Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (44 page)

Through the fall of 1979, Shariatmadari’s conflict with the new rulers steadily intensified. Though he refrained from personal criticisms of Khomeini, he had never accepted his fellow ayatollah’s theory of the “guardianship of the jurist.” Shariatmadari wanted to see a democratically elected government that would be subject to collective clerical guidance. He made a point of keeping up his contacts with the members of the secular and leftist parties, and he sided with the opposition by denouncing the torture and executions that were becoming hallmarks of the new government. His interpretations of Islamic law tended to stick to received tradition—in stark contrast to the innovative activist views of Khomeini.
¹³
When the outlines of the new constitution began to emerge in the early fall of 1979, Shariatmadari went so far as to issue a fatwa against it, declaring to his followers that the principle of
velayat-e faqih
had no legal basis. Prompted by the ruling, his followers rioted in several cities around the country.
¹⁴

This unrest was not spontaneous. As a long-established and widely respected
marja
(a high-ranking scholar entitled to issue authoritative legal judgments), Shariatmadari had a strong power base of his own, centered in his home province of Azerbaijan, and a solid organization to go with it. But he also had many followers in other parts of the country, as well as in Lebanon, Iraq, the Gulf States, and Pakistan. In March 1979, Shariatmadari’s supporters had founded a new party, the Islamic
People’s Republican Party (IPRP), that aimed to serve as a vehicle for his relatively moderate revolutionary principles. Shariatmadari himself, who never became a member, maintained a certain distance from the new group. It was Shariatmadari’s tragedy that he never quite managed to resolve the tension between his lingering distrust of clerical involvement in politics and his own eminently political role as the most credible source of opposition to Khomeini’s plans. Khomeini, of course, had no such hesitations.

With the polarization of the revolutionary camp that followed the hostage taking and the fall of the Bazargan government, Shariatmadari’s options rapidly began to narrow. It became increasingly easy to characterize any opposition to Khomeini, however qualified, as opposition to the revolution overall. After the new constitution passed, with overwhelming approval, in a second referendum on December 2–3, riots broke out in Shariatmadari’s hometown of Tabriz, Iran’s second-largest city and the capital of the province of Azerbaijan (where most of the population were Turk-speaking Azeris). Shariatmadari himself was no separatist, but many of his followers supported the idea of greater regional autonomy for Azerbaijan, and the new constitution’s strict centralism was the last straw for them. IPRP members seized control of the TV station in Tabriz and began broadcasting denunciations of the government in Tehran, which they accused of betraying the democratic ideals of the revolution. Shariatmadari refused to approve their actions, understanding only too well where they would lead.

The revolutionary leaders in Tehran responded in no uncertain terms. They sent tanks and troops. Leading the way were the new Revolutionary Guards, who retook the TV station and occupied the IPRP headquarters. Some of the leaders of the uprising were summarily shot. The government arranged for massive pro-Khomeini counterdemonstrations, and Hezbollahis fought IPRP members in the streets. With the help of the military, the Tehran government soon reestablished control over the Azerbaijani media, depriving the Shariatmadari camp of a crucial means for spreading its views.

In January 1980, under growing pressure from the regime, Shariatmadari publicly disavowed the IPRP and disappeared into house arrest, where he would remain until his death in 1986. He was ordered to refrain from making public statements and kept under guard. Some of his relatives were also imprisoned. The regime forbade other clerics from participating in his funeral prayers.

In the case of Bazargan, one might have argued that the prime minister wasn’t “Islamic enough.” But now the revolution had turned against leading members of the clergy. This was a shift that appeared to be justified less by citations from the
Quran than by straightforward reference to raison d’état. There were other senior members of the clergy who strongly disagreed with Khomeini’s theories, but they were not threats to his role in the same way that Shariatmadari had been. Khomeini could not persuade them to be completely silent, but in their cases he did not need to challenge clerical unity quite as openly as in the case of Shariatmadari.

With Shariatmadari sidelined, Khomeini could turn to the business of eliminating his other enemies—especially the Mujahideen-e Khalq, the still-powerful Islamo-Marxist militia. The Revolutionary Guard and the Hezbollahis launched an all-out offensive against the MEK. Those MEK members who managed to survive quickly went underground and unleashed a guerrilla war against the regime that continues to this day. Other leftist groups, some of them strikingly reluctant to criticize the “anti-imperialist” Khomeini, withered as an independent force.

It was in this broader context—the continuing struggle for power and Khomeini’s need to find leverage against some of his most formidable opponents—that the hostage crisis occurred. It played a key role in Khomeini’s push to consolidate the revolution around his vision of the Islamic state. It now became nearly impossible for anyone to attack the imam’s grand design without being branded a defender of America and Israel (and, by extension, a Satanist). As the months went by, the students began to tire of their occupation of the US Embassy, but Khomeini and his entourage insisted that they stay put. There was simply too much to be gained by the continuing humiliation of President Carter. The embassy’s archives contained countless documents of American dealings with Iranian political figures, including many of the moderates who had tried to open up channels of communication with the United States after the beginning of the revolution. The presentation of these compromising discoveries in the media, usually with inconvenient context edited away, became a highly effective tool for neutralizing opponents. It was a device selectively applied. Some of the people in Khomeini’s entourage had also made contact with US diplomats in the course of the revolution, but no documents incriminating them were ever made public.

Clerical rule was now firmly established, and from this point until the end of his life, Khomeini focused all of his political efforts on defending the institutions he had established. For this reason, he took to calling the chapter of Iranian history that began with the hostage taking the “Second Revolution.” It has yet to end.

I
t is inevitable, perhaps, that we focus on leaders when we examine grand political and economic transitions. But they are not the only actors in these dramas. Deng Xiaoping and his colleagues triumphed precisely because they unleashed the creativity and the entrepreneurial urges of millions of Chinese. Many of them—shocking though it might be to think—were not even members of the Chinese Communist Party.

In January 1979, about the time that Deng was preparing for his trip to the United States, a young man named Rong Zhiren returned to his hometown of Guangzhou (Canton), the largest city in Guangdong Province, up the river from Hong Kong. Rong had just turned thirty, but he had relatively little in the way of concrete achievements to show for someone his age. The reason was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. A central part of the Cultural Revolution was Mao’s campaign against intellectualism, book learning, and the “Four Olds” (old habits, old ideas, old customs, and old culture). In 1966 he had ordered the closure of China’s institutions of higher education. Over the ensuing years, 17 million students were dispatched to the countryside to learn the virtues of the simple life from the peasantry. University entrance examinations did not resume in China until the autumn of 1977. By early 1979 only 7 million students had made it back to the cities.

As the Cultural Revolution played out, the overwhelming majority of students stayed in the places where they were assigned, which usually meant wasting their
best years tilling the land in remote agricultural communes. Rong did not. Sent out to the countryside in 1969, he sneaked away as soon as he had the chance. He spent the next ten years dodging the police and doing odd jobs, like drawing and tutoring. He lived with friends, moving from place to place. In December 1978, back in Guangzhou but still on the run, he heard the results of the historic Third Plenum in Beijing on the local radio. Like millions of other Chinese, he understood that something fundamentally transformative was under way—and that included an opening for entrepreneurship. “I knew this policy would last because Chinese people would want to get rich,” as he later put it. In January 1979, he decided that he would be one of the first to take a chance. He applied for a business license. The bureaucratic obstacles sounded daunting: one of the requirements was a complete physical checkup to ensure that he had no infectious diseases. But it turned out to be a cinch. When Rong went through the procedure in early 1979, everything was done in just a few days. (Nowadays it takes nearly three weeks.) The Guangdong government, eager to get things going, was already trying to encourage business creation.

Rong started his business on March 18—an auspicious date because the number 18 sounds like the phrase “You’ll definitely get rich” in Mandarin. Following the advice of people in the neighborhood where he had been working, he decided to open a small restaurant specializing in breakfast. The main dish he offered was classic Guangdong comfort food: congee (rice porridge) with peanuts and spareribs. He set up his restaurant—really a glorified tent on a wood frame he put together himself—at an intersection close to two high schools, assuming that he could market his cheap breakfasts to hungry students. His start-up capital was one hundred yuan (roughly sixty-five US dollars at the official highly inflated exchange rate), sixty of which he had borrowed from his girlfriend. The furniture and a big cooking pot were loaned from friends. He was nervous at first. The idea of running one’s own business was frowned upon by many educated people, who regarded such things as beneath their dignity. But those worries began to fade away as he immersed himself in the daily routine of his business and the money started rolling in. Almost immediately, the restaurant was an enormous success.
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Some small private businesses—known as
getihu
—had existed since the Communist takeover in 1949. But they belonged to a small but beleaguered minority, continuously battered by the whims of officialdom and the ebb and flow of political campaigns. The policy that took effect in 1979 embodied an entirely different philosophy. The communiqué of the Third Plenum had specifically, if cautiously, embraced the principle of private commerce. Perhaps even more important than the
party’s official statements were its actions. Would-be entrepreneurs were especially heartened when the official media announced, later in 1979, that the government had asked a man named Rong Yiren (no relation to the founder of the restaurant in Guangzhou) to found a new company that was expressly designed to experiment with foreign trade and investment. He called it CITIC, the China International Trust & Investment Corporation. Rong was the scion of one of China’s most famous business families, who had built their wealth on a series of textile mills in the early twentieth century. After the Communists took power in 1949, most of them fled. But Rong decided to stay, giving controlling stakes in his companies to the party and taking a job, for a time, as a vice mayor in Shanghai. During the Cultural Revolution, he had suffered the predictable persecution—including torture and public humiliation—but he had bounced back after the fall of the Gang of Four. His establishment of CITIC was specifically designed to serve as an official signal that China was open for business. Deng himself encouraged Rong to be “boldly creative.”
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Another signal came with the officially sanctioned revival of a long-prohibited aspect of business. Advertising was one of those quirks of capitalism regarded with particular contempt by the ideological purists of Chinese Communism. Right up until the end of 1978, foreign businesspeople noted how the notion of advertising elicited conflicting emotions of disgust and curiosity among their Chinese interlocutors. Then, suddenly, in the spring of 1979, representatives of a new state-owned company called the Shanghai Advertising Company showed up at the Canton Trade Fair.
³
Foreign investors were shocked, but perhaps not completely. They had already been casting about for ways to promote their products in the Chinese media, and on March 15 the well-established Western advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather succeeded in publishing its first ad in a Shanghai newspaper (for watches from the Swiss company Rado).
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The message that commercial success now counted more than ideological purity quickly percolated down to officials at the lower level—and nowhere more than in Guangdong Province, home to the famous Canton trade fair. The remarkable degree of bureaucratic openness that Rong Zhiren encountered when he opened his new restaurant in Guangzhou, then Guangdong’s biggest city, reflected an eagerness among the province’s party elite to unleash private initiative. Already under Hua Guofeng, leading party members had begun pushing the central government to grant them wide-ranging powers over the province’s economic affairs. Their eagerness to gain some vital administrative flexibility was fanned not only by their relative economic backwardness but also by proximity to Hong Kong and
its turbocharged entrepreneurial culture. Despite the tightly sealed border, Guangdong and Hong Kong remained linked in a surprising number of ways. Many of the people in Hong Kong had fled there from Guangdong after the Communist takeover, and often they maintained their ties with the family members they had left behind on the mainland. A certain degree of trade between both sides continued even after 1949, both officially approved and illegal. The people on both sides of the border spoke Cantonese, the dialect ubiquitous in this part of China, rather than the lingua franca of Mandarin. Many in Guangdong could pick up radio broadcasts from the British colony. In the wake of the Third Plenum, they were less shy about listening in—and even about discussing what they heard.