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 Fang told the students what they really thought they already knew (that the Communist system and Marxism were out-of-date) but he drew a wide following for doing it, all over China.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.

1989 – Causes and Effects (Part One – Causes)

How then did the debates of the 1980s lead to the tragedy at Tiananmen in 1989 and is the debate ongoing or did it end there? Today the Chinese continue to debate how the international notion of individual human rights should apply in China if indeed it should at all (and that debate may be a more or less direct result of the Tiananmen massacre). This debate is mainly between China and some western countries but it also occurs within China. However first let’s go back to the 1980s and the various forces at work in that decade.

The reform faction was split in the 1980s and Deng’s inevitable occasional kowtowing to the conservative faction likely had this as its inevitable result. The period has been regarded as one of ‘bourgeois liberalisation’ by those who opposed the reforms. That meant China was looking too much towards western political as well as economic systems for answers to China’s problems. On the liberal wing was Fang Lizhi (now teaching in the US but then a professor of astrophysics and Vice President at a technology university in Anhui who also lectured about freedom and democracy to his students). His downfall was a cause celebre of the opponents of liberal ideas and consequently of those who believed in them. That was the way China was rolling. There was a heck of a lot of division after the partial liberalisation of the 1980 elections.

The 1986 elections proved crucial in cementing the divisions because the nature of their conduct constituted a real reversal of the liberalisation that had proved somewhat promising in 1980. They provoked Anhui students (many inspired by Fang) to demonstrate for more democracy and this movement spread to other cities including Shanghai (but apparently not Beijing) before it was suppressed. Troublemaking students were still able under the system that then obtained to be sent to far off provinces on work assignments as punishment and that occurred to some extent. Unfortunately for the authorities, however, the mere threat of that had the effect this time of simply spreading the ideas to the masses that had produced the discontent among the students.

Fang and others were scapegoated but the movement drew strength from that this time. Fang was given a research posting in Beijing (so, far away from his Anhui students but strangely closer to the centre of action than ever). He was also expelled from the party. Liu Binyan, an investigative journalist was also scapegoated.

This marked the beginning of a new ‘campaign against bourgeois liberalisation’ and it wouldn’t end until it had led to the fall of Hu Yaobang himself at the very apex of the party in 1987 (he was alleged to have been too sympathetic with and slow to suppress the original student protest movement). Hu, another prominent Xiangtanese, had argued within the Politburo against its suppression and it was evident that he did share some of its (and the students’) ideals. He was forced out as party general secretary and to write a traditional self-criticism and was replaced in that job by Zhao Ziyang, the Premier. That brought Li Peng into the position of Premier replacing Zhao.

Where did this now leave the party’s upper echelons? Deng, a cautious and old-school reformer, was still the paramount leader without portfolio but another perhaps more liberal reformer had been replaced for being too liberal. Li had obviously been vetted to ensure he wouldn’t be as liberal as Premier as Hu was as General Party Secretary.

Zhao had survived essentially because he was head of the ‘neo-authoritarian’ camp in debates concerning growth models and would be expected to carry this style of thinking into his new role. This camp in turn then had proponents among leaderships throughout East and South East Asia and based its ‘East Asian development model’ thinking on Confucianism. It had the basic ideas of subsuming individual interests into the collective interest of the society as determined by the authority (government should drive development) and that China was not yet ready for democracy as it interfered with the model’s social stability goal which would in turn interfere with the desired economic development goal.

Any protests, too, could potentially interfere with this economically valued stability and the Chinese (in taking the view that one role of government was the suppression of potentially injurious protests) were no orphans in their region. The stance was a combined cultural and economic claim that either or both of ‘Asian values’ (cultural claim) or the requirements of an underdeveloped economy (economic claim) required the suppression (by authoritarian government) of liberal democratic values in the name of these other social, political, cultural and economic values. On the other side were the ‘democrats’ who sought democracy now. And they were just the split views within the reformist faction. The Maoists were another story altogether when it came to authoritarianism.

So by 1989 what was it like to be a Chinese citizen?

As an economic citizen it was peachy keen in many respects. Freedom of choice quickly became substantially more evident both as a producer and as a consumer in the new market economy. Dynamism and pluralism existed here.

Intellectually, politically and culturally there was some room for debate but rights were limited and the neo-authoritarians were thoroughly in charge and not inclined to budge, believing as they did in what they were doing.

In the spring of 1989 three catalysts led to a feeling of the inevitability of righteous protest being in the air, however.

The first was the death of Hu on 15 April (so soon after his deposition for not completely suppressing a democratic protest movement quickly enough). That was followed on 4 May by the 70^th Anniversary of the establishment of the May Fourth Movement (a democratic movement) and on 15 May by the visit of the reformer Gorbachev (a believer in glasnost (‘openness’ – seen by many Chinese democrats as an introduction to democracy in a Communist system) as well as perestroika (economic restructuring)) for a Sino-Soviet Summit.

Hu had been a great hope of the democratic faction and his death was seen symbolically by some coming as it did so soon before a great anniversary regarded as so significant to Chinese Communism for so long by the CCP. Planning was well advanced for a variety of official celebrations of the anniversary. As well as being a crucible of the CCP, however, the May Fourth Movement had included calls for democracy. The Gorbachev visit was also intended to be and was seen as significant as it was intended to mark the first thawing of Sino-Soviet relations in nearly 30 years. The world’s media would be focused on Beijing for this significant visit making it also of special interest for protesters.

The first protests were by students outside Hu’s state funeral at the Great Hall of the People. This lit the touch paper for the protests on the latter two dates which took on lives of their own and the concept of hunger striking developed in mid May protests further galvanised and inspired the movement.

Given the above catalysts and inspiration, economic grievances also began to be aired by people besides democratic activists and students. People who admired the bravery of the hunger striking students began to notice that they perhaps had grievances worthy of protest, too, also related at least indirectly to the paucity of democracy. The economic reforms had produced great and apparent new disparities in wealth that weren’t appreciated by many people on the poor side of the disparity.

The division was between both the workers and their managers and between the public and new private sectors. It was not uncommon, for example, for a doctor in the state health system who had studied for many years to notice that s/he was receiving less income (potentially much less) that a street egg vendor. Also price deregulation and shortages in the market transition had led to an inflation rate of 20% that for many of the many poorer people hadn’t helped matters. The final concern with the reform was that the management of it had allowed scope for widespread corruption and widespread corruption there had been (families of CCP leaders were notably involved).

These issues were concerns especially in Beijing and other cities. Protests began to occur and gain widespread support in many cities. People hoped that democracy might produce both a more responsive and a less corrupt government that might fix these problems.