Tiananmen Square Revisited

The publication of secret, audio-taped memoirs by fallen Communist Party reformer Zhao Ziyang, 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 Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Indeed, as China looms ever larger in the world economy, it is worth remembering that 20 years ago this June, the People’s Republic of China almost fell apart. The protest movement that gathered in Tiananmen that year posed an existential threat to the Communist Party state, proclaimed in that very spot 40 years earlier by Mao Zedong.

The threat came from two directions - from within the highest echelons of the party 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 party emerged from the crisis unified around Deng Xiaoping’s vision of a “socialist market economy”, and regained legitimacy with the urban population through implementing that vision. The party 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 organised protests. No student-led, urban protests like those of Tiananmen Square of 1989, however, have occurred.

The economic boom under President Jiang Zemin and his successor, Hu Jintao, which channelled youthful revolt into entrepreneurship and professional success, was possible only because Deng prevented the party leadership from fracturing during the student protests of the late 1980’s and the conservative backlash of the early 1990’s. As the protests began, Deng’s chosen successor, Premier Zhao Ziyang, 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 liberalise 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 Party elder Chen Yun slow down marketisation and weather the PRC’s international isolation in Tiananmen’s wake.

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 television cameras rolling, Deng jabbed his finger in the air, admonishing his party: “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 neoliberal hero, Zhu Rongji, 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 party leadership of the 1990s and 2000s did not waver from Deng’s line: steady expansion of market reforms, active involvement in international commerce, massive urbanisation and urban development, and total dedication to party 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 Chinese Communist Party’s “Machiavellian moment”, when Deng confronted the mortality of his republic, and saw what it would take to survive: Party unity based on urban growth.

By reunifying the party leadership and reestablishing 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 organisation 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.