Modern China. A Very Short Introduction (11 page)

Notoriously, in 1985, the party chief of Hainan island, Lei Yu, had 65

12. The economic reforms that have transformed Maoist China are
associated above all with Deng Xiaoping, paramount leader from
1978 to 1997, who is depicted here in the background as tourists take
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pictures

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used valuable foreign exchange to import 79,000 foreign cars, 347,000 televisions, and 45,000 motorcycles for resale at infl ated prices. (Yet Lei was rehabilitated in 1988, and his behaviour was only the most outrageous example of a widespread phenomenon of corruption.)

The signals that the economy should change and grow were unmistakable. In the political sphere, however, the signals were mixed. Deng had supported the rise to power of Hu Yaobang, a relative Politburo liberal, under whose infl uence there was a signifi cant rise in the level of debate in journals and think-tanks which had previously been under the moribund infl uence of a monolithic party line. Deng was relaxed about a certain amount of ideological impurity coming along with the reforms: ‘If you open the window,’ he observed, ‘some fl ies will get in.’ Yet not all the leadership were as sanguine. Chen Yun, the archetypal central planner, and propaganda chief Hu Qiaomu were among 66

those who were concerned by the materialism and ideological vacuousness that they perceived in reform-era China. They supported a series of campaigns, usually under the title of

‘anti-spiritual pollution’ and ‘spiritual civilization’, in which noxious infl uences from the capitalist world would be condemned.

In the 1980s, politics tended to open up, only to be thrown into partial reverse after a couple of years. Yet the movement seemed to be inevitably towards a freer, market-oriented society.

The group which benefi ted most greatly from the reforms in contrast with the Cultural Revolution were ‘intellectuals’: a grab-bag category in the Chinese understanding which includes academics, and students, as well as more abstract thinkers. No longer were they termed the ‘stinking ninth’ (that is, the ninth class of undesirables in Cultural Revolution terminology).

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Instead, education was encouraged, as China strove to improve its science and technology infrastructure. Yet the new freedoms
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that intellectuals enjoyed gave them the appetite for more. After student protests in 1985–6 demanding further opening-up of the party, Hu Yaobang was forced to resign in 1987 and take responsibility for allowing social forces to get out of control.

He was replaced as general secretary by Zhao Ziyang, who was perceived as politically less liberal, although just as strong an economic reformer. The complaints of the intellectuals were not just abstract, however. Most of them – in particular academics and students at universities – were on fi xed state incomes, and as infl ation began to run rife in newly rich reform-era China, they began to fi nd that their income was rapidly becoming insuffi cient to cover their needs.

In April 1989, Hu Yaobang died. It was a long-standing tradition in China that the death of a well-respected fi gure could trigger demonstrations. In this case, students around China used the occasion of his death to organize protests against the continuing role of the CCP in public life. At Peking University, the breeding ground of the May Fourth demonstrations of 67

13. On 4 May 1989, exactly 70 years after the original May Fourth
demonstrations in 1919, students once again ask for ‘Mr Democracy’ in
Tian’anmen Square. A month later, tanks and soldiers would clear the
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Square by force, killing large numbers

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1919, students published journals with titles such as ‘New May Fourth’, and declared the need for ‘science and democracy’, the modernizing watchwords of 80 years earlier, to be revived. On 4 May 1989 itself, protesters in Tian’anmen Square held up signs, written in Chinese and English, reading ‘Hello Mr Democracy!’, a clear reference to the May Fourth duo, ‘Mr Science and Mr Democracy’, who had been tasked with China’s salvation 70 years earlier.

In spring 1989, Tian’anmen Square in Beijing was the scene of an unprecedented demonstration. At its height, nearly a million Chinese workers and students, in a cross-class alliance rare by the late 20th century, fi lled the space in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace. The Party was profoundly embarrassed to have the world’s media record events; they had been there for a historic occasion, the fi rst visit of the reforming Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, 68

but the event had turned to farce as Gorbachev was escorted via a roundabout route to avoid him seeing the demonstrations.

By June 1989, the numbers in the Square had dwindled only to thousands, but they showed no signs of moving. On the night of 3–4 June, the party acted, sending in tanks and armoured personnel carriers. The death toll has never been offi cially confi rmed, but it seems likely to have been in the high hundreds or even more. Hundreds of people associated with the movement were arrested, imprisoned, or forced to fl ee to the West. It seemed to many that the hardliners had won, and that the chance for

‘science and democracy’ had ended.

China since 1989

In retrospect, now that Tian’anmen Square is two decades in
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the past, the surprising thing is what did
not
happen. China did not, as many feared, plunge into civil war; it did not reverse the economic reforms; it did not close itself off to the outside world.

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For some three years, politics did indeed go into a deep freeze.

The liberal trends that had fuelled the protests of the late 1980s were now regarded as ‘evil winds of bourgeois liberalism’. But in 1992, Deng, the man who had sent in the tanks, was now 88

years old. He must have known that his legacy was threatening to be similar to that of Gorbachev, a reformer perceived, at least in Chinese eyes, to have failed. That year, he undertook what was ironically called his ‘southern tour’, the Chinese term
nanxun
referring to the emperor visiting his furthest domains. By visiting Shenzhen, the boomtown on the border with Hong Kong (and appearing to local news reporters riding a golf buggy in a theme park), Deng indicated that the economic policies of reform were not going to be abandoned. He had made other important choices.

Jiang Zemin, the mayor of Shanghai, had effectively dissolved demonstrations in Shanghai in a way that the authorities in Beijing had not. He was groomed as Deng’s successor, having been appointed general secretary of the Party in 1989. Furthermore, 69

his home city, Shanghai, was fi nally given permission to attract foreign investment on a lavish scale, having been kept on a tight leash under Mao and in the initial period of reform. For a century, from the 1840s to the 1940s, Shanghai had been the motor of China’s industry, commerce, and culture, an outward-looking metropolis that regarded itself as a world city rather than just Chinese. Now, it was being given permission to recreate the experience.

The post-Deng leadership has taken on something like a regular pattern. Jiang Zemin, the former mayor of Shanghai, became Deng’s successor in 1989. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Party Congresses in 1992 and 1997 each signalled another fi ve-year term for Jiang as General Secretary of the Party, but despite strong rumours that he wished to stay on, the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Party Congresses in 2002 and 2007 confi rmed Hu Jintao as Jiang’s successor. It is possible also to detect changes in policy
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emphasis between the two leaders. Jiang’s period in offi ce was marked by a breakneck enthusiasm for economic development
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along with cautious political reform (for instance, the growth of local elections at village level, but certainly no move to democracy at higher levels). Since 2002, Hu and his prime minister, Wen Jiabao, have made more efforts to deal with the inequality and poverty in the countryside, and this remains a major concern of the Party, along with reform of the CCP itself (such as providing more mechanisms for genuine discussion within the Party, and the appointment of some non-Party fi gures to ministerial and other prominent positions).

Since the 1990s, China has embraced economic reform with a vengeance. Its politics does not have the liberal, almost naïve interest in the West that it did in the 1980s. One of the single most infl uential intellectuals of the early 21st century, the philosopher Wang Hui, declared that the ‘New Enlightenment’ wave of the 1980s, which ultimately led to Tian’anmen Square, was 70

unable to come to any understanding of the fact that China’s problems are also the problems of the world capitalist market …

Finally, it was unable to recognize the futility of using the West as a yardstick in the critique of China.

But in many ways, Chinese is far more infl uenced by globalized modernity than even in the 1980s. China has placed scientifi c development at the centre of its quest for growth, sending students abroad not in their hundreds, but tens of thousands, to study science and technology, just as the Nationalist government of the 1930s tried to develop an indigenous core of engineers and technicians.

The country also has a powerful international role in the early 21st century. China is a permanent member of the UN Security
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Council, although it rarely uses its veto power, and in the post-9/11 world, has stressed the need for quiet diplomacy
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rather than loud rhetoric. For this reason, it has increasingly been regarded as an honest broker in arenas such as the Middle East. China has also sought economic and diplomatic infl uence in Africa and South America, again taking advantage of a general suspicion in the Third World of the Western post-Cold War order. The international stance of the Bush administration in the US (2001–8) was generally disinclined towards cooperative structures, and China took advantage of this to portray itself as a moderate power seeking consensus in the international order. In addition, the distraction of the US

government by the aftermath of the Iraq War (2003) meant that China was freer to develop its own interests in East Asia.

However, China’s preference for remaining neutral but friendly may not be able to last long into the new century: crises in the Middle East, the Korean peninsula, and the scramble for mineral resources in Africa and energy resources around the globe mean that China is having to make hard choices about which nations it wishes to favour.

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Nationalism has also become a popular rallying-cry at home.

This does not necessarily mean xenophobia or anti-foreignism, although there are occasions (such as the reaction to the 1999

NATO bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo War) that have led to violence against foreign targets and persons. But it is clear that China’s own people consider that the country’s moment has arrived, and that they must oppose attempts – whether by the West, or Japan – to prevent it taking centre stage in the region.

A modern politics?

A popular characterization of China’s leaders of the 20th century, particularly Mao, is that they have sought to become new emperors in their own right. Although it is a colourful shorthand, such a comparison is misleading. It highlights the exotic element of Chinese politics and conceals the reality that many of the
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assumptions and models that have shaped Chinese political thinking in the present century are profoundly modern, and
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indeed, similar to those in the West.

Chinese politics since the late Qing has been dependent on nationalism, an idea that derived its legitimacy from the people as a body in their own right, and an idea that a strong state would be a rational arbiter of power. It was based on mass politics where there was a social contract between government and citizen. While the Confucian mode of governance did also embody a sort of social contract between emperor and subject, it did not think it seemly that the people should be empowered in their own right – a profoundly non-modern way of thought.