But then, with his famous “southern tour” in early 1992, Deng orchestrated the eclipse of the anti-market, conservative faction.
In the boomtown of Shenzhen, with TV cameras rolling, Deng jabbed his finger in the air, admonishing his CCP: “If China does not practice socialism, does not carry on with ‘reform and opening’ and economic development, does not improve people’s standards of living, then no matter what direction we go, it will be a dead end.”
Having begrudgingly purged the reformers in 1989, Deng in 1992 seized the opportunity to sideline the central planners, bringing in China’s neo-liberal hero, Zhu Rongji (朱鎔基), to refire the engines of the economy. Deng judged the mood of the nation shrewdly: The people were ready to be told that “to get rich is glorious.”
The new CCP leadership of the 1990s and 2000s did not waver from Deng’s line: steady expansion of market reforms, active involvement in international commerce, massive urbanization and urban development and total dedication to CCP unity.
June 4, the day Peoples’ Liberation Army troops drove the students and their supporters from Tiananmen Square, is remembered in the West as a tragic example of state violence against unarmed citizens and a memorial to the suppressed yearnings of the Chinese people for freedom and democracy.
But, in the cold eyes of history, the 1989 movement and its aftermath may eventually be seen as the CCP’s “Machiavellian moment,” when Deng confronted the mortality of his republic and saw what it would take to survive: CCP unity based on urban growth.
By reunifying the party leadership and re-establishing solidarity between the party and the urban population, the crisis consolidated CCP rule, and accelerated China’s momentum down its current path of rapid economic growth.
In her classic study On Revolution, Hannah Arendt observed darkly that “whatever brotherhood human beings may be capable of has grown out of fratricide, whatever political organization men may have achieved has its origin in crime.”
The bloodstained square on the morning of June 4 was in this sense perhaps the birthplace of post-revolutionary China.
John Delury is associate director of the Center on US-China Relations and director of the China Boom Project at the Asia Society.
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