Events in the USSR must have been followed with special interest in China. Its rulers had their own reasons for uneasiness about the direction in which events appeared to be going on the other side of their longest land frontier after the collapse of communism there. With the Soviet Union’s disappearance, they were the rulers of the only multinational empire still intact. Moreover, China had been engaged since 1978 in a continuing process of cautious and controlled modernization.
Deng Xiaoping came to be seen as the dominating influence in this, but he worked in a collective leadership. Scope was to be given to local and community enterprise and the profit motive. Commercial ties with noncommunist countries began to be encouraged. Although the new course was defined in appropriately Marxist language, the outcome seemed to be a substantial liberalization (at least in the eyes of old-fashioned communists) of the economy, but in fact showed no weakening of the will to power of the regime. China’s rulers remained firmly in control and intended to do so. They were helped by the persistence of the old Chinese social disciplines, by the relief felt by millions that the Cultural Revolution had been left behind, by the cult (qualified though it might be) of Mao’s memory, and by the policy (contrary to that of Marxism as still expounded in Moscow until 1980) that economic rewards should flow through the system to the peasant. This built up rural purchasing power and that made for contentment in the countryside. There was a major swing of power away from the rural communes, which in many places practically ceased to be relevant, and by 1985 the family farm was back as the dominant form of rural production over much of China.
For all the complaints of critics that China was resuming the ‘capitalist road’, tender consciences were assuaged by talk of ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’ and a prudent pragmatism about local interests and regional differences. Village industrial and commercial enterprise emerged from the ‘communes’ and ‘brigades’ of the era of the Great Leap. By the mid-1980s a half of rural income was drawn from industrial employment.
The new policy was not without costs, however. Growing urban markets encouraged farmers and gave them profits to plough back, but the city dwellers began to feel the effects of rising prices. As the decade progressed, though, domestic difficulties increased. Foreign debt had shot up and inflation was running at an annual rate of about 30 per cent by the end of the decade. There was anger over evidence of corruption, and divisions in the leadership (some following upon the deaths and illness among the gerontocrats who dominated the Party) were widely known to exist. Those believing that a reassertion of political control was needed began to gain ground, and there were signs that they were manoeuvring to win over Deng Xiaoping. Yet western observers and perhaps some Chinese had been led by the policy of economic liberalization to take unrealistic and over-optimistic views about the possibility of political relaxation. The exciting changes in eastern Europe stimulated further hopes of this. But the illusions suddenly crumbled.
As 1989 began, China’s city-dwellers were feeling the pressures both of the acute inflation and of an austerity programme that had been imposed to deal with it. This was the background to a new wave of student demands. Encouraged by the presence of sympathizers with liberalization in the governing oligarchy, they demanded that the Party and government should open a dialogue with a newly formed and unofficial student union about corruption and reform. Posters and rallies began to champion calls for greater ‘democracy’. The regime’s leadership was alarmed, refusing to recognize the union, which, it was feared, might be the harbinger of a new Red Guards movement. As the seventieth anniversary of the May 4th Movement approached, activists invoked its memory so as to give a broad patriotic colour to their campaign. They were not able to arouse much support in the countryside although there were sympathetic demonstrations in many cities, but, encouraged by the obviously benevolent attitude of the general secretary of the CCP, Zhao Ziyang, they began a mass hunger strike that won widespread popular sympathy and support in Beijing. It had started only shortly before Gorbachev arrived in the capital; his state visit, instead of providing further reassuring evidence of China’s international standing, only served to remind people of what was going on in the USSR as a result of policies of liberalization. This cut both ways, encouraging would-be reformers and frightening conservatives.
By this time the most senior members of the government, including Deng Xiaoping, seem to have become thoroughly alarmed. Widespread disorder might be in the offing; they believed China faced a major crisis. Some feared a new Cultural Revolution if things got out of control. On 20 May 1989 martial law was declared. There were signs for a moment that a divided government might not be able to impose its will, but the army’s reliability was soon assured. The repression that followed two weeks later was ruthless. The student leaders had moved the focus of their efforts to an encampment in Beijing in Tiananmen Square, where, forty years before, Mao had proclaimed the foundation of the People’s Republic, and they had been joined there by other dissidents. From one of the gates of the old Forbidden City a huge portrait of Mao looked down on the symbol of the protesters: a plaster figure of a ‘Goddess of Democracy’, deliberately evocative of New York’s Statue of Liberty. On 2 June the first military units entered the suburbs of Beijing on their way to the square. There was resistance with extemporized weapons and barricades that they forced their way through. On 3 June the demonstrators were overcome by rifle-fire, tear-gas, and a brutal crushing of the encampment under the treads of tanks that swept into the square. Killing went on for some days, mass arrests followed (perhaps as many as 10,000 in all). Much of what happened took place before the eyes of the world, thanks to the presence of foreign film-crews who had for days familiarized television audiences with the demonstrators’ encampment.
Foreign disapproval was almost universal. Yet, as so often in China, it is hard to know what had really happened. Obviously China’s rulers felt they faced a grave threat. It is probable, too, that they acted in a way deplored and opposed by many of their fellow Chinese. There was disorder, some of it serious, in over eighty cities, and the army encountered resistance in some working-class districts of Beijing. Yet the masses did not rise to support the protesters; they were often hostile to them. Much was to be made in future years of Tiananmen as evidence of Chinese disregard of human rights, but it cannot be confidently asserted that China would have been bound to benefit if the party had given way to the student movement. More Asian lives were shattered by banking fiascos in the 1990s than in China’s troubles in 1989.
Although the party and ruling hierarchy were somewhat in disarray, vigorous attempts to impose political orthodoxy followed. Neo-Marxist slogans were heard again. Discipline was reimposed in the party. Economic liberalization was for a time reined in. China, it was soon clear, was not going to go the way of eastern Europe or the USSR. But where was it going? Perhaps the safest conclusion to be drawn at this stage is that it was once again moving to its own rhythms, stimulated by forces peculiar to it, for all the rhetoric of regime and protesters alike. The youngsters in Tiananmen Square who met the tanks not only put up a statue as their icon of Liberty, but also showed what they owed to another non-Chinese and western inspiration by singing the ‘Internationale’. That suggests both the complexity (even the incoherence) of the opposition movement and its alienation from much that was still influential in China. As recently as 1987, a poll had reported that even among urban Chinese, the moral defect that was most strongly deplored was that of ‘filial disobedience’. Transformed though so much of the world already was, China after Tiananmen Square still baffled observers and futurologists by its seemingly massive immunity to currents outside its borders. One of the traditional roles of its governments has always been to act as the guardian of Chinese values. If, anywhere in the world, modernization might turn out in the end not to mean ‘westernization’, it could be in China. Two thousand years of history do not easily go away.