In the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square killings
in 1989, the Chinese communist leaders acted
like a caste of high priests. They alone could
delineate the right path to be followed by a billion
of their fellow Chinese. Yet since 1949 Chinese
history had been marked by abrupt changes. The
correct line at any one moment was determined
by the ascendant group among the elite. After
Mao’s death in 1976, no one carried enough
prestige to assume his mantle, though Deng
Xiaoping managed for a decade to exert overriding
influence. When there was a change of policy,
the leader turned on his erstwhile supporters, who
were now revealed as deviationists, enemies or
counter-revolutionaries – exposed by the vigilance
of the victorious faction. The rest of China, from
the regional cadres to the humble peasant, was
coerced into following the new line. The imprisonment
of opponents was commonplace, as was
the execution of criminals.
This structure, however, in no way inhibited
power struggles among China’s leadership, which
occurred right through to the 1990s. But the tensions
and conflicts within the Politburo could
only be guessed at until the victory of one group
and leader brought them out into the open. The
party could ‘reform’ only from the top down.
Reform from below or outside the party – that
is, democracy – would undermine this selfperpetuating
system. So any radical change in the
way China was ruled had to be effected by the
leadership itself. For any Chinese leader, control
of the army was thus as vital as control of the
Politburo. The chairmanship of the Military
Affairs Commission was a key position of great
power; its occupant ensured that posts held under
him, such as the deputy director, the chief of staff
and the director of the Political Department, were
filled by his supporters. Yet the decades following
Mao’s death witnessed a transformation. Oneparty
control remained. Might not otherwise
China have succumbed again to regional disintegration
and chaos during the years of great
change. Yet year by year the people did gain more
freedoms, with one proviso; they could not fundamentally
challenge party rule without risking
incarceration. Party leaders in big cities down to
small rural communities enjoy unchallenged
power. Corruption was rife despite constant campaigns
to check its spread and the threats of draconian
punishment. At first there were few signs
of a new dawn.
Until his death in 1976, Mao continued to
dominate China whenever he chose to set the line
of policy to be followed. The violent changes from
1949 to 1976 reflected his perversion of the
Confucian doctrine of the Golden Mean – a
radical move would be followed by consolidation
and relaxation only to be succeeded by the next
step forward. The demise of the Red Guards in
1968, however, was succeeded not so much by
consolidation and relaxation as by a change in the
direction of the revolution. The student Red
Guards had experienced real and heady power; in
the name of Mao they had taken the law into their
own hands, believing that they should lead
Chinese society through revolution to communist
utopia. They had ventured forth with Mao’s blessing,
causing mayhem and attacking not only the
local officials, as Mao had instructed in his Big
Character Poster of August 1966, ‘Bombard the
Headquarters’, but also anyone belonging to the
traditional establishment. Their bitterness and
disillusionment when Mao and the party leadership
suppressed them and forced them to labour
in the countryside were fierce indeed. Paradoxically
the Cultural Revolution also gave rise to the
Democracy Movement, whose ideals of individual
rights and liberties were the exact opposite of the
Red Guards’ cry of submission to Mao’s doctrines
and vision.
During the last years of his life Mao acted
more and more autocratically. He found it useful
to maintain in power a Politburo in which the
extreme left group (Gang of Four), which
included Jiang Quing, his actress wife since 1938,
was balanced by the reformists, led by Deng
Xiaoping, who returned to the central stage in
1973 as one of the vice-premiers. Premier Zhou
Enlai, who had weathered all the turns of policy,
moving just sufficiently in whatever direction the
wind blew, was a moderating influence. His
unqualified loyalty to Mao and his flexibility help
to explain how he alone among China’s political
elite had remained at the centre. The attempts by
the Gang of Four to undermine his position only
earned them Mao’s reproof, but they too retained
considerable influence until the chairman’s
death. It was Mao’s way of balancing rival forces.
Nonetheless, a victim had to be found who could
be blamed for the excesses of the Red Guards.
From the highest ranks of the Politburo, Mao
chose his intended successor, Lin Biao, minister
of defence since 1960. Accused of plotting to
assassinate Mao, Lin Biao was never brought
to trial, and died conveniently in an air crash in
1971, allegedly while trying to escape.
In 1975 Zhou Enlai fell seriously ill. Mao, who
recognised Deng’s abilities, delegated to him the
running of the state, despite the hostility of the
Gang of Four. Zhou Enlai died the following
year, in April 1976, but Deng’s ascendancy was
short-lived. Thousands of people demonstrated in
Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, ostensibly to mourn
the death of Zhou Enlai but in reality protesting
against the repression of the ultra-left. There were
scuffles with police and the square was cleared by
force, an uneasy precedent for what was to
happen there thirteen years later.
Between 1970 and 1974 the economic recovery
was proceeding in fits and starts. This did not
deflect the party leadership from making grand
plans for the future. At the Fourth National
People’s Congress in January 1975 Zhou Enlai
proclaimed that the country’s objective now was
to catch up with the developed world by the end
of the century by concentrating on the ‘four
moderns’: the modernisation of agriculture, of
industry, of national defence and of science and
technology. But within the constraints of Mao’s
ideology such results could not be attained. It
would be left to Mao’s heirs to try new ways of
achieving the necessary growth.
What has subsequently been called the second
phase of the Cultural Revolution continued to
disrupt China. Some 12 million students, professionals
and intellectuals had been sent into the
countryside to be educated in the realities of
Chinese peasant life. Many unjust imprisonments
were upheld. Education and science were disrupted;
schools and universities only gradually
reopened in the 1970s. The see-saw policies of
Mao’s hierarchy inflicted untold hardship and suffering
on millions of Chinese. They would
remember the decade from 1966 to 1976 as the
years of great turmoil.
Yet there were also, at least in principle, some
beneficial aspects. The relocation of industrial
activity throughout China, away from the manufacturing
cities of the southern China coast spurred
a more even development and mitigated the Third
World phenomenon of developing mega-cities
unable to cope with the population influx. Had
there been more rational planning, with transport
and communications keeping pace and with the
older urban centres being maintained and renewed
as necessary instead of suffering from neglect,
China’s economic development would have suffered
less from Mao’s Cultural Revolution. As it
was Mao’s faith in the power of ideology created a
fatal impediment.
It is remarkable that one branch of technology
nevertheless held its own during the decade when
intellectuals were most fiercely persecuted: that
was the missile and atomic-bomb sector. After
Russia’s withdrawal from the nuclear programme,
Chinese scientists went ahead on their own, and
in October 1964 China exploded its own atomic
bomb, becoming the fifth nuclear power in the
world. Two years later guided missiles provided a
delivery system. By 1967 China had built the even
more terrible hydrogen bomb. Three years later
it sent up its first satellite and in 1975 launched
a retrievable model. Chinese missiles are among
the most reliable.
One of the most startling developments of
Mao’s last years was the reorientation of China’s
foreign policy. Relations with the Soviet Union
had gone from bad to worse after Khrushchev’s
fall, and in March 1969 there was actually handto-
hand fighting over an insignificant island in the
middle of the River Ussuri claimed by both the
Russians and the Chinese. But the border dispute
on the Soviet Pacific along the Amur and Ussuri
rivers was less a cause than a symptom of Sino-
Soviet hostility, with Brezhnev in the 1970s stationing
some of Russia’s best divisions on the
border, complete with nuclear-missile installations.
The Chinese anyway knew that they were
no match for the Russians. Mao interpreted Soviet
foreign policy as entering a new imperialist era,
and he could cite as evidence the Brezhnev
Doctrine, which was used to justify the invasion of
Czechoslovakia in 1968. The US by contrast had
in Mao’s view become overstretched and in the
early 1970s was looking for a way out of Vietnam.
Mao saw in the American–Soviet rivalry a contradiction
that China might exploit: he was now prepared
to seek agreement with the country that had
hitherto been China’s main antagonist – the US.
In Washington, President Nixon and Henry
Kissinger also saw a chance to create a better balance
of power against the Soviet Union by playing
the China card.
It began in a characteristically Chinese fashion
with an agreement early in 1971 for a US tabletennis
team to visit China. This was the first direct
link between the two countries. The US still recognised
Chiang Kai-shek’s regime in Taiwan as the
legitimate Republic of China, and its representatives
occupied China’s place on the UN Security
Council. In July, Kissinger, President Nixon’s
national security adviser, journeyed secretly to
Beijing. This paved the way for one of the most
momentous U-turns in the history of international
relations.
President Nixon, Mrs Nixon, William Rogers,
the secretary of state, and Kissinger flew to Beijing
for discussions and negotiations with Mao and
Zhou Enlai in February 1972. The outcome was
incorporated in a joint US–Chinese communiqué
published in Shanghai on 28 February in which the
American and Chinese signatories declared that
they wished to normalise relations between the
two countries. They reviewed the world situation,
and the Americans and Chinese each issued a statement
of their own. Despite different ideologies,
the US document declared, no country was infallible.
The US stressed its commitment to freedom
and to support for South Vietnam and South
Korea. The Chinese countered that oppression
bred resistance, that strong nations should not
bully the weak: ‘China will never be a superpower
and it opposes hegemony and power politics of any
kind.’ The Chinese expressed their firm support for
the peoples of Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia (here
the Chinese took the opposite side to the US), but
declared they both wished to reduce the danger of
international conflict and did not seek hegemony.
The touchiest and most crucial difference was over
the future of Taiwan, so long allied to the US. The
Chinese uncompromisingly declared Taiwan to be
an internal question and insisted that Taiwan as a
province of China should return to the motherland.
They also demanded that US forces be withdrawn
from the island. The Americans agreed that
there was but one China – a point, they added
tartly, that Taiwan and Beijing had in common.
The US wanted to see a peaceful settlement and
gave a momentous if somewhat vague undertaking:
‘it affirms the ultimate objective of the withdrawal
of all US forces and military installations
from Taiwan’.
In December 1978 full diplomatic relations
were resumed between Beijing and Washington.
America’s trade embargo had long ended and
China had taken its place fully in the international
community, replacing Taiwan’s representative as
a permanent member of the UN Security
Council. Relations with the West were normalised,
a process that began with the Soviet
Union only in the late 1980s. Thus the opening
to the West had begun under Mao’s auspices in
the 1970s. It was to reach a high point in the
1980s, with many thousands of Chinese students
being sent abroad – most to the capitalist US,
where over 20,000 were sent to study advanced
technology and management. Deng’s younger
son studied for his doctorate at Rochester
University. It was an ironic reversal: in the 1950s
it had been the Soviet Union that had provided
the education.
Mao’s immediate successor, chosen as chairman
by the geriatric Politburo, was an orthodox
Maoist, Hua Guofeng. His most significant contribution
was to drive the Gang of Four, that is
the extreme left, from the most powerful positions.
We can only guess at the struggles within
the Politburo that led to Deng’s recall to his
former posts in 1977. Natural disasters, which
struck the countryside in 1977 and 1978, slowed
down the economic recovery then under way and
probably helped the reformist section of the
Politburo. A distinguished Chinese historian has
called the third plenary session of the Eleventh
Party Central Committee held in December 1978
‘a turning point of far-reaching significance’. Hua
was dismissed from his position as party chairman
in 1978, accused of persisting in the ‘two whatevers’
– that is, of wanting to uphold whatever
policy decisions Mao had made and whatever
directives Mao had sent down.
A main plank of Marxist strategy was now
abandoned with the dropping of the ‘class struggle’
as the key to development and the shift to
‘socialist modernisation’. What this meant in
reality, despite lip service to Maoist thinking, was
a break with Mao’s revolutionary drives, founded
on the belief that the creation of communist man
must come first through education and the organisation
of the peasantry in collectives and workers
into state-managed enterprises. The benefits of
well-being and economic progress were supposed
to follow automatically. It was now thought that
the prime task was to modernise China, to do
whatever was necessary to increase production on
the land and in industry as rapidly as possible so
as to raise within a generation the Chinese standard
of living from one of the lowest in the world
to rank with that of the West. The new line
(which had to be sloganised to conform to political
practice) was called ‘Seeking truth from facts’.
Where Marxist ideology proved a hindrance it
would be jettisoned. This indeed was a revolutionary
change of course, though gradual in execution.
The party, whose standing had reached
rock-bottom during the Cultural Revolution, was
to be restored to pre-eminence, to ensure that the
reforms decided by the leadership would be
carried through; and the People’s Liberation
Army was cosseted to ensure that it would remain
the loyal instrument of power and preserve order,
unity and obedience to the party leadership.
Democracy in the Western sense of pluralism and
of a leadership chosen by the people played no
part in this programme – indeed, demands for
such things were seen as jeopardising the aims of
modernisation, as destroying the essential unity of
purpose.
Deng Xiaoping, the man who represented the
new line and who had already played a significant
role in attempting to make China more modern
economically, belonged to that elderly group of
revolutionaries who had been active in the 1950s.
The open distancing from Mao’s supposed infallibility
was signalled by subjecting the Gang of
Four to a televised trial in 1980 in order to expose
the wrongdoings of the Cultural Revolution.
Jiang Quing, Mao’s widow, alone offered a spirited
defence, refusing to admit any guilt: ‘You
can’t have peaceful coexistence in this area of ideology’,
she spat out. ‘You coexist, and they’ll
corrupt you.’ She was sentenced to death, but this
was later commuted to life imprisonment. As a
symbol of the Cultural Revolution she became
the most hated woman in China. Meanwhile, a
younger generation of politicians had been placed
in the top positions: Hu Yaobang became party
leader and Zhao Ziyang the head of government,
both of them reformist followers of Deng. Deng
himself eschewed Mao’s personality cult, though
as a member of the Politburo in charge of the
army he was careful to counter the ‘old guard’ of
conservatives, who remained powerful and strong,
ready to make a comeback should his reforms fail
or loosen party control or threaten China’s unity.
So it can be seen that Deng’s position could not
be compared to Mao’s. When public protests
became too strong, Deng himself was ready to
back a more conservative line.
Deng’s reforms of the political structure were
never intended to create a Western-style democracy,
which he condemned as ‘bourgeois liberalism’.
But without some reforms of the existing
structures his economic programme would fail.
For years he manipulated the factions in China
with the skill of a poker player. Just so much criticism
had to be encouraged to galvanise corrupt
or inefficient party bureaucrats and the patronage
system which placed a premium on who you
knew. Between 1982 and 1985 slow but steady
progress was made in weeding out those who had
become too old or were too incompetent, usually
by offering generous retirement terms. At a special
national party conference in September 1985, half
the Politburo was retired and a fifth of the Central
Committee. Deng Xiaoping, Hu Yaobang and
Zhao Ziyang now had a majority vote in the
Politburo. At this point Deng had probably
reached the height of his influence and power.
Deng could also look back on a remarkably
successful start to his programme of economic
reform in education and technological progress,
but most especially in agriculture. Socialism was
gradually modified and the peasant was given the
incentive of growing some of his crops for profit
and of engaging in handicraft industry. The
people’s communes were replaced between 1979
and 1984 by a new system which, in practice,
returned the land to the peasantry under a contract,
called a lease, hardly distinguishable from
private ownership. The contract had been used
before for short periods to revive agricultural
output, but now it became the system adopted
in place of the collectives. Contracts were made
with individual households: taxes had to be paid
and an agreed amount of grain had to be sold to
the state, but beyond this the household (or
groups of peasants) could keep whatever they
could earn. Efficient households soon became
quasi-landlords, employing sometimes as many as
a hundred peasant labourers.
Prices were raised. There was a boom in some
regions of China as the successful farmers built
themselves large houses and bought consumer
goods never before seen in the countryside –
colour television sets and refrigerators. Rural
enterprises and factories also developed and some
owners became rich. What mattered most to the
state, however, was the increase in agricultural
production, which in the years after 1979 was
spectacular, starting as it did from the low base
of the collectives. By 1984 Deng’s agricultural
reforms appeared to have vindicated his approach.
The reform of state factories and urban enterprises
took off later, in the mid-1980s, Deng
having given priority to the agricultural reforms.
The reformers now turned to free industry from
state shackles and to devolve responsibility to the
factory manager; here, too, the profit motive was
designed to provide incentives. Small, privately
owned enterprises were encouraged. By 1987 20
million one-family undertakings had been started.
But the most startling reform was the development
of what were called ‘special economic
zones’ – capitalist enclaves within socialist China.
Though the West had exploited China in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, establishing
Western enclaves in China, the treaty ports
and concessions, these had also been a channel by
which Western management and technology were
transferred to China. The most successful of these
international concessions had existed in Shanghai,
whose trading and commercial pre-eminence in
China was due to the presence of the Westerner.
But the communists had reasserted Chinese sovereignty
and driven out the West from all the
enclaves. For a decade the Soviet Union had filled
the gap as educator, but then it also withdrew.
Deng and the reformers wanted to bring Western
knowledge and capital back to China. That was
the purpose of the Special Enterprise Zones. One
such, Shenzhen, was placed strategically across
the frontiers of Hong Kong, the prime example
of what a combination of Chinese skill and the
capitalist system could achieve. Favourable condi-
tions and the availability of cheap Chinese labour
attracted large-scale investment from Hong
Kong. No doubt Deng was trying to kill two
birds with one stone. By showing that capitalism
and socialism could exist side by side he furthered
the reunification of all of China – the British
colony of Hong Kong, the Portuguese enclave of
Macao and hostile Taiwan. Most of Hong Kong
would revert to China when the British lease
ended. In 1984 the British and Chinese governments
concluded an agreement that embodied
Deng’s formula ‘one country, two systems’. After
the British lease ended in 1997 Hong Kong
would be allowed to maintain its capitalist system
and its freedoms for fifty years as a Special
Administrative Region of the People’s Republic.
While it seemed that Deng and the reformers
were transforming China, opening the country to
the West, attracting tourists and foreign capital,
developing new joint enterprises and placing
orders for machines and whole factories with the
US, Britain, West Germany and other countries,
problems were emerging which, in 1989, were to
place question marks over Deng’s decade of
reform.
Free-enterprise agriculture was concentrating
on the production of more profitable crops than
grain, such as jute and tobacco. In 1985 grain
production fell as China’s population, despite
intensive birth-control campaigns enforcing ‘one
couple, one child’, inexorably grew. Greater productivity
on the land meant less need for labour.
China’s urban population almost doubled
between 1980 and 1986 – another 180 million
mouths to feed in the cities. There was underemployment
and unemployment in the cities;
housing shortages grew more severe. The mixed
state and free market encouraged corruption.
Favouritism and bribery became widespread.
Price rises unsettled the population, more used to
the stability of stagnation. Economic development
has been uneven, fastest in the last 1980s
in the coastal cities. Agricultural output from
what are predominantly small farms has little
scope to increase and so match China’s population
growth. With an economy in which prices are
not yet market-oriented there is confusion and
dislocation. Corruption is rife and China is still
overburdened with a vast bureaucracy, whose
planning functions continue to shrink. Vested
interests damaged by these changes did their best
to slow up or undermine Deng’s reforms.
The biggest problem was Deng’s recognition
of the need to transform the attitudes of the individual
Chinese, to make them more independentthinking,
responsible and enterprising. To the
extent that he succeeded he also raised expectations
beyond what the party could fulfil.
Educational reform created a larger professional
class and more idealistic students, who demanded
new freedoms and ‘democracy’. This set Deng’s
reformers and the party leadership on a collision
course with a vociferous, educated, urban minority
which wanted political reforms on the Western
model. The West had come to expect more from
the Chinese leadership as China’s economic and
diplomatic involvement with the rest of the world
had grown. Tourists visited China and found its
people generous and friendly; Beijing even
allowed discreet nightclubs to open, offering the
services of hostesses. It looked as if China would
adopt the Western way of life, importing not only
Western capital and goods but also some of the
West’s values. But in 1989 the Chinese leadership
showed a different face that should have been
expected. The West recoiled with horror but only
for a short time.
In the China of the twentieth century there is a
tradition of student and intellectual protest. The
calendar is marked by events such as the antiforeigner
demonstrations of 4 May 1919, which
became the focus for new demonstrations in the
1980s. Student idealism and frustrations were
manipulated from time to time by the aged party
leadership against their rivals, not least by Mao
himself, with the launch of the Red Guards in
1966. It was a dangerous tactic and those who
used student protest for their own purposes then
had to contain what they had helped to arouse.
Deng and his chosen successor, the man he had
placed in the position of party leader, Hu Yaobang,
together with the head of the government Zhao
Ziyang, decided to allow freer expression of views.
Deng, however, kept his lines open to the more
conservative aged Politburo in deploring decadent
Western ‘bourgeois’ influences.
It was not surprising that China’s students
were in the forefront of protest and demonstrations.
They lived in bad conditions and were
rigidly controlled by their elders. Their future
usually lay in the hands of the state or party
machine, which would assign them to a job somewhere
in China – possibly in the wildest, most
remote regions. Added to the instinctive desire of
youth to be free of the restrictions imposed by an
older generation, to find new solutions to longlasting
problems, was a growing impatience with
party politicising, with corruption and with
repression. The old certainties enshrined within
Mao’s infallibility had been replaced by a jumble
of ideas. The rapid pace of economic change and
contact with foreigners, with foreign literature
and with some of their teachers, who bravely
spoke their minds, all created a ferment of unrest.
In the winter of 1986 the students took to the
streets and gathered in Tiananmen Square.
Economic reforms were not enough – they
wanted control over their own lives. The demand
was for ‘democracy’, symbolised on their banners
by the Statue of Liberty. It was a spontaneous
expression of feeling; but the students had no
notion of how a transition to democracy might
be managed in the prevailing conditions of China.
They were brave and impetuous, and rejected
Deng’s cautious approach to greater freedoms
and prosperity which was then producing more
dislocation than progress. The student protest
was contained and dispersed without undue violence.
The hardliners in the Politburo may well
have regarded this as misplaced tolerance.
Deng’s economic reforms, which encouraged
more choice and freedom in the lives of the
Chinese, were blamed for these dangerous
demands for political freedoms, which challenged
the role of the party and its leaders. Deng could
not stop halfway on the road of economic reform,
but he agreed with the conservatives that liberty of
expression could not be allowed at this critical
stage to affect the leadership’s firm control of policy
decisions. The man he was thought to have
chosen as his successor, the pragmatic reformist
Hu Yaobang, was removed from the leadership of
the party but not from the Politburo. In the
course of 1987 Deng managed to readjust the balance
between reformers and conservatives while
pressing ahead with economic modernisation and
encouraging Western capitalism to invest in
China. Hu Yaobang’s position was taken by Zhao
Ziyang, whose administrative skills were intended
to help reform the party and to rid it of corruption.
A younger Politburo member, Li Peng, a
colourless Moscow-educated technocrat, was
placed at the head of the state administration. In a
wily masterstroke Deng retired from his posts and
thereby persuaded many of the ageing conservative
members of the Politburo to retire with him.
But a secret party agreement acknowledged that
he would continue to take major party decisions.
Rapid change caused increasing economic
problems in 1988 and 1989. Price inflation
reached 30 per cent; with the new economic freedoms,
some did well, but the army, the hundreds
of thousands of party and state officials and all
who derived their income from state salaries were
left behind. The disadvantaged began to see
Chinese society as increasingly unjust; food
queues in Beijing were painful evidence of agricultural
shortfalls and corruption. It was the example
of Gorbachev’s bold policy of glasnost and his
impending visit to Beijing that enthused the students
in the spring of 1989 to demonstrate and to
demand political reform. Countless banners in
Tiananmen Square celebrated the ‘Pioneer of
Glasnost’ and hailed the Soviet leader as an
‘Emissary of Democracy’. Gorbachev’s arrival in
May was, in itself, a turning point in China’s international
relations. At the end of a chaotic four-day
visit, Deng and Gorbachev announced that after
thirty years of hostility the relations between
China and the Soviet Union had been normalised.
But no very specific evidence of collaboration
emerged. The visit was in any case overshadowed
by the dramatic events outside the Great Hall of
the People in Tiananmen Square. Such turmoil
had not been seen in China since the Cultural
Revolution twenty years earlier.
The students, who had been demonstrating
since April, occupied the square throughout May
and attracted growing attention. China’s advances
in technology – television and satellite links –
vividly conveyed this mass protest, with its
demand for democracy and an end to the exclu-
sive role of the corrupt party, to the whole world.
Buoyed by public support, the students escalated
the confrontation, humiliating to the Politburo
holed up in the Great Hall, by going on hungerstrike.
For seven weeks the Chinese leadership tolerated
the students’ occupation of the square.
China seemed truly to have changed.
Inside the Great Hall of the People a power
struggle was going on between the party leader
Zhao Ziyang and the more hardline premier Li
Peng. The proclamation of martial law on 20 May
and the recall to the Politburo of four octogenarian
revolutionaries indicated that Deng was
ready to use as much force as necessary but
needed to wait until the crucial Gorbachev visit
had ended. He was also aware of the immense
damage a bloody crackdown would do to the
image of a reforming China, just when with its
economic troubles mounting he needed Western
help more than ever. Might the army prove unreliable,
even though he was head of the Military
Commission? An early attempt to use troops stationed
in Beijing failed. More ominously workers
went on strike and the students began to secure
mass support. In a final show of defiance they
erected in the square a plaster Goddess of Liberty,
which looked much like the American Statue of
Liberty. Deng ordered thousands of troops from
outlying parts of China to Beijing. These young
recruits had no idea what was really at issue; still
less had they any idea who they were being
ordered to suppress as dangerous revolutionaries.
The students massing in the square could not
believe that the People’s Liberation Army could
be prepared to harm their fellow Chinese, young
men and women the same age as they. In a dramatic
last bid Zhao Ziyang tearfully tried to
placate the students.
During the early hours of Sunday, 4 June 1989
the army with tanks and guns fired on those
unarmed students who would not leave the
square. The massacre, in which hundreds were
killed, was witnessed by the world as courageous
television crews and reporters provided live coverage
of the bloodshed, of students rushing
corpses and the wounded on their improvised
bicycle ambulances to Beijing’s hospitals. The
hospitals, unable to cope, simply stacked the
corpses in the corridors. All Sunday the soldiers
fired indiscriminately, killing men, women and
children, often bystanders unconnected to the
demonstration. For days Beijing was at the mercy
of the military. The striking workers were threatened
and made to return to work. In the
Politburo the students were condemned as revolutionaries,
and a conspiracy manipulated by
outside forces hostile to China was ‘uncovered’.
The massacre was simply denied and the demonstrators
were accused of killing the soldiers – it
was true that in their fury the crowds had savagely
burnt some trucks and killed the few occupants
they could lay their hands on. The troubles had
spread to other cities as well. In Shanghai there
were massive demonstrations, but there bloodshed
was avoided.
In the immediate aftermath student leaders and
demonstrators were arrested. The universities
emptied as students and staff dispersed, their
future uncertain. A number of public trials were
televised and sentences of execution pronounced.
A hunt for student leaders and supporters of the
democracy movement, now branded revolutionaries,
began. Zhao Ziyang was ousted as party
chief and placed under house arrest. Li Peng
became the spokesman for the hardliners. But the
power struggle was not over even as China outwardly
returned to normality. Deng, as an octogenarian,
could not be expected to retain power
for much longer. With the population still
growing despite birth-control campaigns – it had
increased from 540 million in 1949 to 1,300
million by the year 2000 – the need to increase
production through modernisation was indispensable.
China was poised between free enterprise
and socialist planning, between some fragile
individual freedoms and party control, governed
by a small band of political leaders locked in
strife with each other. Despite the progress made
since 1949, it still faced a very difficult future.
Thousands of the best-educated Chinese had been
alienated into secret opposition, yet they were the
very young men and women most needed to make
modernisation possible. The brutal use of the
People’s Army against the people had opened up
a breach that would take time to heal.
The issue of whether economic reform and
modernisation had to precede fundamental political
change, as Deng believed, or whether economic
reforms had reached the stage where they
could be carried no further without political
reform, had been decided. What China’s leaders
believed was that to have given way to demands
for ‘democracy’ would have plunged China into
chaos and disruption, and quite probably bloodshed
on a large scale. Control and discipline would
be needed as the precondition of material
progress. They saw no reason why one-party control
could not sit comfortably with the expansion
of what has come to be called the socialist market
economy. The economic progress achieved since
1989 has proved many a pessimistic Western theorist
wrong. Politically, the events of 1989 dispelled
much facile optimism in the West. For
some months the West cut off relations with
China. In Hong Kong there was greater anxiety
about what the Anglo-Chinese settlement held in
store. But China was too important a vast country
with prospects for profitable business, a player
in Asian international relations also hopefully
able to restrain North Korea, its vote on the
Security Council too crucial, for the West to maintain
the ostracism. So, despite everything, realism
demanded a gradual normalisation of Western
dealings with China in 1990. The Chinese leadership
was careful to avoid further offence and
demonstrated goodwill towards the West by backing
the Security Council resolutions against Iraq
after the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The
Chinese leadership managed to insulate their
country from the upheavals that had swept communist
Eastern Europe and brought enormous
changes to the Soviet Union. In China the pace of
reform is set from above.
In China’s vast interior, trials of dissidents,
sentences of execution and incarceration were
meted out as a harsh lesson after June 1989.
Obedience to party and leadership were not to be
challenged. China would continue to be ruled
politically by the Communist Party and its leaders
as before. The leaders would decide on the limits
of debate and intellectual freedom. There has
been liberalisation since the 1990s; visitors were
welcomed and students continue to study abroad.
The intellectual ferment in China settled down
surprisingly quickly. Dissent is kept under wraps.
One explanation is the booming economy and
rising standards of living, faster since the 1990s
in the cities than in the countryside. The senior
leader, Deng Xiaoping, observed with satisfaction
that he had chosen the right course. Political liberalisation,
perestroika, in the Soviet Union had
accompanied economic reform, and made commercial
modernisation infinitely more difficult
and led to conflict and the disintegration of the
Soviet state. The Chinese people would be less
concerned with notions of Western-style democracy
if the party could deliver higher standards of
living, and a plentiful supply of enticing consumer
goods. Beijing has been transformed, with its
modern hotels, department stores, foreign goods,
Benetton sweaters and monied inhabitants.
China’s immense land mass is divided between
some wealthy regions and impoverished lands.
The Fourteenth Communist Party Congress
which met in October 1992 confirmed the policy
the 89-year-old Deng had tenaciously followed
for fifteen years: the transition to a mixed socialist
market economy, called for appearance’s sake
‘the socialist market economy’, presided over by
a communist party with a monopoly of political
power. China was going its own way yet again.
The spectacular growth of China’s economy
represents a tantalising opportunity for Western
business; a whole new frontier appeared to be
opening up. But Western governments have had
to grapple with the dilemma of dealing with a
regime whose human rights record is at the same
time condemned by them. Can moral principles
outweigh national interest when the furtherance
of trade contributes to prosperity and employment
at home? The Clinton administration faced
this issue by granting Chinese exports unhindered
access to the US market in order to secure
improvements in the way the Chinese authorities
treated their dissidents. Success has been limited.
For Britain, compelled to hand over the colony
in 1997, Hong Kong was an Achilles heel.
Belated attempts to introduce democratic elements
in government were met by a furious reaction
in Beijing and threats to dismantle what had
been done without China’s approval.
With the death of Deng in February 1997
China’s leaders have to grapple with China’s
enormous problems of modernisation, with the
uneven development of the regions, with corruption,
but also with millions of people who for the
first time have access to information about life in
the West. Satellite dishes and the Internet may in
the end prove more powerful than tanks. The
Fifteenth Congress gathered in September 1997.
The vast Hall of the People was filled to capacity
with delegates applauding in unison and voting as
one. Flanked by flowers, China’s leaders delivered
their speeches from the raised platform. This
stage-managed scene, transmitted throughout
China and all over the world, demonstrated
the unity of purpose of a monolithic nation.
However, these images were a distortion of the
truth. China has had to cope with serious tensions.
A rapid and uneven transformation, the
reult of Deng’s drive to bring about accelerated
development, widened the gap between the
coastal regions and middle China and created differences
even between neighbouring districts.
Rapid growth caused inflation in the early 1990s
and was followed by austerity before growth
could be resumed. The path followed in politics,
by way of contrast, was steady repression. With
the crushing of the Tiananmen Democracy
Protest movement in 1989, the search for political
reform was over. Deng believed that the
Chinese people would be diverted and reconciled
to party rule by increased prosperity. As long as
criticism was judged ‘constructive’ within narrow
limits a small measure of individual freedom of
expression was allowed – but only if the fundamental
aims of the party and the leadership
remained unchallenged. Democracy, the toleration
of an opposition, has remained anathema.
Amid all the problems caused by China’s transformation,
the Politburo in Beijing feared that if
it lost its grip chaos would ensue – provinces
would take their fate in their own hands,
Tibetans, Mongolians and the non-Han Chinese
in border regions would rise up and fight for
independence, and in the heart of China tensions
could escalate into rural rebellions.
There have been large economic gains since
the 1990s but they have been unequally shared.
Of China’s 1.2 billion people, 850 million live in
the countryside. Heavy taxation, corruption and
nepotism have resulted in a breakdown of trust
between peasants and the party. In the 1980s and
early 1990s John Gittings, one of the bestinformed
China-watchers, made several journeys
into the interior, far from the burgeoning ‘special
economic zones’ and coastal cities. His findings
have been collected in a remarkable book, Real
China, in which he describes the chaos caused by
China’s rapid development particularly in its
impact on the peasantry. Some 80 million peasants,
driven by poverty, migrated to the cities
where they form a virtually inexhaustible cheap
source of labour; those who don’t find work
aggravate the many urban social ills, especially
vagrancy and crime. In the countryside unemployment
remains the most serious problem; here
the directives from Beijing were often ignored by
local officials, and the peasants resorted to massive
protests and riots. In 1993 alone 750,000 ‘incidents’
were officially reported. Under such conditions
the response of the Chinese leadership
appeared almost reckless. It was given at the
Fifteenth Party Congress by Jiang Zemin,
president of China since 1993, who emerged as
China’s strongman; backed by the Politburo, he
seemed set to follow in the footsteps of Deng.
China plans to accelerate the pace of market
reforms and to privatise the 17,000 medium and
small state-owned industries that were creating
huge deficits. Those that could not be made to
pay their way would be shut down. Only a
number of large key industries, such as those
manufacturing military hardware, would remain
in state hands. Millions of workers will be thrown
out of work and join the unemployed, a recipe
for unrest that will test the iron hand of state
control. The hitherto unswerving support of the
army, which is to be reduced in size but modernised,
will be a critical factor.
China’s policy of rapid economic development
also depends on access to world markets on equal
terms and on the continuing inflow of Western
investment and technology. China had not yet
been accepted as a member of the World Trade
Organisation, not granted permanent ‘most
favoured nation’ status by the US; the annual
renewal of this concession requires congressional
approval, which meant that China’s human rights
record and its role in assisting Pakistan’s nuclear
weapons programme (despite having signed the
Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty in 1992) could
be called into question. Clinton was prepared to
be helpful. Eager to promote trading opportunities
for American companies, he believed in
engaging China rather than isolating it. In 1994
he had already uncoupled threats of trading sanctions
from the issue of human rights. When, three
years later, in September 1997 Jiang Zemin paid
an unofficial state visit to the US, the first made
by any leader since the Tiananmen Square massacre,
a deal was struck. Jiang Zemin gave no
ground publicly on human rights; he undertook
only to supervise more carefully the export of
nuclear materials and missiles. Such assurances fell
short of prohibition, but Clinton achieved his
objective of winning an order for fifty Boeing jets
and authorised the profitable sale of American
nuclear reactors to China.
Authoritarian China was ready to master, if
necessary by force, the dislocations caused by its
dynamic industrial development. The party maintained
its controlling role. After the Tiananmen
Square killings any thought of political reform,
which was limited in any case to creating more
separation between the government and the
party, has quietly been dropped. The party
derived its legitimacy from bettering living standards
and economic growth. Deng’s path of economic
liberalisation, the gradual move toward a
market economy was continued and internationally
China is opening to global competition. An
important step forward was joining the World
Trade Organisation. The huge country with its
ethnic minorities and disparities of wealth
between the booming coast and the interior
where two-thirds of the population, 1.2 billion
people, live faces the risks of instability not least
from the economic course chosen which has
created 25 million unemployed as inefficient state
industries shed workers.
In China personal freedoms have increased as
long as they do not challenge the party. That
material aims and dry Marxist dialectic was not
enough, however, was demonstrated by the aston-
ishing growth of a cult in the 1990s, the Falun
Gong which mixes Buddhist and Taoist beliefs
with traditional physical involvements, to lead
people on the path of enlightenment. It is a peaceful
spiritual movement which, according to some
estimates, at its height gained 60 million followers.
They protested and ‘exercised’ in Beijing’s
parks when the party ordered their suppression.
The basic consensus among the party leaders
did not exclude rivalries between them over the
spoils of office, of power and material benefits.
The price of one-party rule over the decades has
been endemic corruption reaching down to the
lowest party officials in the countryside. Periodic
campaigns to eradicate it have only temporary
beneficial effects while the cronies of those in
power continue to enjoy protection. Thousands
less fortunate were sent to trial and labour camps.
In China the movement has been destroyed in the
open and only persists underground among the
most determined of its followers. The cult,
however, is popular especially among ethnic
Chinese, in the US attracting devotees who publicly
exercise in parks without hindrance.
Internationally Taiwan remained a focus of
conflict. The US is anxious to restrain both sides
from turning a war of words into real conflict.
Taiwan invests indirectly in business ventures in
mainland China and personal contacts, people to
people, are growing. Taiwan as an economic
model of success has much to offer mainland
China. For the People’s Republic good relations
with its two most powerful neighbours Russia and
the US are essential to ensure its economic
progress. The People’s Republic has become
an influence for peace in the region out of selfinterest.
A good example was Beijing’s efforts to
facilitate a resolution in 2003 over the clash
between the US and North Korea when its
leaders announced their nuclear weapons programme.
In the midst of momentous change,
China’s leaders are haunted by the fear that they
could lose control, and instability and chaos
would result. They certainly look like being able
to maintain the edifice in the forseeable future. At
the top there is a consensus on China’s priorities:
first comes the need to maintain unity of this vast
and varied country which looks back on the first
half of the century as the disastrous era of division
and foreign domination, decades of misery.
During the four months between the Communist
Party Congress in November 2002 and
the (State) National People’s Congress in March
2003 there was a change in the leadership, less
complete than it appeared. Jiang Zemin stepped
down as secretary-general of the Communist Party
and his deputy Hu Jintao replaced him. All but
one member of an increased nine-member
Politburo Standing Committee were newly promoted.
Jiang hung on to power ensuring that
two-thirds of the Standing Committee were his
allies and he remained head of the Party Central
Military Commission, in fact, supreme head of the
army. Jiang had the party adopt his addition to its
ideology, his theory of the ‘Three Represents’,
which for the first time allowed private businessmen
to join the party. In March 2003 at the
National People’s Congress, the State Presidency
passed from Jiang to Hu, in 2004 Jiang gave up
his remaining positions of authority. Zhu Rongji
who had experience at directing the economy was
replaced by Wen Ziabao as prime minister. Wen
owed his appointment to having shed the pre-
Tiannanmen Square sympathy with reform. Aged
seventy-six, Jiang remains the paramount leader
seeking to follow the example of Deng without
enjoying anything like Deng’s standing. The
new team has to face the formidable problems of
an economy that grows fast, unevenly on a weak
infrastructure, with an inadequate commercial
legal system, state banks overloaded with loans in
default and non-performing state industries.
There is corruption that is hard to limit, a rural
population that is backward and will have to face
world competition in foodstuffs, whose standard
of living has advanced little if at all, and a middle
class on the coast, which in cities such as Shanghai
can consume luxuries ordinary Chinese people can
only dream about. In recent years a new problem
that has to be faced is the spread of AIDS.
China cannot at the same time follow an aggressive
international policy that would jeopardise
investment from abroad and hinder trade. The
rhetoric is fierce about Taiwan, the ‘renegade’
province, but action is limited to threats and
warnings. The possibility that the Chinese will
attack Taiwan has lost credibility. When the US
recognised the People’s Republic as China’s legitimate
government it did not abandon Taiwan.
The US Congress passed the Taiwan Relations
Act promising to ‘resist’ any resort to force. The
commitment was dramatically tested in the Spring
of 1996. The Taiwanese president, Lee Teng-hui,
elected in 1988 was seeking re-election. He was
a change from the old-style authoritarian leaders,
his aim to move Taiwan out of the time warp, the
pretence that it represented the whole of China
and that the communists on the mainland lacked
all legitimacy their victory in 1949 notwithstanding.
He appeared to be on the verge of declaring
Taiwanese independence if re-elected. Beijing
opened a campaign to intimidate the Taiwanese
and frighten them by firing missiles into the
sea. The US countered by moving two aircraftcarriers
into the South China Sea. The message
was clear: the Chinese use of force against Taiwan
would meet armed resistance. The stand-off was
diffused as quickly as it had begun. China backed
off. Following the return of Hong Kong on the
1 July 1997, China has sought to win back
Taiwan on the same basis – ‘one country, two
systems’. However, Taiwan’s 22 million people
could not be won over either by threats or by
blandishments pointing to the continuing prosperity
of Hong Kong. Per head of population the
Taiwanese were many times more productive than
the Chinese on the mainland and their high standard
of living reflects their economic success.
Politically, too, Taiwan has advanced, allowing a
somewhat disorderly multi-party system.
In July 1999 the earlier crisis was repeated
when Lee tried to bolster his chances of another
electoral victory declaring he no longer accepted
the ‘one China’ ambiguity. A declaration of independence
would open up the carefully crafted
compromise Washington had devised to paper
over the cracks. Lee did not win, Washington
stood firm. Both sides calmed down.
World History
