Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (111 page)

Deng sought to avoid in China what was occurring in Eastern Europe as political leaders were yielding to citizens' demands and losing control. Initially, Deng tried to avoid bloodshed, which he knew would only inflame the demonstrators. But from the beginning he believed that firmness was required, and after Hu Yaobang's funeral he became more directly involved in
supervising the party's response to the demonstrators. He was prepared to ensure that officials carried out whatever steps he considered necessary to restore order.

Before June 4, no one—party leaders, intellectuals, or student leaders—proved able to stop the mounting chaos. Party leaders' efforts to gain control were frustrated by splits in their own leadership, disagreements about how much freedom China could then manage, the differing perspectives between senior officials who had fought in the Chinese revolution and students accustomed to more comfortable lives, the insecurity of the urban residents who were worried about inflation and jobs, the massive scale of the demonstrations, the inability of the student leaders to control their own movement, the sympathy of the Chinese public and foreigners for the demonstrators, and Chinese troops' lack of experience in crowd control.

The student movements that senior leaders had taken part in before 1949 were well organized, with thought-through plans and agenda, and by 1949, the student leaders had worked together for many years. Students in the late 1960s had experience as Red Guards. But the tight controls in the decade before 1989 had prevented the growth of an independent organized student movement. In 1989 the students who came together did not have any experience in organizing. Articulate orators emerged as leaders, but, lacking organization, an agenda, and procedures for ensuring compliance, they had no basis for negotiating with political leaders on behalf of other students.

Urban residents did not join in restraining the demonstrators, for they sympathized with their complaints. Even some older intellectuals who tried to keep the students from taking radical actions in fact admired the students for boldly expressing views that they themselves, beaten down by years of political pressures, were afraid to express. What began as an unplanned peaceful outpouring of mourning for Hu Yaobang was transformed into parades, political forums, campouts, angry protests, hunger strikes, and clashes that spiraled out of control.

Student demonstrators wanted improvements in their living conditions and they were upset that they were receiving fewer economic rewards for their ability and hard work than were uneducated entrepreneurs. But they had learned from the failure of the student movement in 1986 that it was important to win widespread public support for their cause. So in 1989, instead of complaining about their miserable living conditions, they used slogans that resonated with the citizenry—democracy, freedom, and a more humane and
accountable party with upright officials who were dedicated to the public good.

The demonstrations were spurred on by and played out before global television audiences who were moved by the tender, heartfelt appeals of Chinese youth. Foreign reporters in China, who in their work had long been hounded by Chinese officials who policed their activities and arrested any sources who dared to speak out, listened eagerly to the students' demands. Before April 15, most students had been afraid to talk openly with foreign reporters, but as they grew bolder over the course of the spring, foreign reporters gave voice to their hopes for a more democratic society, winning them sympathy throughout the world.

For their part, students were buoyed not only by the enormous support at home and abroad, but also by the failure of the government's initial efforts to curb the demonstrations. When masses of students broke through police cordons, students and foreign observers alike became unrealistically hopeful that the government would eventually yield to their cause. At the time, the students could not have imagined that the political leaders would eventually resort to armed force and that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) would shoot unarmed citizens on the streets of Beijing.

Chinese leaders, for their part, could see that foreign attention and support encouraged the protestors. They found it difficult to believe that Chinese citizens could be that angry at the leadership and found it easy to believe that the protests were being controlled behind the scenes by domestic and foreign “black hands.” Stories and rumors of such “black hands” circulated widely among high officials and were used by the conservatives to push Deng to take stronger action.

The Death of Hu Yaobang

Shortly after returning to Beijing from a winter holiday in the south, Hu Yaobang attended a Politburo meeting on April 8. During the first hour of the meeting, he had a sudden, severe heart attack and collapsed. Rushed to the hospital, he seemed to be recovering when suddenly, early on the morning of April 15, he passed away. The news was made public on the seven o'clock evening television news. On the following day, an official obituary was read on television and printed in the newspapers. The shock was universal. Hu's death had been completely unexpected and attracted enormous
sympathy, even among hardliners.
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Deng Liqun, Hu's most vocal critic and the one who had led the attack on Hu in January 1987, now praised him. He later wrote that Hu had not engaged in plots and that he had been completely aboveboard and bore no grudges. Deng Liqun later claimed that, in contrast, Zhao Ziyang had engaged in plots and attacked people.
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The Chinese public had long been inspired not only by Hu's enthusiasm and personal warmth, but also by his integrity and dedication to the party. He was the hope of the intellectuals, for whom he had fought so valiantly, and he was their symbol of the good official—a man with high ideals who was free of any trace of corruption. As the longtime general secretary of the Communist Youth League, Hu had always identified with young people, whom he cultivated and whose interests he promoted. Yet Hu was coldly ejected from office in 1987 amid accusations that he had been soft on the 1986 student demonstrators.

The 1989 demonstrations represented an implicit criticism of Deng Xiaoping's unwillingness to do more to promote democracy and to support Hu Yaobang's efforts. Hu Yaobang's friends felt that Hu had been criticized unfairly and they reported that he had felt deeply wounded, especially by the criticism from Deng, whom he had served so loyally. After being removed in 1987, Hu had ceased watching television and lost weight.
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Many believed he died from sheer disappointment, a martyr for the cause of freedom and democracy. But many of those who took part in the demonstrations were not concerned about Hu Yaobang personally; instead, they regarded him as a useful rallying point for expanding their efforts to increase freedom and democracy. Indeed, many intellectuals regretted that they had been submissive in 1986 when the student movement was so easily defused. They were now determined to stand stronger.

As students invoked the memory of Hu Yaobang to advance the cause of freedom and democracy, the parallels between the April 5, 1976, demonstrations (to mourn Zhou Enlai) and the April 1989 demonstrations (to mourn Hu Yaobang) were striking enough to inspire the demonstrators and to worry the Chinese leaders. The demonstrations in 1989 were taking place in the very same place as the April 1976 “Tiananmen Incident.” Like Zhou Enlai, Hu Yaobang had fought to protect the people and had died a tragic death. In both 1976 and 1989, the public was outraged that a man whom they revered had not been treated with more respect. In 1976 the demonstrators had taken advantage of the occasion to attack the Gang of Four. Now, was it not possible to use the occasion to criticize Deng Xiaoping and Premier Li Peng? By
the fall of 1978, too, those arrested in the spring of 1976 had been rehabilitated and called patriotic. In the same way, was it not possible that the demonstrators in 1989 would later be called patriotic as well? Among those Chinese who hoped for a more humane government, Hu Yaobang had replaced Zhou as the great hero of the time.

Sources of Unrest

In the spring of 1989, political disagreements among high-level leaders, particularly Zhao Ziyang and Li Peng, as well as the gradual withdrawal of Deng from involvement in leading daily affairs, led to conflicting signals and confusion. This uncertain environment allowed serious sources of social unrest to fester and intensify at lower levels. Most Chinese students in the late 1980s were less concerned about political freedoms than about their personal freedoms, such as the ability to choose their own jobs and to escape from their “political guides.” After already having proved their talent and dedication by preparing for the difficult university entrance examinations, they felt entitled to pursue whatever jobs they wanted. But in 1989, with a shortage of trained graduates in key industries and government offices, government policy still mandated that graduates be assigned their jobs. Since one's job assignment was based in part on what the political guides who lived with the students wrote in the “little reports” in each student's secret records, the political guides became the symbol of government surveillance. The political guides were rarely as well educated as the students on whom they were reporting; some were suspected of favoritism and flaunted their authority to influence a student's future. Many cosmopolitan, independent-minded students detested the constant worry about pleasing them. “Freedom,” to them, meant eliminating these political guides and being able to choose their jobs and careers on their own. The students actually spent little time discussing election systems.

Intellectuals, both young and old, were also still angry about the 1983 campaign against spiritual pollution and the 1987 campaign against bourgeois liberalization. The popular Chinese television documentary
River Elegy
, which had been broadcast for a short time in the late 1980s (until the conservatives were able to end it), caught the mood of many intellectuals when it criticized the Yellow River—a symbol of traditional China—and praised the Blue Ocean that had brought innovative foreign ideas and modern practices to China's shores.
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For the general public, a major worry was inflation. Party and government workers, state enterprise employees, and others with fixed salaries were furious to see rich private businesspeople flaunting their material wealth and driving market prices higher, threatening the ability of salaried workers to pay for their basic food and clothing needs. The problem was exacerbated by corruption: township and village enterprise workers were enriching themselves by siphoning off needed materials and funds from state and public enterprises; independent entrepreneurs were making fortunes, in part due to government loopholes; and “profiteering officials” were finding ways to use society's goods to line their own pockets as the incomes of law-abiding officials stagnated.
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Migrants beginning to stream into the cities also contributed to the inflation problem.

Official indices, which underestimate the actual changes, showed consumer prices in Beijing between 1987 and 1988 rising more than 30 percent, terrifying families that were dependent on fixed salaries and for over three decades had expected stable prices. Frugal families that had been able to put aside some savings for old age and future illness were distressed to note the drop in the value of their savings. As prices continued to rise and officials threatened to lift more price controls, anger turned to panic.

Government employees on fixed salaries had been taught that they were working for the public good. It was thus outrageous that the least moral people in Chinese society, those working for themselves and those willing to exploit public resources for personal benefit, were now able to afford expensive restaurants, better housing, stylish clothes, motorcycles, and even cars or vans. No city had as large a concentration of public salaried officials or university students who expected to live on fixed salaries after graduation as Beijing. They believed that government enterprises should use more of their income to offer employees higher salaries or at least better welfare services. In the excitement of the spring of 1989, some government employees were sufficiently outraged that they were willing to run the risks of joining the demonstrations with signs bearing the names of their government units. But even for the general public, the student slogans opposing inflation and corrupt officials tapped a deep reservoir of outrage

When the Chinese public talked about “corrupt officials,” they did not mean those who disobeyed laws, for the concept of legality was not that strong. They meant those who used their positions or their personal contacts for benefits that others sought but did not have. Protesting students, furious at “profiteering” officials, demanded that these officials' incomes and expenses
be revealed, along with the number of villas they owned and the sources of their children's money.
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In 1966 many children of high officials had joined the Red Guards against those who had “taken the capitalist road,” but in 1989 few children of high officials joined the protestors. Instead they were under attack, along with their parents, for the privileges they enjoyed as a result of turning their powerful positions into sources of profit in the new market economy.

For employees in state enterprises, even more frightening than inflation was the fear that their “iron rice bowls”—their secure jobs and benefits—might be at risk as state enterprises became subject to market forces. The government had already begun to pressure state enterprises that were losing money to cut their costs. Some firms were even permitted to go bankrupt, creating near-panic among their employees. The stakes were extremely high for workers because China lacked a national social security system and a national health program. Sizable state enterprises, much like U.S. military bases, were not just economic units but total societies that provided subsidized housing, medical care, and even education for workers' children. For the workers in state enterprises, to lose a job was to lose everything. The prospect of free markets that could put state enterprises out of business was terrifying.