Back To
Square
1989 began in Tiananmen Square.
The events there are now one year
old. John Gittings assesses
the prospects
One
12
MARXISM TODAY JUNE 1990
It started in Beijing. The
challenge to party feudalism,
the appeal for dialogue, the
spontaneity of the streetcorner, the call for democracy, the linked hands and
•
self-discipline of struggle, all began in
Beijing a year ago, before Berlin, before Bucharest. Thwarted in the East it
then burst forth in the West. Jakes and
Honecker, Prague students and Leipzig
demonstrators, all knew very well what
had happened in Tiananmen Square and
calculated accordingly. In an unquantifiable but real sense, those who died
along Changan Avenue and in the Square on the night of June 3-4 helped to
ensure by their example that others
would not die in Wenceslas Square or on
Marx-Engels Platz.
The Chinese democracy movement
also demolished, though too briefly, the
barrier of orientalising misperception
which for so much of the European Left
as well as for the ruling establishments
has consigned China into the category
of separate and different. It had the
same effect too in China. The new vigour of Beijing 1989 nourished a new
mood of emergent internationalism.
Tell the world,' urged the citizens at the
barricades. Even the feeblest message
of support from the British Young
Socialists (not of course from the Labour Party executive) was cheered
widely in Tiananmen Square. The questions of Chinese students and workers
leaped the habitual cultural divide. Do
your people know what we are doing?
Have you read the international declaration of human rights? What does President Bush think about us? Have you got
the address of Greenpeace?
When the movement was defeated,
these opening doors of dialogue were
closed again, obviously so by the
conservative regime in Beijing, less obviously but more damagingly from outside. All those year-end supplements on
Revolution in Eastern Europe barely
nodded in the direction of the first Revolution of 1989. In media terms China
would sink low on the news list unless
there was new trouble on the streets. It
had been too accessible for its own
long-term good in 1989. Soon there was
nothing much to show except people
cycling round the edges of Tiananmen
Square. At the diplomatic level, where
the democracy movement of the last
decade had always been belittled in the
foreign embassy briefings, the delay in
normalising relations with post-massacre Beijing was less due to disapproval
than to doubt as to the future stability of
the regime. The underlying attitude in
Whitehall and Washington was not so
different from that of Deng Xiaoping:
the events of last year had been part of
an essentially inscrutable and probably
cyclical process which was peculiar to
the Chinese. (This was the advice received by Sir Geoffrey Howe even after
martial law was declared.) What the
Chinese needed was stability as much
as - and probably more than democracy.
On the Chinese side the temptation to
retreat into a mood of self-critical isolation has many precedents from the past
century of modern history - a history
which has been largely determined by
the perplexing question of how to cope
with the outside world. In the decline of
the Qing dynasty, Chinese nationalists
felt 'the shame of not being like Japan'.
For the writer Lu Xun after the failed
1911 revolution, China was trapped in
an iron box, its people mostly unaware
of what lay outside. For Sun Yat-sen, the
leader of the revolution, China was a
slab of meat waiting to be carved up by
the foreign powers, a loose sheet of sand
incapable of being coherently organised. Mao Zedong's genius was to perceive that beautiful characters could be
written upon what he called 'this blank
sheet of paper'. (His tragic folly was to
insist after his successful revolution
that only he knew which characters to
write.) The argument between reformers and conservatives since Mao's
death has been focused on whether to
open the window to the outside world or
insert an 'iron mesh' to prevent the
intrusion of 'dirty flies'. The ideologically bankrupt leadership in Beijing
now seeks to take advantage of this
mood, hoping to dissipate the effect of
outside criticism by encouraging a
chauvinist rejection of foreign interference. Thus a poem earlier this year in
the conservative Guangming ('Enlightened') Daily (February 18):
We are more than willing to learn everything wholesome,
To listen to all sincere suggestions and
more generally the shame of not being
like Japan has now been reinforced by
the shame of not being like Romania.
This humiliation has given rise to an
array of bitter jokes, reversing the official slogans from the Maoist past.
'Only socialism can save China' now
becomes 'Only China can save socialism'. For 'Without the Communist Party
there would be no China' read 'Without
China there would be no Communist
Party'.
Yet there are optimists too in Beijing who
point to internal conflicts of the postmassacre leadership, its empty rhetoric
and lack of moral authority as grounds
for confidence that sooner or later it
will be consumed like a stack of dry
firewood. There are the tensions between the three old men, Deng Xiaoping, President Yang Shangkun (the
hard man of June 1989) and Chen Yun
(who has recentralised economic controls). There are the tensions too between the younger men: Li Peng and the
ultra-left in the Beijing party apparatus
are ranged against Jiang Zemin and the
other provincial leaders who were
brought in by Deng Xiaoping after June
1989 to try to limit the damage. They are
said to squabble endlessly about personnel appointments and propaganda
slogans.
he sight of the measures
taken by the regime to deter
dissent during the two months
of anniversaries of the democracy movement from April to June this
year is also cheering. It is a defeat for
the regime to have to warn an entire
city population to stay away from Tiananmen Square. Many workers are also
less prone to pessimism than the historically vulnerable class of Chinese inadvice.
But there is absolutely... no welcome tellectuals. Impressively politicised
last year, their cynicism towards the
for anything dictated,
Absolutely no recognising hegemony regime continues to mature. Many
should have been laid off from work as a
as humanity.
consequence of the government's deflaIn the depths of our own pride,
Mountainous waves can be whipped up. tionary policies. But to avoid unrest
Who knows China's deepest and they are kept on the books at a basic
wage, sitting around idly at work for
greatest secret?
Let me tell you as a citizen of China: lack of materials or customers. The
factory workshop has become what
Pride'.
Patriotism, says the new party leader Mao would have called a Great Political
Jiang Zemin, is the same thing as social- School.
ism. He likes to recall China's '5,000
If Mao could sit up in his mausoleum
year-old tradition of history' (which and scan the elite quarters to the west of
takes us back to the mythical Yellow the Forbidden City, with X-ray vision to
Emperor) and urges China's battered penetrate its vermilion walls, he would
intellectuals to revive their patriotic conclude that the present leadership
spirit. The dissident leaders abroad are should be Respected Tactically but
denounced for 'national betrayal'. Chi- Despised Strategically. In other words,
nese students have been urged by Jiang the classic Paper Tiger. The tactical
to have 'a sense of national pride, respect is due to a regime which having
national integrity and self-confidence'. used the army once must be judged
These are of course the qualities most ready to seek to do so again. Deng
deficient since June 1989. The suc- Xiaoping has shown his usual political
cess of the Romanian uprising against skill in balancing off rival factions.
the Ceausescu clan prompted some Another relatively uncontaminated proChinese to ask gleefully how long the vincial leader, Li Ruihuan, is now talkChinese Ceausescu could survive. But ing about the need for unity. Martial
13
T
MARXISM TODAY JUNE 1990
'lt is a
defeat for
the regime
to have to
warn an
entire city
population
to stay away
from
Tiananmen
Square'
law, expected by many to continue at
least until the Asian Games in September, has been formally ended both
in Beijing and Lhasa, though the troops
remain close at hand. At the time of
writing (mid-May), the first anniversaries had passed without significant incident.
Yet the strategic outlook for the regime is confused and threatening. Deng
appears to be no more successful than
Mao in solving the succession problem.
What happens may depend on who dies
first, Deng, or Yang, or the conservative Chen Yun. The army's position is
ambiguous. Rising unemployment in
the countryside has cancelled out the
economic gains of the early-1980s reforms. The regime's continuing strength,
it is argued, should not be mistaken for
vitality. As Eastern Europe has shown,
an oppressed people never forgets the
lies it is obliged to tell, and it will seize
the chance to avenge them. The key
demands of the 1989 movement were
not for democracy or an end to corruption. They were for dialogue and truth.
If the people sense that a vacuum has
developed at the 'party centre', and the
troops are withdrawn, they will fill the
same square with the same demand in a
matter of hours. That is why, say many
Beijingers, 'we are waiting for someone
to die'.
et it is by no means certain
that the next political
upheaval will take place on
the streets. The likely role
of the People's Liberation Army (PLA)
is both vital and hard to predict. On the
eve of the anniversaries, Jiang Zemin
told it to work harder to play its role as
'pillar of the proletarian dictatorship... .So long as China has the PLA as
its powerful back-up, attempts by
(Western) hostile forces are doomed to
failure, and there is absolutely no way
for the socialist system to be abolished
on the earth.' This is the language of a
deeply apprehensive regime. Although
there was never any chance of rival
armies fighting it out last June - that
was a fantasy nourished by prodemocracy propaganda and the American networks - there were considerable tensions of which we now have a
better understanding. A number of
army units committed to the occupation
of Tiananmen Square refused to fire.
Those that did are not proud of it. If
ordered into similar action again, they
might find a better excuse to abstain.
Yet the army too is waiting for someone
to die, and the different factions of the
party leadership are replicated in its
high command.
Some PLA leaders now have a vested
interest in the continuation of a more
conservative, centralised regime. Others, especially in the provinces, would
support a return to liberal reform. Most
people expect the PLA to intervene
more openly in the next political crisis,
but not necessarily in a unified manner.
The most optimistic scenario of what
will happen after 'someone dies' has the
army intervening on behalf of the re-
Y
form faction within the party led, presumably, by Zhao. A new Gang of Four (or
five or six) headed by Li Peng would be
arrested and tried for crimes against
the people. The problem with this 1976type solution is (a) that the army has
blood on its own hands, and (b) that
nobody at the centre has the unchallenged authority of Marshal Ye Jianying who led the 1976 anti-Gang coup.
The prospect of the break-up of China
into a new form of warlordism, for so
long a mere fantasy of the China lobby
in the US, is now not an entirely implausible worst-case scenario.
The Li Peng regime is inhibited from mak-
ing the clean sweep necessary to insure
against a counter-move in the future.
Accused in the press of fomenting
counter-revolution, Zhao Ziyang remains a party member and even a delegate to the National People's Congress
(though in March he tactfully begged
leave 'not to attend'). He is even said to
be at liberty to play golf. The army has
been purged half-heartedly. Too many
demotions would weaken morale
further; too few will be seen as weakness. Large numbers of workers and
citizens involved in the disturbances
have been arrested, but relatively few
students and intellectuals. The apprehension of being 'seized' by the police is
always present, but some of the arrests
are pro forma so that local authorities
can claim to be showing the necessary
zeal. (The situation in Tibet is quite
different: dissidents and protestors are
regularly arrested and tortured, while
Lhasa remains a city under military
occupation. It would soon become so in
parts of the northwest region of Xinjiang where long-suppressed grievances of the Uighur Muslim majority
have begun to break out.) The May
mood in Beijing is overwhelmingly one
of alienation, in which the government
apparatus as well as the population only
moves at half-pace.
Away from the elite politics at the
centre, the millions of rural Chinese
constitute an even less calculable factor
in any future political upheaval. Orientalising wisdom has it that the rural
masses know nothing about politics and
are satisfied with the new commodity
economy generated by the privatisation
of land. This is over-stated: a third of
those peasants have become semiurbanised in the past decade, moving
into small-town industry and commerce
or contracting their labour to urban
construction. Most army conscripts are
peasants - including many of the bewildered soldiers who occupied Beijing
last June.
Unemployment continues to rise. The
Chinese definitions are complex: there
are new entrants to the job market who
are 'waiting for employment'; those
who have become unemployed because
of new reforms which include a bankruptcy law; those who refuse job assignment; cohcealed unemployment where
labour has been assigned to enterprises
to maintain a fiction of full employ-
T h e key
demands of
the 1989
movement
were not for
democracy
or an end to
corruption.
They were
for dialogue
and truth'
ment; and surplus labour - peasants
with little or nothing to do - in the rural
areas. Figures are sketchy but all these
categories combined appear to total at
least 100m, or over 9% of the Chinese
population - nearly 20% of the adult
population. The serious provincial riots
in April-June last year in Xian, Changsha
and Chengdu all involved large numbers
of rural unemployed. Since then the
economic clamp-down has further cut
back urban building projects, closed
rural industries and increased restrictions on small-scale business.
The success of the rural reforms had
already faltered in the late 1980s as
farmers found that competitive risktaking generated losses as well as profits. They suffered from fluctuating
cash-crop prices, shortages of inputs
such as fertilisers and the deterioration
of collectively-managed resources.
Rural living standards in most areas
had improved significantly in the 1980s,
but last year for the first time they fell
back. Meanwhile the urban working
force suffers from the loss of bonuses
as factory productivity is cut, and
from official disapproval of the previously fast-growing sector of private
commerce.
Yet the economic situation will not by
itself defeat the present regime. The
austerity measures had already been
introduced at the end of 1988 to tackle a
reform policy which - it must be recognised - had got wildly out of hand.
Inflation and the budgetary deficit have
been reduced, though at the usual price
of increased unemployment and the
decline of local enterprises. The former
secretary-general Zhao Ziyang's reckless policy of unbalanced high growth in
the developed coastal areas - the socalled 'gold coast' policy - and excessive tolerance of inflation and corruption, did require correction. The regime
has in fact over-corrected, but the harm
which excessive centralisation might
do is diminished by the degree of de
facto autonomy which many provinces
have acquired.
owever, the present regime is incapable of the
necessary
systemic
changes. These would
require a proper balance between
market and state controls, backed by
political reforms to restore confidence
in central direction. The two-tier system of pegged and free prices would
have to be tackled. Other necessary
reforms are needed in the financial
markets and commercial law. But an
integrated set of policies of this nature
is impossible in a period of political
paralysis, because (a) nobody will take
the initiative to devise it, and (b) nobody
will take responsibility for implementing it. If the economy will not defeat the
regime, it will not save it either.
Foreign pressure will also be inconclusive. In view of the media coverage of the Beijing massacre, Western
governments had no alternative but to
make a visible display of their own
disapproval. The true test, however,
15 MARXISM TODAY JUNE 1990
was the secret mission on behalf of
President Bush to Beijing in the month
after the massacre, undisclosed until a
second trip was revealed in December.
Thatcher's personal adviser Sir Percy
Cradock also made a secret visit in
December, with as little success. The
justification for this secret diplomacy
was that a loud voice would not have
produced better results. Bush's White
House spokesman explained his belief
in 'trying to provide opportunities for
them (the Chinese) to improve our relationship'. In December Bush had also
authorised licenses for the export of
three communications satellites and
refused to impose sanctions recently
approved by Congress on export-import
bank funding. This exceptionally conciliatory policy continued in spite of a
State Department report accurately
documenting human rights abuses in
China.
ver since Kissinger and
Heath were flattered by Zhou
Enlai, Western politicians
have prided themselves on
being able to ameliorate Chinese policy
through private persuasion. This time
the Chinese have lacked the diplomatic
subtlety to respond. But the qualified
disapproval of foreign governments is
less significant than the loss of Western
commercial confidence. A large multinational may do less than 3% of its
business with China. The investment of
research and management resources to
build up a Chinese market has usually
E
been at a higher cost than would be
tolerated elsewhere. Now China has lost
its special attraction for captains of
industry and director-generals of international agencies, who used to seize any
pretext to visit Beijing and sign a probably meaningless Letter of Understanding. Foreign business also has a
more practical complaint: because of
China's credit squeeze, bills are no longer
paid on time. The real damage done to the
foreign investment climate in China also
alienates the important and growing
class of entrepreneurs (once called compradores) from the regime.
History is already repeating itself as farce
in Beijing a year after the massacre.
The regime declares itself to be the only
true guardian of socialism, but can
offer no answer to what is happening
elsewhere except to denounce foreign
interference and to assert that communism must inevitably triumph. Such
statements are published at full-page
length in the unreadable media. The
bookshops continue to be well-stocked
with thrillers, Kung Fu manuals and
books about sexual relations, while
their political shelves remain empty.
Only two slogans appear now on the
billboards. The first is to 'Learn from
Lei Feng', the model soldier who died
nearly 30 years ago. The second is 'Welcome the Asian Games', the international event scheduled long ago for
September 1990 which the authorities
both welcome as an opportunity to
17
'Patriotism,
says the new
party leader
Jiang Zemin,
is the same
thing as
socialism'
demonstrate normality and fear as a
possible platform for dissident protest.
Sometimes the two slogans are meaninglessly combined, as in 'Prepare for
the Asian Games by Learning from Lei
Feng'.
The public mood is necessarily confused. Depression in one democracy
activist is reshaped as determination in
another. But it remans difficult to see
how the paper tiger can avoid being
shredded over the next two or three
years. We may adopt another Maoist
metaphor and say that the next revolution will be like a straw sandal made in
his home province of Hunan. It is not
fashioned, the chairman once said,
according to a pattern. But it takes
shape as it is woven. The democracy
movement outside China may only play
a more substantial role if a new power
vacuum allows the exiles to return
home - although, like Sun Yat-sen's
Tongmenghui party after the 1911 revolution, they may still be outmanoeuvred by domestic political forces.
The real forces for change remain inside China. It must start in the army and
party, but in the end the people, and
only the people, can decide. With history speeding up on every side, it is
hard to imagine that the present edgy
equilibrium can last for very long.#
John Gittings' history of China since 1949, China
Changes Face, has been issued in a new extended
paperback edition (Oxford University Press, 1990,
£6.95). It includes a 30-page epilogue on the Beijing
massacre and the subsequent repression, largely
based on his own eye-witness observations.
MARXISM TODAY JUNE 1990