home | 1946-21st century | Profile: People's Republic of China

Deng Xiaopeng.

Jiang Qing on trial.

Jiang Qing hustled out of court.

Reforms under Deng Xiaoping

"It matters not whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice."

Deng Xiaoping

Deng Xiaoping was one of the old revolutionary fighters and a survivor of the legendary Long March. And, having long been among the top leaders and an ally of Zhou Enlai, he still had a lot of respect in the Party. In 1977 he returned to the upper ranks of the Party, and by late 1978, as Hua Guofeng was fading politically, Deng became the Party's "paramount leader" while holding the relatively modest post of Vice Premier.

Deng portrayed himself as a Marxist-Leninist, as a man of the revolution, but Marxists-Leninists were supposed to be practical. Marxist socialism was supposed to be scientific, and Deng was guided by what worked. Deng said he did not care whether a cat was black or white, that what mattered was whether the cat caught mice.

Deng remained opposed to Mao's egalitarianism. By now rigorous entrance examinations for universities were in place, and gifted children were to be identified and given advanced training. Deng favored opening China to what was to be called the global economy. In late December 1978, China order three 747s from Boeing aircraft in Seattle. Also that December, Coca-Cola announced that it would be opening a plant in Shanghai. And in early 1979 China's government shifted its economic strategy to emphasize the manufacture of consumer goods for sale abroad.

In 1979, China began to reassemble the rudiments of a legal system, Party leaders seeing insufficient legality as one of the causes of abuses during the Cultural Revolution. The Ministry of Justice was re-established. State courts were reopened, as were law schools. Party leaders hoped that more lawyers would help give people protections that had been lacking during the Cultural Revolution, and China invited a well known lawyer from the U.S., Alan Dershowitz, to lecture on the subject.  Those in the legal profession who had been purged during the Cultural Revolution were rehabilitated. Deng and his comrades began a five-year program of research and rehabilitating people who had been condemned as the criminals in the Maoist years, some posthumously, including Liu Shaoqi.

In late 1980 the "Gang of Four" were put on trail - in part to demonstrate that the nation was returning to the rule of law. They were charged with framing and persecuting more than 700,000 people and responsibility for at least 35,000 deaths. The trial was televised, with Jiang Qing showing defiance and continually protesting that all she had done had had the support of Mao - as if Mao's approval still accounted well with everyone and was sufficient exoneration.  She shouted at witnesses, and she called the judge a fascist. She no doubt saw her accusers as enemies of the revolution and was probably sorry that she had not crushed them permanently when she had had the opportunity. She received the sentence of death, but none of the Four was executed. Instead they were to languish in prison.

By 1982 it was acceptable to criticize Mao. The Party feared that too much denigration of Mao would bring disrespect for the Revolution and the Party, and the official Party line became that Mao had been a great leader when the revolution was young but that he had erred when he aged. Mao's portrait was to look over Tiananmen square, but elsewhere across China his portraits and his statues were being removed. And stockpiles of his writings were collecting dust.

As a part of the drive for economic advancement and opening to the West, students were sent to foreign countries to study, at government expense. And in 1984, to improve China's working relationship with foreign powers and foreign businesses, China adopted a patent law to protect foreign patents. And under Deng, religious freedom was being restored. Nine hundred Protestant churches and ninety Catholic churches were reopened.

Marxism-Leninism was still the Party's official ideology. The Party still claimed that the "dictatorship of the proletariat" was in place. The Party still declared itself as the Party of the masses and that its domination in the political life of the nation was essential. But changes within the Party were taking place. During Mao's time, few people in the Party had any formal education, and only about twenty-five percent of people in leadership positions within the Party were college graduates. By 1984, half of the Party's rank and file were college graduates, as were seventy-five percent of those in leadership positions. Education within the Party gave it a greater insight into social dynamics and China's social problems. Military men had lost their prominence in the Communist Party's Central Committee, and young Party cadres with a college education or professional training were being sent to government positions in the provinces.

Deng believed that a freer agriculture, trade and industry would function better. With Mao gone, his communes were being dismantled. People living on communal lands were permitted to farm collectively if they wished, but those who wished to farm individually were allowed to do so - on land that was not privately owned. Exhortations about equality were out, and in its place was an emphasis on peasant initiative and incentives. Both collective farms and individual growers were encouraged to make as much profit as they could and to invest in any kind of local business. People were encouraged to grow what suited them and to trade as they pleased.

Under Deng, manufacturing industries had to resort to ascertaining economic realities such as demand and the prices they should set for their goods. Managers running their own industry,  minding the quality of their product, keeping their own books and working for their industry's profit, was working better than when the industries were being run by Party committees. Industries could fire people more easily now, making them more efficient and less of a welfare institution. And in 1985, price controls were dropped from a range of manufactured goods.

Much of industry remained state-owned. But small-scale, privately own enterprises were allowed, as were joint ventures with foreign capitalists.  And thousands of privately owned small-scale businesses came into being, which employed millions of people. Individual initiative resulted in such stories as that of the director of a bankrupt shirt-making factory who made the business prosperous by firing inept employees and introducing incentives that linked wages to output. And there was the 34 year-old female engineer and eight other employees who took control of a foundering pharmaceutical company, branched into new products, introduced new manufacturing methods and turned a profit their first year.

In agriculture, the production of grain had risen to almost 300 million tons in 1983, up from about 200 million tons in 1976 - while grain production in the Soviet Union was declining. In 1989 grain, production would reach 1.2 billion tons.

By 1987, China's Gross National Product had risen substantially. But when averaged out per person it was only one-third of that of the Soviet Union and less than a seventh of that of the United States - just above Albania and just below Nicaragua. China's population, approximately 750 million in 1966, had risen to over 1,008,000,000 according to its 1982 census.  And by 1987 it was somewhere around 1,093,000,000. China had experienced a rapid rise in births after the starvations of 1958-61, a compensatory reaction, and the government had responded with the strictest family planning in the world. Couples had to marry late and they were allowed only one child. A lot of abortions and the killing of female newborns resulted. In the eighties, the one-child policy was relaxed slightly, while the policy remained hard to enforce - accounting for the continued growth in the population, at a higher rate in the countryside than in the cities.

In 1987, China's literacy rate was still relatively low, at 69 percent, below the customary 99 percent of European nations and Japan, and the 96 percent in the United States. But life expectancy in China had reached 70 years, equal to the Soviet Union, a little behind the 78 years of Japan, the 77 years in Western Europe and the 76 years in the United States.

By Chinese standards the economy was booming. The incomes of hardworking families were rising. In the countryside they were raising an abundance of chickens and pigs, growing fruits and vegetables, advancing a fish industry, and people were taking advantage of new opportunities to work in local service industries. The rise in the incomes of farmers was stimulating industrial production, as farmers were purchasing their own machinery, including small tractors, and they were buying fertilizer. In rural towns and in cities, sidewalk entrepreneurs had become a common sight, such as sellers of hot snacks, bicycle mechanics and shoe repairing.

One source of wealth for China was the increase in tourists from abroad - an industry encouraged by the government. Wealth was entering China also in the form of foreign investment, to areas that the government had designated for high-tech development, which offered tax exemptions and other benefits to foreigners.

The cities were producing not only fertilizers, tractors and other tools; they were producing consumer goods that were described as the "eight bigs:" television sets, refrigerators, stereos, cameras, motorcycles, furniture sets, washing machines and electric fans. A common sight in China was a delighted couple carting home a television set or a washing machine.

The drab dress of Maoist times was gone. Chinese women were now dressing themselves in "bourgeois colors." The Chinese were now attending motion pictures, exhibitions of western art, and attending plays from the West. There were rock bands and disco dancing, with Party officials promoting western dancing, especially disco, and sponsoring dance parties, happy perhaps to see people spending their time interested in moving around on a dance floor rather than brooding and planning demonstrations.

Strike at Tiananmen Square

With the other changes since the rise of Deng had come a rise in crime. Economic crimes, such as embezzlement, were publicized - the punishment for which was often death. The Communist regime had not grown soft.

But the Chinese people no longer had Mao the "great helmsman" to rely on. Gone were Mao's moralistic, altruistic guideposts. Indoctrination in China's schools had broken down. Some people in China were enjoying the new freedom and the rise in prosperity, but there were also dissatisfactions. From the left side of the political opinion were people who were annoyed at the new orientation toward individual gain. Some people disliked the opening of commerce to foreign powers, some referring to what they called "Japan's second occupation." Some people found themselves on the sidelines, not benefiting from the uneven rise in prosperity. Those in the countryside who had found a place in the communes were unhappy about the end of the communes and having to sell their labor. Many of those youths who had been sent into the countryside at the end of the Cultural Revolution were feeling out of place and returning illegally to the cities. On the rightist side of political thought, some intellectuals had their doubts about Communist ideology and wanted more freedom of expression.  And there was a mix of leftist and Rightist discontent and a desire for democracy in place of rule by the Communist Party.

There had been disturbances in 1983 and 1984. Frightened people had withdrawn money from banks, and foreigners had withheld investments. The disturbances were easily put down by the government. And Deng Xiaoping and others in the Party were adamant about preventing any return of disorder - disorder from the Left or from counter-revolutionaries.

In December 1984, the Party gave assurances to the Chinese Writers Association that freedom of expression existed and that there would be no anti-intellectual campaign such as that which followed Mao's 100 flowers campaign back in 1957. But, the wall of posters, called Democracy Wall, that had arisen in Beijing in 1978-79 ceased to function after a leading dissident, Wei Jingsheng, was arrested for his outspoken support for democracy.

Deng lost the respect of those yearning for more democracy, and into the eighties many young people remained baffled - much like some intellectuals were baffled by World War I. Similar to the Dadaist movement that appeared after World War I, Chinese youths who thought of themselves as sophisticated grabbed onto the notion that all was meaningless, as expressed in new rock lyrics and poetry that appeared. Having lost the sense of purpose, they saw no hope in the complexities of the more individualistic society that had developed in China.

Student Unrest

On April 15, 1989 the Communist leader, Hu Yaobang, died. He had been a doctrinaire Marxist, but many students had seen him as free of greed and corruption. These students were still moved by the values of altruism, and they respected Hu Yaobang for having possessed kindliness toward people in general. With Deng Xiaoping in mind, some of these students complained that the wrong Communist had died.

The Communist Party held a memorial service for Hu Yaobang at the Great Hall of the People at Tiananmen Square, and at the square over 100,000 students massed to join in the mourning. Three students, considering themselves representatives of the others, went to the steps of the Great Hall of the People on bended knee with a petition that they wished to hand-deliver to China's premier, Li Peng. They refused to give it to lesser officials who were willing to deliver the petition to Li Peng, so it remained undelivered. Later, with righteous indignation, they went before meetings of students and expressed outrage that Li Peng had not himself come out of the Great Hall of the People to accept their petition. The outraged students decided to so something about it. They decided to create a new, independent student organization, and they called for boycotting classes. They launched a movement they called "the Great Revolution for Democracy against Dictatorship."

Deng Xiaoping was outraged at what he saw as naïve, absolutist and arrogant youth similar to those who had risen during the Cultural Revolution. An article in the People's Daily inspired by Deng denounced the students for creating chaos. The students responded with more outrage, and the student movement's leaders handed the government a petition that demanded dialogue with the government. Believing in their supreme importance the students insisted that the dialogue had to begin the following day, May 3, otherwise they would take to the streets on May 4 - the anniversary of the great rising in 1919.

The student had their May 4 demonstrations, but nothing developed to their satisfaction. On May 13, to dramatize their frustration, about 400 students began a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square. The hunger strikers demanded that the People's Daily attack on the students be retracted. Meanwhile, groups of students had been moving through the city rallying support from the public. And demonstrators had begun dramatizing their cause by disrupting traffic and releasing air from bus tires.

The hunger strike caused a great sensation. The number of hunger strikers grew. And a few intellectuals took advantage of the sensation to express their support for more democracy in China. Verbal attacks were made against Deng Xiaoping, including calling him China's "last emperor without a title." And more than a million people in Beijing were daily converging on Tiananmen Square.

The economy was growing at almost ten percent per year - a success. But prices had risen, and there were 1.1 million unemployed in Beijing.  The Communist Party was frightened by the prospect of workers linking themselves with the student protesters.  Rather than moving the Communist Party to reform as the students wished, Party officials were moving toward a harder stance against dissent, and support within the Party for reform was losing ground. The most prominent among the Party reformers, Zhao Ziyang, was on the verge of being demoted. On May 19, Zhao Ziyang, moved the students in Tiananmen Square with a farewell address. Tears were in his eyes, and this impressed the students. Zhao Ziyang asked the students to stop their hunger strike. And the students responded. They ended the hunger strike and resorted to the tactic that had been a part of the civil rights movement in the United States: a sit-in.

Expressing a harder line that that of Zhao Ziyang, Premier Li Peng made a speech that the students disliked. And, upset once again, 200,000 resumed the hunger strike. That same day, May 20, the government declared martial law, and hundreds of thousands of people from Beijing began blocking intersections in the city to prevent the troops from attacking the students in Tiananmen Square. On May 23, over 10,000 intellectuals and about one million others marched in protest against martial law. Proportional to the U.S. population this would have been a demonstration of something like 250,000 people. At any rate, it was impressive enough that the government hesitated and ordered the troops that it had sent to Beijing to withdraw.

The withdrawal of troops lessened tensions, and by May 29, the demonstration at Tiananmen Square was wearing down, as demonstrations do. Students who had emerged as leaders during the previous month had been urging their fellow students to end the hunger strikes, to return to their campus and to continue their struggle for democracy through a more decentralized attempt at dialogue with the government. The majority of the students from Beijing left Tiananmen Square. They believed that they had made their point and they were putting their hopes in peaceful transitions and gradualist reforms.

Then on May 30, the demonstration in Tiananmen Square was revived by dissidents placing there a thirty-foot-high, plaster and styrofoam statue called "The Goddess of Democracy." New people were entering the demonstrations at Tiananmen Square, many from other cities, where demonstrations had also been occurring. At Tiananmen Square speakers denounced retreat as a betrayal of principle. They claimed that the government would never speak to them unless they maintained the kind of pressure that they were applying.

Many in China's countryside - where eighty percent of the population still lived - viewed the demonstrations with dismay or disfavor. Demonstrations of unrest and some organizing occurred in various cities in China, but the unrest was not as massive as had been the unrest ten years before in Iran that brought down the Shah. Nor was the regime in power as crippled as had been Kerensky's government in Russia in November 1917. And unlike Mexico in 1910, China was without a lot of guerrilla armies about to overwhelm an unpopular dictatorship. Nor was this Romania, Hungary or Poland, where Communism had come with a foreign army - or Czechoslovakia.

The government had a choice of just letting the demonstrations fade or of showing its opposition to disorder. It chose the latter, somewhat similar to Herbert Hoover not tolerating the camp of the Bonus marchers in Washington in early 1932 or the U.S. government not tolerating the demonstrations at the Pentagon in 1967. Deng Xiaoping was not about to tolerate more of the upheaval and idealism that had wrecked the Communist Party and China in the sixties. The army was coming.

Some at Tiananmen square were there for the excitement. Some others were prepared to fight. Among them were groups with names such as the "Dare to Die" squad, the "Flying Tigers," "Warriors of Democracy" and there was the group with the appropriate name of "Children's Army Squad." A good number of the demonstrators still thought about principles rather than their ability to stand against the same army that had been used against the Red Guards.

These were new times in television coverage in China by the foreign press. The foreign press had missed the slaughter in March 1947, when Chiang Kai-shek's army killed from 8,000 to 10,000 people in Taiwan's capital, Taipei. The foreign press and television crews had missed the slaughter in Indonesia in 1965, when people died in the hundreds of thousands. But the foreign press was now present for the great spectacle at Beijing - as they had been in Vietnam - and the Communist regime, regretted it.

On May 31, pro-government demonstrations by soldiers and by peasants occurred in Beijing. On June 3, seasoned troops loyal to Deng Xiaoping, with tanks and armored personnel carriers stood just outside town. Late that night they began rumbling through the city toward Tiananmen Square, forcing their way through barricades and crushing anyone who stood in their way. They fired on a few people whom they saw as an actual physical threat - as armies are instructed to do. Well after midnight, the military turned off the lights in the square, and the demonstrators were warned to leave the square. Some did. Many did not, and they were forced out by troops advancing from all sides. Some of the demonstrators who escaped from Tiananmen Square joined with other student supporters and retaliated against isolated army groups and soldiers in places in the city. They burned military vehicles and killed a few soldiers. The entire day of June 4 the army spent quelling disorder through the streets of Beijing. Officially 23 students and 300 soldiers had died. The Beijing Red Cross put the number of demonstrators killed at 2600.

Ten Years after Tiananmen

Ten years later, the rising at Tiananmen Square would be more in the minds of Americans when they thought of China than it would be in the minds of the people in China.  People in China were still looking forward to gradual and orderly political and economic progress. Mao's little red book and other items related to Mao were hot items for sale to tourists. The likeness of Mao could be seen hanging from the rear view mirror of taxis - and seen as cute rather than as a serious political expression.  But for the Communist Party, Mao, despite his mistakes, was still revered as a founder, deserving respect for his participation in the struggles in revolutionary China. At least a few people looked upon the Mao with a touch of nostalgia because people in his day, they said, were less self-centered. In the countryside a few women, disturbed by an unpleasant development of some sort, could be seen praying at one of the few Mao statues that remained.

The government was allowing individual expressions of dissent, and in bookstores were books by a dissident or two. The Party hoped that with an economic growth rate up around eight percent the masses would remain content with rule by their "people's party." But growth began to slow a little by late 1998.  Unemployment was rising. Tensions remained between the Communist Party and those who wished for political pluralism, and the Party continued to forbid organization of any political opposition.

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