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.

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.

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).

Problematic Legacies from Mao (and Deng’s Solutions)

Despite the successes I noted in the last post, Mao’s era left a shortage of funds for capital investment, low morale and productivity in the workforce, the beginning of a stagnation period in standards of living, a growing rural/urban divide in living conditions and antique and inefficient (on the verge of obsolescent) industrial plant and technologies. Deng would have to deal with these issues.

His approach was firstly to state his approach and hope it caught on but obviously there was more to it than that. The basic approach was (as usual in the PRC) related by various slogans. It was to recognise that there were ‘objective economic laws’ and scientific methods, that ‘practice is the sole criterion for truth’ and that the CCP and PRC should ‘seek truth from facts’. That was stage one at least and might not appear very radical but it really was something new after Mao’s regularly magical and occasionally probably paranoid thinking.

Deng planned to fix the living standard stagnation and to some extent morale and productivity by allowing some funds normally slated for investment to be the foundation of a new consumer economy. This was near the beginning of the ‘greed is good’ decade in the US and it would be in China, too. Deng felt he could not only satisfy that greed but turn it to the advantage of the economy ala Gekko. The shortage of capital would be addressed in part by permitting unemployment for the first time as necessary economically to free resources for consumption.

How could Deng justify what was an obvious trashing of much Mao Zedong Thought (MZDT), the official policy of the PRC? As MZDT was itself a modification of Marxism/Leninism, Deng saw no reason why he couldn’t further modify MZDT and that was essentially his public message. Within a few years as we know (in 1981) the correction would become quite explicit for all time in black and white in the Mao is 70% good 30% bad pronouncement.

The main error of Mao’s that Deng wanted to correct from a theoretical point of view (or at least this is what Deng wanted his people to believe) what his thinking that Communism was always just around the corner. Deng now said this misread the great Marx and that is certainly a fair claim. Mao was really having regard more to Lenin’s and Trotsky’s ideas when he thought of how China needed to and would be able to behave. Deng’s stated view was that there was an early ‘primary stage of socialism’ to go through that might take anything from fifty to a hundred years. This was what he said objectivity taught (and that was what now mattered, of course).

Economic development was a key focus in this primary stage that could be understood within Marx’s philosophy – a focus that Marx noted was well handled by capitalism (which socialism was to follow, rather than seek to overtake so precipitately). The corollary was that the policies required by Deng looked less like Maoism than capitalism and were arguably perhaps more orthodoxly Marxist (if not especially Leninist). Furthermore, egalitarianism could clearly not be complete at this stage, then, because the greed for extra material incentives was what greased the wheels of the capitalist system. The ideas that “some much get rich[er than others] first” and that in fact “to get rich is glorious” were new tenets for this period of PRC history (that we’re still in today, more than thirty years later, despite the passing of Deng himself into history).

The role of the centre was now to be as a (more remote) chairman of the board rather than a Maoist micro-manager, which was actually more about Mao’s own personal style in many ways. The gradual incremental process of development was described as being like “groping for stones” when attempting to cross a river. Ideas for change would generally be tested with care first on a small scale before gradually going into large scale operation only as they proved their merit. The centre had a role here. There was no question of pretending something had worked at a local level that hadn’t and rushing headlong into a foolhardy national implementation. It could easily be discarded as an idea and moved on from at the local trial level.

All governments manage the economy to some extent at a macro level (by macroeconomic policy) and, as I’ve noted, the new policy was to encourage and permit more consumption. Many also take some charge of microeconomic reforms and the PRC government was well placed to direct resources away from heavy industry investment (still oversubscribed despite Mao’s best efforts) into investment in the lighter consumables industry (and consumable agricultural output was an aim of investment, too). Here Deng was also attempting to address the city/country divide. Salaries were increased and decision making was briskly decentralised to prepare for better development outcomes (local managers were given discretion over the payment of material incentives (the preferred form usually turned out to be payment of bonuses)).

The outcome of this reform was that it became usual for up to 50% of a typical Chinese worker’s pay-packet to be comprised of efficiency bonuses (efficiency would usually be determined by means of some kind of point system). There was also to be a transition to markets determining outcomes in both the cities and in rural areas and so also many price control regulations were removed. And the final reform in the overall economy (that I’ll consider a little further in a later post) was a further opening up of China to trade and foreign investment. China especially wanted to export more and receive foreign investment capital and advanced technology.