Tiananmen, Part 2

What about the Workers?

Imagine that it’s June, 2029.

Students from Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Radcliffe, Columbia, Vassar, Smith, Brown and Penn have been demonstrating outside the White House, flooding the Mall for six weeks. As their number has grown their mood has darkened: government corruption has triggered another downturn,  a crime wave and inflation threaten employment prospects and National Merit Scholarships have been canceled. Student leaders–some sponsored by a shadowy Chinese NGO–are taunting the crowd, urging them to ignore the Secret Service snipers and push their way into the White House grounds. Suddenly, simultaneously, every White House door bursts open. Uniformed officers rush out bearing either submachine guns – with which they open fire, slaughtering the children of America’s elite – or bottles of mineral water and invitations to join the First Family on the White House lawn for a barbecue that night.

Now imagine that it’s 1989. Fourteen million Americans, 6% of the population, were in college, while 0.02% of Chinese kids, two million, had the same opportunity (they are today’s leaders, btw). The idea that any national elite would murder its own children for demonstrating democratically about legitimate grievances is ridiculous.

The students were demonstrating about what they always demonstrate about: status, money and sex. The ‘democracy’ they wanted was the democracy they learned under Mao. Which is Big Character posters, unseen since the Cultural Revolution, reappeared. Mao, foreseeing such a moment, tried and failed to get big character postering constitutionally guaranteed.

Says eyewitness Lee Feigon, “The police seemed remarkably tolerant, unflustered by the constant jeering and screaming. Many who watched doubted that the American Secret Service would have reacted so genially if a similar mob were battering on the gates of the White House in the middle of the night. This was carried to an extreme at about 2:30 a.m. when the police tried to clear the crowd and some of them were pushed back onto a cluster of fallen bicycles. One tough picked up one of the bikes and smashed it over the head of one of the police. He was not arrested”.  

Squabbling within the Forbidden City, where opposition to Deng’s Reform and Opening was still powerful among Maoists, reflected the turmoil in the Square. Conservatives and progressives struggled to implement contradictory policies and Hu Yaobang’s unexpected death left no trusted interlocutor. Demonstrations intensified when students marched into Tiananmen Square on April 26 singing the Internationale and holding aloft portraits of Mao.

Lee Feigon continues, “The leaders of a prominent student group hung big pictures of Mao in the tents they pitched on the square. They talked openly and boldly about the good old days of the Cultural Revolution. Mao, they felt, had the right ideas although he sometimes used wrong tactics. Now they were determined to use what they considered the right ones”. 

Like American students (whose dreams died shortly afterwards, at Kent State), China’s knew the value of publicity. They expected repression and openly provoked it but, to their considerable surprise, provoked mostly sympathy. The Party’s reform wing hailed them as ‘bearers of the spirit of socialist democracy’ and The Peoples Daily gave them front-page spreads and headlines like, ‘A Million from All Walks of life Demonstrate in Support of Hunger-Striking Students,’ ‘Save the Students! Save the Children!’ The Guangming Daily ran front-page stories like, “The conditions of the students and the future of the country touch the heart of every Chinese who has a conscience”.

Clearly, the students were not alone. 

At the height of the turmoil, CCTV broadcast the meeting between organizers and Party leaders to millions of Chinese sympathetic to their demands for an end to the corruption and crime Deng had unleashed with his reforms. Support for the students grew so strong that the The Peoples Daily pushed coverage of Russian President Gorbachev’s state visit below the fold to feature their demands that Deng retire, troops stationed outside the city be dispersed, and martial law revoked.

Demands

Capitalizing on the coverage, protesters blocked the Square and announced a hunger strike. When the government responded (it sent ten thousand doctors and nurses, a hundred ambulances and teams of sanitation workers and portable toilets), the hunger strikers insisted on further dialog. When the government complied, they presented four new demands:

1. Better treatment for intellectuals, including more money for education, better salaries and job assignments after graduation.

2. An end to pervasive official corruption and to preferential treatment for relatives of Party officials in getting lucrative jobs and better living arrangements and education.

3. Hu Yaobang's political reforms, including more government accountability and responsiveness to citizens’ ideas and opinions and broader input into government policy.

4. Respect for constitutionally guaranteed freedoms like freedom to demonstrate, freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

Corruption in the ranks