World-China Forum

China after Tiananmen

Spring always brings new blossoms, but 20 years ago, spring brought to China an unprecedented flowering. In hundreds of cities, citizens took to the streets in peaceful protests to demand freedom, government accountability and an end to corruption -- and the government, once among the most repressive on Earth, stood by and let them.

It was an intoxicating moment that didn't last. By the morning of June 4, the government had reversed course, sending the army to crush the long-running student demonstration in the capital's Tiananmen Square, leaving hundreds dead, and the Beijing spring was over.

Since that day, China has undergone such a broad transformation that it is almost unrecognizable. The economy has opened up to markets, private property and foreign trade. Living standards have soared. The government that once preached world revolution now provides credit to sustain American consumption. Chinese students go abroad to attend universities in bastions of capitalism.

But the bloody events of 1989 are still a live issue in China. Last month brought forth the posthumous secret memoir of Zhao Ziyang, the Communist Party chief removed because of his sympathy for the protesters. In it, he denounced the crackdown as "a tragedy to shock the world" and said his country deserved "a state more suitable to a democratic society." (Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribute)

China’s success outstrips democracy for now

Those who imagined in 1989 that the suppression of students marked the death throes of authoritarianism have been bitterly disappointed. Today, the Communist party’s knife is sharper and the hemp less knotty: it rules largely through the consent of a population grateful for its management of a breakneck economy and its restoration of China’s long-lost prestige. If there were elections tomorrow – What a way to mark the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen! – the Communist party would probably win by a landslide.

Martin Jacques, author of When China Rules the World, argues that China’s deep-seated Confucianism is incompatible with western-style democracy. He contends that to embrace democracy at this stage – halfway through China’s economic takeoff – would be to accept an “alien transplant”. If democracy does eventually emerge, he says, it is likely to be quite different from what westerners assume is their universal template.

Mr Jacques is right to argue that democracy, as patented by the west, is a product of European history, not a natural phenomenon. But he and others who emphasise the enduring nature of Chinese authoritarianism underestimate the attractiveness of the democratic idea itself. Soap and television are not universal either. But people the world over have grown to like them nonetheless. Representation and limits on absolute power are attractive concepts in their own right.

Zhao certainly thought so. Condemned to house arrest by the party he once headed, he spent years pondering the meaning of the Tiananmen uprising and its bloody suppression. His conclusion, so different from that of Deng, was that the Communist party should compete for power. Without checks, corruption would flourish and power would be abused, he said. After 20 years, Deng’s narrow view of democracy has prevailed. At some stage, a broader one will follow. (David Pilling, Financial Times)

How is the Chinese leadership divided?

Winberg Chai says:  

Cheng Li (China’s Team of Rivals) has oversimplified reality in his analysis of China’s future leadership by dividing it into two camps: the “populists” and the “elitists.” In fact, there are six equally important rival factions competing for the top two positions in the Chinese government.

These six factions developed within the six separate and equal political institutions that exist under the overall guidance of the Chinese Communist Party. They are: the Central Committee, the Discipline Commission, the People’s Government, the People’s Congress, the Political Consultative Conference, and the Central Military Commission. All of them recruit and cultivate their own followers. Each one has its own leaders, who are represented at the party’s Politburo. These six groups’ leaders have their own complex mix of agendas, ties, worldviews, personalities, and priorities based on their own personal experiences and that of their political institutions.

Cheng Li replies:

Winberg Chai’s argument that there are six equally important rival factions in the Chinese leadership is empirically groundless and conceptually misleading.

One of the defining political characteristics of the People’s Republic of China is the long-standing party-state system. By design, the leaders of the Communist Party have always held the most important official positions in the government, the legislative body, and the military. In fact, three of the six institutions that Chai mentions—the Central Committee, the government, and the Central Military Commission—are headed by the same person (currently, President Hu Jintao). These six institutions are neither “separate” nor “equal.” Quite the contrary, the institutions of the party and the state are intimately intertwined, with the government implementing the decisions of the party. Two other institutions on Chai’s list, the People’s Congress and the Political Consultative Conference, are well-known symbolic “rubber stamps.”

(Foreign Policy, May/June)

Wang Dan: Tiananmen’s Enduring Challenge

In the past decade, I have watched from afar as China has reasserted its role on the world stage. The economic growth is impressive. Last year’s Beijing Olympic Games gave China the global profile the leadership so clearly wants for legitimacy. But what about media censorship, which contributed to the number of victims of the tainted-milk scandal? And government corruption, which led to shoddy construction practices in Sichuan and devastating consequences during last year’s earthquake? Or the widening gap between the rich and the poor? These issues, all raised by the students in Tiananmen Square 20 years ago, remain unaddressed.

China’s power is limited to the “yang,” or hard power of military and economic might, whereas in the 21st century the “yin,” or soft power based on moral principles and human rights, is equally important. The Chinese people yearn not just for economic benefits but also for basic human rights. A pro-democracy manifesto called Charter 08, released online last December, has garnered thousands of signatures despite every effort by the government to block its distribution and punish its authors.

On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, the Chinese government should take four steps if it wishes to convince the world it is a responsible power. First, it should pay reparations to the Tiananmen mothers who lost their children. Second, the government should allow me and other forcibly exiled Chinese citizens to return to our homeland. Third, the government should release the remaining prisoners who were jailed for peacefully protesting in Tiananmen Square and more recent prisoners persecuted for their efforts to encourage human rights reform. Finally, China’s leaders should address the objectives shared by the Tiananmen students and the authors of Charter 08 — establishing the rule of law, guaranteeing basic human rights and ending corruption. Only then can China begin to turn the tragic page of Tiananmen. (Wang Dan, New York Times)

Former Communist Party official stands trial over bribery in E China

A former Communist Party chief of a city in east China's Anhui Province stood trial Wednesday on bribery charges. Prosecutors accused Zhou Guangquan of accepting briberies worth 4.1 million yuan from more than 30 people when he was secretary of the Communist Party of China Chaohu City Committee from 2000 to 2004, heard the Anqing City Intermediate People's Court. Zhou was also charged with failing to account for the sources of his 3 million yuan of property. Among the people who bribed Zhou, nearly 20 were government officials who got promotions after giving him bribes, according to the court. The defendant admitted to the charges.(Xinhua)

Susan Shirk: The Legacy of Tiananmen for Chinese Politics

Ever since 1989, Chinese leaders have been haunted by the fear that their days in power are numbered. The regime was shaken to its roots by six weeks of student protests in more than 130 cities and the divisions within the Communist Party leadership over how to handle them. The regime remained standing only because the military followed Deng Xiaoping's order to use force to disperse the demonstrators.

Today, two decades after the "life-and-death turning point" of Tiananmen, Chinese Communist rule has survived, but its leaders remain anxious about the possibility of another revolutionary challenge. To foreigners, China appears like an emerging superpower, strong economically and influential internationally; but its Communist leaders feel much weaker as they struggle to stay on top of a society roiled by thirty years of market reform and opening to the world.

Although never publicly articulating it, the Chinese Communist Party has devised a formula for survival based on the lessons they drew from the Tiananmen experience. First, prevent large-scale protests. Second, avoid public leadership splits. And third, keep the military loyal to the Party.

The three rules are interconnected. If the leadership group remains cohesive despite the competition that inevitably arises in it, then the Party and the security police can stop the protests from spreading. Unless people receive some signal of "permission" from the top, protests are likely to fizzle out or be extinguished before they grow politically threatening. But if the divisions among the top leaders come into the open as they did in 1989, people will take to the streets with little fear of punishment. Then, if the military splits too, or refuses to use force to defend the Party leaders, the entire regime could collapse. For the past twenty years, with the spectre of another Tiananmen crisis haunting them, China's leaders have worked hard to shore up all three fronts -- social quiescence, elite unity, and military loyalty. (Susan Shirk, Huffington Post)

Beijing's Favorite Capitalists

Today, the Communist Party has proven itself, in all but one particular, a friend to the urbanites and professionals who now prosper in China's cities -- socioeconomically, the very kinds of people it gunned down in Tiananmen Square. All it asks of them in return is that they not actively seek democratic rights. For their part, the hundreds of millions of beneficiaries of China's new prosperity have kept up their end of that bargain. Knowing that they'd face the brute wrath of the party and state if they did, they've made an understandable decision.

In the countryside, where hundreds of millions of Chinese still reside, the benefits of the nation's economic miracle are far harder to detect. For many, the backbreaking drudgery of peasant life persists as it has for centuries. Some Sinologists believe that one reason the urban Chinese haven't demanded more rights is their fear that in a democratic China, they'd be outvoted by a peasantry that would demand a more equitable distribution of the nation's wealth.

According to the nostrums of Reagan Age America, the current Chinese system -- in equal measure capitalist and authoritarian -- cannot actually exist. Capitalism spread democracy, we were told ad nauseam by a steady stream of conservative hacks, free-trade apologists, government officials and American companies doing business in China. Given enough Starbuckses and McDonald's, provided with sufficient consumer choice, China would surely become a democracy.

And yet, it hasn't. And this week, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has traveled there to assure its government that America won't permit China's massive investment in our government's notes to diminish in value, even if that means we have to cut back on needed public programs. In explaining China's rise and America's decline, historians may well note that capitalism -- American capitalism, anyway -- far from spreading democracy, actually has played a key role in transforming China into an authoritarian superpower. (Harold Meyerson, Washington Post)

Minxin Pei: How Beijing kept its grip on power

Chinese leaders appear to believe that they have discovered the magic formula for political survival: a one-party regime that embraces capitalism and globalisation. Abroad, the party’s success raises fears that it has established a viable new model for autocratic rule.

As the world commemorates the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen tragedy, it is time to reflect on how the party has held on to power against seemingly impossible odds and whether the strategy it has pursued since Tiananmen will continue to sustain its political monopoly.

Clearly, the most important explanation for the party’s apparent resilience is its ability to deliver consistently high growth. However, largely through trial and error, the party has also developed a complementary and quite sophisticated political strategy to strengthen its power base.

A lesson taken from the Tiananmen debacle by the party’s leaders is that elite unity is critical to its survival. The political necessity of launching China’s economic reforms in the late 1970s required the party to form a grand alliance of liberals, technocrats and conservatives. But the liberals and the conservatives constantly clashed during the 1980s, over both the speed and direction of reform.

Disunity at the top sent out mixed signals to Chinese society and, during Tiananmen, paralysed the decision-making process. After Tiananmen, the party purged liberals from its top echelon and formed a technocratic/conservative coalition that has unleashed capitalism but suppressed democracy.

An additional lesson learnt from the party’s near-death experience in Tiananmen was that it must co-opt social elites to expand its base. The pro-democracy movement was led and organised by China’s intelligentsia and college students. The most effective strategy for preventing another Tiananmen, the party apparently reasoned, was to win over elite elements from Chinese society, thus depriving potential opposition of leadership and organisational capacity.

So in the post-Tiananmen era, the party courted the intelligentsia, professionals and entrepreneurs, showering them with perks and political status. The strategy has been so successful that today’s party consists mostly of well-educated bureaucrats, professionals and intellectuals. (Minxin Pei, Financial Times)

Rule of Law: Back and Forth From Beijing

In China’s authoritarian system, political power at each level of the bureaucratic hierarchy is centralized in the hands of a small group of Communist Party officials. If they want to choke off information to Beijing and cover up their own corruption or incompetence they have the tools to do so.

Over the last three decades, China’s central leaders have experimented with tentative, bottom-up reforms to address these problems. Their aim was to create channels to allow a limited degree of citizen supervision over local officials and harness popular input to help Beijing better monitor local government agencies. For this reason, the central authorities supported the spread of village elections in the 1990s, allowing rural residents some ability to hold their local leaders accountable. Over the last two decades, Beijing has promoted legal reforms giving citizens limited rights to challenge local authorities in court.

But these efforts can progress only so far before they run into trouble. Beijing may want to keep a closer eye on local authorities, but it does not want to see these channels emerge as truly independent checks on its own power. As a result, China’s leaders end up undermining their own reforms. In the late 1990s, for example, the central leadership clamped down on electoral reforms following activists’ efforts to bring more open elections to higher levels of the bureaucracy.

This dynamic — one step forward, one step back — now appears to be playing itself out in the legal arena. (CARL MINZNER, New York Times)

CCP-KMT-DPP, parties in full-fledged war of calculations

In allowing Chen to call President Ma by his official title right in the face of high-ranking Communist government officials, thus making Chen a “heroine” by some DPP leaders, which was not reported in mainland media, Beijing amply demonstrated its political astuteness. That China may continue to use such double-faced tactics in dealing with the Taiwanese in the future will prove to be a big challenge for the KMT as any seemingly weaker response on its part will discredit its mainland position on the question of Taiwan's sovereignty.

For the KMT people, to warm up cross-strait ties is their long-standing policy, which they believe will benefit Taiwan, economically in particular, without sacrificing the sovereignty of the island under the principle of “one China with different interpretations.” In the long term, the accelerated exchanges will help China move faster on its way to become opener and freer.

As to the DPP, although its party line opposes closer relationship with mainland China, the economic relations, tourism and other attractions are so overwhelming that it is hard for its leaders to ignore. The latest opinion polls unmistakably indicate that the majority of the voters in Taiwan favor more liberal policies toward China as implemented by the KMT under the leadership of Ma. Therefore, the major opposition party has no choice but to try to adjust its attitude toward Beijing if it wants to survive in elections.

Now, it is clear that a full-fledged war of calculations is going on, involving the confrontation between Beijing's “united front” ploy and the reactions of the KMT and the DPP in their counter moves. What worries many is that as the current situation stands, it is very difficult for the DPP to achieve intra-party unity on numerous issues, let alone to cooperate with a political foe. (William Fang, China Post)