The publication of secret, audiotaped memoirs by fallen Chinese Communist Party (CCP) reformer Zhao Ziyang (趙紫陽), who sought to “eradicate the malady of China’s economic system at its roots” and died under house arrest for his efforts, is reigniting debate over the complex legacy of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests.
Indeed, as China looms ever larger in the world economy, it is worth remembering that 20 years ago next month, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) almost fell apart. The protest movement that gathered in Tiananmen that year posed an existential threat to the CCP state, proclaimed in that very spot 40 years earlier by Mao Zedong (毛澤東).
The threat came from two directions — from within the highest echelons of the CCP leadership, where ideological differences over reform split the ruling Politburo, and from the urban masses, who, with Beijing’s university students at the vanguard, stood in open, peaceful revolt against state authority.
Amazingly, the CCP emerged from the crisis unified around Deng Xiaoping’s (鄧小平) vision of a “socialist market economy” and regained legitimacy with the urban population through implementing that vision. The CCP restored unity on the platform of globally integrated, market-driven growth, to be achieved without the intercession of the students’ “Goddess of Democracy,” but bringing tangible material benefit to city residents.
Sure enough, urban development, investment and GDP growth accelerated throughout the 1990s, but so did the gap between urban winners and rural losers. The protest energy that briefly electrified Tiananmen Square dissipated out of the cities and spread across the countryside.
At the euphoric outset of the 1989 demonstrations, more than 80,000 students marched through the streets of Beijing demanding a more responsive government. By 2005, there were more than 80,000 mass disturbances reported across the country — but mostly not in the booming coastal cities and certainly not at the elite national universities.
Over the past 20 years, laid-off workers, dispossessed farmers, Falun Gong practitioners and angry Tibetans have organized protests. No student-led, urban protests like those of Tiananmen Square of 1989, however, have occurred.
The economic boom under former Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民)and his successor, Hu Jintao (胡錦濤), which channeled youthful revolt into entrepreneurship and professional success, was possible only because Deng prevented the CCP leadership from fracturing during the student protests of the late 1980s and the conservative backlash of the early 1990s.
As the protests began, Deng’s chosen successor, Zhao, was tempted to use the mass movement as a lever to push harder for market reform, and possibly political reform.
If China was going to have its own Mikhail Gorbachev, it would have been Zhao.
Deng supported Zhao’s drive to liberalize the economy, even though it was creating mixed results in 1988 and 1989, with inflation spiking and economic anxiety pervasive. But Deng, scarred from decades of Maoism — particularly the chaos unleashed by the Cultural Revolution — had limited tolerance for political instability. And Zhao’s toleration of the demonstrators was dividing the Politburo into factions. So Deng fed Zhao to the party’s more conservative lions.
Hardliners emerged triumphant in the wake of the crackdown. In their eyes, the tumult of 1989 proved that “reform and opening” were leading to chaos and collapse. Deng temporarily withdrew, letting the central planners around CCP elder Chen Yun (陳雲) slow down marketization and weather the PRC’s international isolation in Tiananmen’s wake.
RSS