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The Democracy Movement in China
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15254 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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8 / 1989 |
1,848 Words |
| Author
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Roger A. Brooks
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In late April of this year, hundreds of thousands of Chinese students took to the streets in Beijing. Their ostensible catalyst was the April 15 passing of the former Chinese Communist Party Chairman Hu Yaobang, one of China's best-known reformers. The demonstrations continued through the visit to China of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev from May 17 to 19 and culminated in the now infamous massacre, which, by some reports, took the lives of more than 3,000 Chinese in Tiananmen Square on the weekend of June 3-4.
Set against the background of demonstrations in Beijing and in other cities in China has been a vicious power struggle in the Chinese leadership. This struggle apparently has evolved between, on the one hand, the hard-line, "anxious" reformers, represented by China's Prime Minister Li Peng and China's octogenarian President Yang Shangkun and the "enthusiastic" reformers, or moderates, represented by Communist Party Chief Zhao Ziyang. Although it is still difficult to discern precisely how this leadership divided over the appropriate government response to the demonstrations, it appears that Li and senior leader Deng Xiaoping had advocated the use of force to quell the disturbances, and that Zhao effectively separated himself from the hard-liners by stressing dialogue with the students and by allegedly offering to resign his positions as Communist Party leader. Although several weeks have passed since Deng and other hard-liners managed to force Zhao from power and declare martial law in Beijing, they have failed to organize the Central Committee coalition needed to replace him.
Whatever the outcome of the current power struggle in China, the six weeks of demonstrations in China already symbolize a watershed in the development of post-1949 China. And whatever happens now, the face of China has already been changed forever.
The reasons behind the demonstrations
As the student demonstrations indicated, there was a growing suspicion that China had lost its way and that the Chinese leadership had grown dangerously out of touch with its own people. Those ruling the country no longer inspired its people's confidence. The economic reforms, initiated by Deng a decade ago, had become terribly bogged down. Soaring inflation was holding the nation's economic modernization prisoner. Clamps on credit and prices threatened peasants, business people, and students. Corruption and nepotism were rampant throughout society and most visible among the party's elite. Despite all the lip service Deng's reforms had given to separating the functions of party and state, there simply existed in China no viable check on the authority of the Communist Party. Thus, while China's opening to the West had fostered extensive international contact, it had not been matched by domestic political reform.
The protracted confrontation in Tiananmen Square
The final crackdown in Tiananmen Square on June 3 and 4 was preceded by several weeks of delayed response and apparent indecision. There are several reasons for this. First of all, almost from the very beginning, the Chinese leadership was engulfed in a major power struggle. And it was not at all clear which side would prevail, the hard-liners or the moderates. It was evident that at least some of the ruling party elite supported some of the goals of the demonstrators during the time
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