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NOT NOW, SAYS ZHAO
By William Terdoslavich
No more Mr. Nice Guy.
Freedom. Good people like it. Bad people hate it. That’s pretty much how Americans size things up.
Whenever people take to the streets to protest oppression by some dictator, they have our sympathy. We root for these underdogs. We want the good guys to win.
Sometimes they don’t.
In China, in 1989, tens of thousands of people crowded into Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, demanding that government be accountable to them. The government responded by sending in the army to contain the protesters, and hopefully suppress their perceived “bourgeois liberalism.” When suppression failed, the army shot at the unarmed crowds.
More than twenty-five years later, we still remember. Only the Chinese government wants to make people forget the story, especially as it revolved around one forgotten man: Zhao Ziyang.
May You Live in Interesting Times
China was wrecked and weakened by the practices of Chairman Mao Zedong’s “Cultural Revolution” in the 1960s. The revolution was supposed to purge the last bits of pre-Communist China. A reign of terror resulted.
Radicalized cadres of students flooded into Beijing and other cities. Professors, professionals, and party members were swept out of their offices, forcibly demoted, and forced to work in menial jobs on collective farms and in factories. One of those swept away was Deng Xiaoping. Another was Zhao Ziyang.
As things broke down for lack of experienced managers to run them, many technocrats and former party leaders were “rehabilitated” in order to run things again. Mao died in 1976. Many of his radical cronies were still in power. Returned from disgrace, Deng moved carefully, consolidating his own power base and, when strong enough, purging the party of its radicals.
By the 1980s, Deng began the economic reforms needed to shift China from a collective to a market economy. He picked Hu Yaobang as general secretary to oversee change. Reform was causing a lot of social unrest, without getting results. Deng removed Hu in 1986 and next reached out to Zhao to help fix things.
This would not be easy. State-owned industries were shut down. People lost jobs. Official corruption was systemic. The government limited families to having only one child. People were not free to move to cities to seek work, but they did. The government did not seem to be in charge.
In the middle of all this, Hu keeled over from a heart attack in April 1989. Only in China would the death of a Politburo member become a political problem.
Appearances Can Be Deceiving
In China, the Communist Party must have a monopoly on politics. Any approved event that draws a crowd can have an outward appearance, but acquire a hidden meaning.
The late Hu favored government reforms, was against corruption, and wanted to see a government more accountable to the people. Showing up at Hu’s funeral was a “vote” for this agenda.
Tens of thousands of Chinese did show up. The college students began protesting, at first in small crowds. They tried to present a list of grievances to the government, asking that Hu’s reputation be rehabilitated, as well as granting freedom of speech, press, and assembly. They also wanted increased funding for colleges and research. And they wanted this reported fairly in state media.
The “April 18 Petition” was pretty much ignored. Government security forces did nothing to arrest the students behind the petition. The government looked weak to the students, who kept marching. Student protests spearheaded the Cultural Revolution. Should the Politburo decide to crack down on the protests or conciliate?
Here Zhao Ziyang stood out. He called on the government to urge the students to return to classes, and to open a wide-ranging dialogue with them and the intellectuals—and for the police to refrain from violence.
With that said, Zhao boarded a train and headed off for a state visit to North Korea.
That was his biggest mistake.
Only One Vote Matters
While Zhao was away, Li Peng began to play. The hard-liner had direct access to the only person whose decision mattered, the semiretired Deng Xiaoping. And he kept it that way.
Li used his temporary powers during Zhao’s North Korea trip to call a standing committee meeting. Zhao would not be present to argue for a kinder, gentler approach to the perceived disorder. Instead, the committee members concluded that the crowds of protesters were staging a carefully plotted attempt to overthrow the government. This information was presented to Deng. Already burned by the Cultural Revolution, he did not sympathize with protesters. He sided with the hard-liners. That was all that mattered.
Then Li Peng took liberties with Deng’s statements. He published them in the official party newspaper, the People’s Daily. There, party members read Deng’s remarks, in which he accused the protesters of having “anti-Party and anti-socialist motives.”
Now the students were angry. The protests spread throughout China. Zhao returned from North Korea only to find he had no pull with his fellow Politburo members.
By mid-May, students had encamped in Tiananmen Square in the very heart of Beijing, near Mao’s tomb, the Great Hall of the People, and the Forbidden City. If this happened in Washington, it would be like having protesters all over the Mall between the Capitol, the White House, and the Lincoln Memorial.
Soviet Union chairman Mikhail Gorbachev was expected to pay a visit, ending a thirty-year breach with China. He had to be greeted at the airport, with restricted public and press access. Tiananmen Square was already occupied.
On May 17, Zhao finally got his meeting at Deng’s home. Waiting there for him was the entire Politburo. Zhao realized that the deck was stacked against him. He made his presentation anyway, calling on his colleagues to revoke the People’s Daily editorial labeling the students as a threat. This would allow the government to regain political control of the situation. Using violence to restore order would only make things worse.
No one spoke in favor of Zhao’s remarks. Li Peng responded by criticizing him. Finally, Deng spoke. Backing down would only make things worse. He called for martial law to be imposed on Beijing. The People’s Liberation Army was mobilized for the task.
Zhao made a speech to the students two days later in Tiananmen Square. His show of solidarity was his swan song.
Tanks for the Memory
Starting on May 20, approximately 250,000 troops were brought into Beijing, taking up positions around the city. Outside the main protest area, many of the city’s residents successfully encouraged the troops to briefly withdraw from the area. Soldiers were ordered back into Beijing, timing their moves with other military operations against similar protests, spreading throughout other Chinese cities. Then, on the night of June 3–4, two divisions were tasked with clearing Tiananmen Square of all protesters. The soldiers were from outlying parts of China. They had no sympathy for the protesters. They would follow orders.
International media was thick in the square. They went live on TV or filed news reports describing how truck-borne troops fired into unarmed crowds, and how the military cordon kept ambulances from picking up wounded protesters. Bystanders commandeered bike-rickshaws to rush the wounded to nearby hospitals, which were already swamped. The sound of gunfire continued through the night. By six a.m., Tiananmen Square was cleared of people, leaving the square covered with litter, wreckage, and blood. To this day, we have no sure information as to how many protesters were killed. Maybe three hundred? Maybe a thousand?
Deng appeared on state television several days later, with the Politburo members and their semiretired elder sponsors, thanking the army’s generals for saving the nation. Heavily edited footage showed troops arriving in Tiananmen Square, facing down retreating protesters, nonviolently.
Zhao faced the Politburo several weeks afterward. If he made a statement of “self-correction,” admitting his doctrinal errors, he would obtain some forgiveness. Zhao refused. Stripped of his office, he was condemned to house arrest, which lasted the remainder of his life, until 2005. Zhao was proof that nice guys finish last.
No More Mr. Nice Guy
Shanghai Communist Party boss Jiang Zemin was called up to replace Zhao. Jiang managed to disperse protesters in his city without using force, upholding Deng’s policy of law and order.
Once Deng fully retired from behind-the-scenes control, Jiang was free to steer China on a course of ultranationalism. The Communist Party retained its monopoly on political power, but allowed private enterprise to take root. The economy improved, raising the standard of living for ordinary Chinese. So long as life got better, the government was good. But it is illegal to mention the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
That is how China works. Back when emperors ran the country, their legitimacy as rulers without question depended on maintaining peace and prosperity. As soon as the people suffered from flood, famine, corrupt officials, or civil war, the ruling dynasty lost that legitimacy and either fell or was overthrown. A new emperor would take the throne. Times would be good again. And the cycle would repeat itself.
So how was the “Communist Dynasty” supposed to handle China’s bad times? It would have been a hundred times better if Zhao had had his way. And it would have been consistent with Chinese culture. Peasants had long brought petitions to their emperors, asking that problems be fixed. The situation in Tiananmen Square was no different.
Zhao would only have been able to keep his top job for another six or seven years. But during that time, he could have steered China on a course that balanced economic change with social justice. China would be less of a military threat to its neighbors, who would be more eager to trade with Asia’s largest state. China would have naturally secured regional dominance without threatening anyone.
Instead, the ultranationalist course has been policy for more than twenty-five years. China has built military forces and wants to annex the South China Sea at the expense of neighboring states and international law. And it relies on its cyber-warfare capabilities to steal intellectual property from American corporations to further advantage its own companies.
Had Zhao prevailed, China would still be great, but as a friend, not as an adversary.