movement spurred it on – they chose to again trust their at least hoped-for leadership.

Deng then brought in his reforms and the people waited to see how it would turn out. Would he ultimately welcome the democracy first sought by the May Fourth Movement in 1919? Maybe not.

Better international relations were now on the agenda. The US and China were ready for rapprochement. By 1 January 1979 they had established full diplomatic relations and later that month Deng visited President Carter becoming the first Chinese leader ever to visit the US. Deng was impressed by the technology and material conditions he witnessed on this visit. He, in turn, impressed everybody he met in the US with his vision for China and its relations with the West.

Like Mao, Deng was prepared to turn on dissenters and soon the democracy wall demonstrators that had supported his own rise to power were going too far for him. Deng had wanted four modernisations and Wei Jingsheng, for example, suggested democracy as a fifth.

Deng as readily referred to people like Wei as counter revolutionary as Mao had called Deng that. He began to suppress the movement in Mao style (if a little less violently) and the wall was soon shut down. Notably most of the wall activity had actually been conducted with due regard to the Four Cardinal Principles Deng delineated that I will refer to in a later post.
The reality was that Deng copied Mao’s legal methods in that laws that no one could possibly follow were always kept in reserve to justify any repression as and when it was desired by the leader.

Deng’s next concern in terms of dissent would be potentially brought about by the local devastating drought in Anhui province (also in 1978). Chinese agriculture was still close to a subsistence proposition in a typical year and employing most Chinese so drought was a particular concern in China. The large communes didn’t help matters. In response, local authorities, inspired by the peasants themselves, tried the system that would work and later go national. The productivity in Anhui boomed in response to this new incentivisation. Famine was averted but rolling out the scheme nationally still turned out to be a test of Deng’s power base.

Deng’s ‘capitalist roader’ tag still had the power to tie his hands regardless of how successful (and in fact saving) capitalism could be shown to be. He was finally able to squeeze the reform through, however. It also proved itself almost immediately nationwide in terms of productivity. Along with the local produce and other markets, small factories producing consumer items for market also began to spontaneously sprout up in rural areas.

The two major figures standing with Deng then were Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang and they both also favoured the market.

Foreign capitalists found they were now welcomed, too (initially principally in the SEZs). The foreigners in the zones were popular with locals because they had deeper pockets and this attracted Chinese from all over China hoping for a share of their apparent largesse. Chinese wages and standards of living were higher there but the increases eventually flowed throughout much of the Chinese economy especially in the south of the country (because most of the initial zones were concentrated there. The coastal city special areas were more evenly spread between north and south).

The youth of these zones soon began to live a noticeably more decadent and capitalist lifestyle and to lose some respect for socialism. Prostitution and other supposed signs of vice soon began to flourish there.

Deng’s response (under some pressure from the left to prove his credentials) was to begin a campaign against ‘moral pollution’. After decades of Maoism this comparatively mild effort was treated as a bit of a joke, though. In one oft repeated story a particularly zealous official involving himself in the campaign criticised somebody who possessed a book containing a picture of a western woman with a low cut dress. The woman in question turned out to be Marx’s wife. Meanwhile, investors apparently weren’t getting the joke and Deng was forced to end the scary campaign before it had really begun to assuage their fears. Nevertheless thousands of smugglers had been arrested as part of the campaign.

Deng successfully negotiated the 1997 handover of Hong Kong following the expiration of Britain’s lease with the Thatcher government despite Thatcher’s apparent misgivings, another coup for south China. He used a combination of a few threats and agreement to the concept of ‘one state two systems’ to get that happening, the latter leading to more local name-calling to the effect that he was excessively ‘rightist’. The name-callers probably never had to deal with the “Iron Lady” themselves and in fact Deng once remarked that in these discussions he was “the Iron Man meeting the Iron Lady”.

Deng’s other two notable reforms were to allow the practice of religions more freely again and to reduce the length of the working week. All in all, the economic and social reforms I’ve outlined in these last couple of posts saw Deng riding a wave of popularity by the time of the PRC’s 35^th anniversary celebrations in 1984. In the next few posts I’ll focus a little more on political, party and legal reforms in the Deng era especially as it continued from here (and prospects for more).