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What Future After Tiananmen Square?
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16736 |
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Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
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10 / 1989 |
5,256 Words |
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Thomas W. Robinson
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The spring 1989 events in Tiananmen Square fundamentally altered the course of twentieth-century Chinese history. What seemed a reasonably successful effort to modernize a centrally planned economy and to liberalize a Leninist party became instead a tragedy: the slaughter of thousands of innocent and well-meaning citizens. The upshot is that the Chinese Communist Party has definitively lost its claim to moral leadership of the Chinese people it must now, therefore, either rule by force, admit its errors and share power with the people, or be overthrown by popular revolution.
This is not the first time the party has inflicted its will on an unwilling population. The Anti-rightist Campaign of 1958, for example, led to the fiasco of the Great Leap Forward and the death by starvation of some 25 million Chinese; and the Cultural Revolution of 1965 led to a lost decade of economic stagnation, international isolation, and perhaps a million more people. Although politics is not baseball, the party now has three strikes against it, and it seems apparent that the long-term effect of the current repression will probably be replacement of the party with some other institution and belief system quite different in organization and philosophy. What is unknowable are the specific paths to that end and the time required to make the change. Indeed, the course of post-1949 Chinese history is filled with jagged departures from a reasonably smooth course. Thus, the capability of outside analysts to forecast even the most general course and turn of events has always been marginal. It will undoubtedly continue that way. Therefore, any attempt to forecast the future in the predictions of specific events should be avoided.
China's Recent History
Before the events of the spring of 1988, most observers thought that China's future course would be relatively smooth and reasonably positive. The general assumption was that the Deng Xiaoping-led economic reforms, especially in the spheres of agriculture and foreign trade (the open-door policy), had finally enabled China to go beyond its 150-Year-long hesitation to modernize and beyond fears of the effects that economic and political development might have on basic Chinese cultural values (and in, the case of the Chinese Communist Party, on Marxist ideology and Leninist monopoly of power). There would be occasional dips in the generally upward curve of development, as was evidenced in the Spiritual Pollution and Anti bourgeois Campaigns of the early and middle 1980s, but there would be short-lived as the benefits of the reforms became increasingly evident and as further reforms were effectuated. If there was a political-economic cycle in post-1978 China, it was thought to be shallow and of short (say, two years) duration. It was presumed that the general direction of China's future would be upward.
There were two problems with this analysis. First, the economic reforms themselves were structured in a such a way that they had to be continually liberalized in the direction of a free-market, quasi-capitalist economy. If agricultural production was freed to the point where the peasant was able to produce for the market as well as the state, further increases in production depended on further privatization of the agricultural sector, increased mechanization, and locally funded construction of public works. If urban industry was told to produce for profit and charge accordingly, macroeconomic tools of fiscal control (such as using interest rates to control the pace of economic activity) and
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