Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (48 page)

Some people posted poems, brief personal accounts, or philosophical essays. Some big-character posters were written with large brushes; some poems and essays were written by pen on notebook paper. Many were written by youths, offspring of high-level officials who had a closer view of the changed atmosphere at the Central Party Work Conference, which was being held at the same time. Some were posted by other young people who were inspired by their newfound freedom but, having lived in a closed society, lacked the experience and wisdom to inform or temper their judgments. Under the terror of the Cultural Revolution, individuals could not test their ideas, and larger movements were unable to hone their strategies. In addition, advocates of freedom and democracy, like their critics, were not experienced or well informed about foreign developments. As they began to question Mao Zedong Thought and Marxist theory and to discover that other countries were far more advanced economically than China, some expressed an almost naïve faith in Western democracy.
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Others wrote that all they had been taught—Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought—was wrong. The wall became known as “Xidan Democracy Wall,” or simply “Democracy Wall.” At its peak, hundreds of thousands of viewers stopped by the wall each day. Similar walls appeared in other cities throughout the country.

The postings were passionately written, with some authors, fearing possible retribution, using pseudonyms, and others using their real names as a way of seeking redress. Some living far from large cities traveled long distances to
post their grievances. Many who had been tortured or whose relatives had been killed during the Cultural Revolution took their chance to tell their stories at last. Those with relatives and friends still in the countryside, in prison, or under house arrest called for the freeing of the victims. Relatives of the accused who had died wanted their family reputations restored, so they could lift themselves out of lives of misery. Of the 17 million youths who had been sent to the countryside since 1967, only about 7 million had been allowed to return to the cities.
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Many of the complaints came from those who had lost their opportunities for a higher education or for a good job and were living impoverished lives in the countryside. Others, with greater political sophistication, alluded to current debates in party circles and gave voice to the attacks on the “two whatevers” and to the demands for re-evaluating the April 5 incident.

On November 26, the day after Hua Guofeng addressed the work conference and publicly backed away from the “two whatevers,” Deng Xiaoping told Sasaki Ryosaku, the head of the Japanese Democratic Socialist Party, “The writing of big-character posters is permitted by our constitution. We have no right to negate or criticize the masses for promoting democracy and putting up big-character posters. The masses should be allowed to vent their grievances.”
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He rhetorically asked, “What is wrong with allowing people to express their views?”
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In addition, Marshal Ye and Hu Yaobang both expressed support for the people posting their opinions.

On that same afternoon, when John Fraser of the
Toronto Globe and Mail
went with the American columnist Robert Novak to see Xidan Democracy Wall, word circulated among the hundreds who surrounded them that Novak would see Deng the following day. Onlookers gave Fraser, who could speak Chinese, some questions for Novak to ask Deng Xiaoping, and Fraser agreed to report back to the onlookers the next evening. At the appointed time and place, when Fraser returned, there were thousands waiting to hear Deng's responses. When Fraser reported that Peng Dehuai's official reputation would soon be restored, they cheered. When he announced that Deng had declared the wall to be a good thing, they shouted with joy and relief.
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As the crowds gathered daily at the wall, brimming with excitement, individual Chinese, starved for information and eager to speak with foreigners, bombarded the foreigners with naïve but deeply sincere questions about democracy and human rights in other countries: Who in your country decides what appears in newspapers and what is heard on broadcasts?
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Foreign correspondents, who had been trying for years to get people to express their opinions,
eagerly reported to their home countries on the candid conversations and vibrant atmosphere at Democracy Wall. Although the official Chinese press did not pass on the messages appearing on Xidan Wall to the Chinese public, through the Voice of America and BBC these conversations were beamed back into China.

Although the crowds at Xidan Wall remained quite orderly, after several weeks some people began posting politically charged messages demanding democracy and the rule of law. Public security officials in Beijing reported some scuffles around the wall and expressed worries that the growing crowds posed a threat to order. In his conversation with Sasaki in late November, Deng had already warned that some postings were not conducive to stability, unity, and the realization of the four modernizations. Nevertheless, as the Third Plenum was drawing to a close, after a month of postings on Democracy Wall, China's top leaders were still willing to support the freedom to post one's views. In his closing speech at the Central Party Work Conference, for example, Marshal Ye said that the conference was a model of democracy in the party and that Xidan Democracy Wall was “a model of democracy among the people.”
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On December 13, shortly before the Central Party Work Conference ended, Deng took aside Yu Guangyuan, a staff member in his Political Research Office and one of the drafters of Deng's speech for the Third Plenum, and asked him to prepare a speech supporting Xidan Democracy Wall. He said to Yu: “What is the harm of a little opposition?”
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Although
People's Daily
did not report the events at Xidan, staff members at the newspapers who supported the wall published a bold editorial on January 3, 1979. It declared, “Let the people say what they wish. The heavens will not fall. . . . If people become unwilling to say anything, that would be too bad . . . the suffocation of democracy produces bad results.”
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By mid-January the comments on the wall were becoming increasingly political. On January 14, a column of people held banners that announced that they were “persecuted people from all over China.” Declaring “We want democracy and human rights,” they marched from Tiananmen Square to the gates of Zhongnanhai, where the most powerful party officials lived and worked. The marchers tried to enter the gates, but were stopped by armed soldiers. Roger Garside, a British diplomat who observed the protestors, described them as “the angriest group of people I have ever met.”
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Other groups began to print magazines and distribute them for free to
people who came to view the wall. On January 17, a group of protestors calling themselves the “China Human Rights Association” printed a nineteen-point declaration that demanded freedom of speech, the right to evaluate party and state leaders, open publication of the national budget, permission for outsiders to sit in on meetings of the National People's Congress, free contact with foreign embassies, and the right of educated youth to be reassigned.
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These angry protests took place a few days before Deng was to leave for the United States, but Deng did not impose restraint. He knew that if he clamped down on Democracy Wall just before leaving for the United States, his actions would be reported in the Western press and could affect the success of his trip. When Deng returned from the United States and Japan on February 8, however, he did not ask Yu Guangyuan to see a copy of the speech he had prepared for Deng in support of Democracy Wall. More importantly, Deng never delivered it.
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By March, more essays had been posted attacking the basic system of Communist Party rule. Emboldened by the absence of government restraint, people began to criticize the entire Communist Party, the political system, and even Deng Xiaoping.

On March 25, Wei Jingsheng, a zoo employee and former soldier, took a bold step beyond the old boundaries. He posted a fundamental critique of the Communist Party system and called for “The Fifth Modernization—Democracy.” Wei had not attended university and the piece was not a sophisticated analysis of democracy. But what Wei lacked in sophistication, he made up for in passion. He had a Tibetan girlfriend whose father had been jailed and whose mother had committed suicide after being jailed and humiliated. Wei himself had been assigned to work in a remote area of Xinjiang and was troubled by the people he saw begging for food. He sought to understand why so many people had died when some officials were living such comfortable lives. He accused the party of using the slogan the “Four Modernizations” to mask a system of class struggle that in fact remained unchanged. He asked, “Do the people enjoy democracy nowadays? No. Is it that the people do not want to be their own masters? Of course they do. . . . The People have finally learned what their goal is. They have a clear orientation and a real leader—the banner of democracy.”
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With these public declarations, Wei Jingsheng immediately became a sensation in the global media, which elevated him to the status of a leading Chinese spokesperson for a new democratic system.

It was around this time that China's attack on Vietnam had ended and
Deng could devote more attention to domestic matters, including Democracy Wall and the Theory Work Conference (for the attack on Vietnam, see
Chapter 18
). By then Democracy Wall had proved to be of great value to Deng politically: it had allowed people to give vent to their objections to the “two whatevers,” to the handling of the April 5 demonstrations, and to the errors of Chairman Mao, thus providing Deng more political room to follow a new path without having to take part in the attacks himself.

In theory, Deng may have found democracy attractive as he was just taking over the reins of power; he encouraged more democratic discussion within the party. But when protestors attracted huge crowds and resisted basic rule by the Communist leadership, Deng moved decisively to suppress the challenge. As one provincial first party secretary later said, Deng's view of democracy was like Lord Ye's view of dragons. “Lord Ye loved looking at a book with pretty pictures of dragons
(Yegong haolong)
, but when a real dragon appeared, he was terrified.” Although Hua was chairman of the party and premier, it was Deng who decided to curb the criticisms. On March 28, Beijing city government officials, reflecting the changing political climate and Deng's personal views, issued a regulation declaring that “slogans, posters, books, magazines, photographs, and other materials which oppose socialism, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the leadership of the Communist Party, Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought are formally prohibited.”
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As in imperial days, order was maintained by a general decree and by publicizing severe punishment of a prominent case to deter others. Deng's crackdown continued with the arrest of Wei Jingsheng on March 29, just four days after Wei's article on democracy had appeared on Democracy Wall. With Wei's arrest, the number of people going to view the wall suddenly dropped and only a few brave people continued to put up posters. The best-informed foreign estimate of the number of arrests in Beijing in the following weeks is thirty—infinitesimal compared to the hundreds of thousands arrested in 1957 or during the Cultural Revolution. No deaths were recorded.
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Remaining posters were moved to a much less traveled spot at Yuetan Park, well beyond easy walking distance from Xidan. Articles began to appear in the press criticizing some of the postings on the wall. At Yuetan Park, officials were assigned to request the name and work unit of anyone who wished to hang a poster.
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Wall posters were not officially prohibited at Xidan until December 1979, but by the end of March, Democracy Wall had ended. Yu Guangyuan reported that Hu Yaobang, as an obedient official, publicly supported Deng's decision, but officials who attended the opening sessions of
the Theory Work Conference could see that Hu Yaobang personally believed that granting more freedoms would not endanger public order.

When the wall was closed down, few among the general public dared to protest.
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Although many in the party firmly supported Deng's action as necessary to prevent the chaos that had characterized the Cultural Revolution, other party officials, including many intellectuals, were deeply disturbed by Deng's decision.
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In Yu Guangyuan's view, Deng's change from approving of the wall in mid-December to closing it down three months later was one of the key turning points in China after the death of Mao.
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Conference on Theoretical Principles, Part One

In late September 1978, Marshal Ye, concerned about the divisive battles between the advocates of the “two whatevers” and those who favored “Practice Is the Sole Criterion for Judging Truth,” proposed holding a conference to create common basic principles to guide party work in the fields of culture and education.
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Impressed with the success of the work conference on the economy, Ye believed that a free discussion of theoretical principles would unify party leaders as they entered a new era. On December 13, at the close of the Central Party Work Conference and with the approval of other leaders, Hua Guofeng formally announced plans to hold the Conference on Theoretical Principles.
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