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CIAO DATE: 8/01
What The Tiananmen Papers Tells Us About China Today
On The Issues
February 2001
The Tiananmen Papers, a pseudonymous publication of classified Chinese documents, sheds new light on the grievances of the people who staged the peaceful demonstrations at Tiananmen Square. It also reminds readers that the leadership of China is bent on preserving the communist status quo and that more crimes and tragedies almost certainly lie ahead for the People's Republic.
The eleven years of denial and political make-believe that began in China with the bloody crushing of the nationwide democracy movement in 1989 ended in January. The first inside account of how the "People's Government" in Beijing reached the grave decision to use deadly force against the people was published in the United States.
Aftershocks will likely continue from revelations contained in The Tiananmen Papers—nearly 500 pages of secret documents brought out by a brave, pseudonymous Chinese civil servant and edited by two of America's foremost China scholars—for years to come, as they did from Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev's "secret speech" in 1956. That broke Stalin's spell by telling the truth about his crimes and began the process that abolished the Soviet Union thirty years later.
Assuming the Tiananmen documents are genuine, and we have every indication that they are, some lessons are already clear.
First, the Chinese people are nowhere near so passive nor so gullible as is sometimes assumed. Beijing has tried hard to wipe out all trace of the massacre, but clearly it has not been forgotten. People simply have their heads down, remembering what happened the last time they spoke out.
Yet even as Jiang Zemin's government repaved and landscaped Tiananmen Square to eliminate shell traces and tank tracks, and lured foreign leaders, Bill Clinton among them, to ceremonies there, other Chinese, including some in government, were secretly gathering the official papers that told the true story. They were also arranging for their publication abroad, first in English and then in an even more comprehensive Chinese version, which is forthcoming.
The grievances that bubbled up in 1989 in the largest peaceful demonstrations in human history have thus burst the dam of official denial and are now flooding back into the Internet-wired China that has taken shape in the meantime. What about individual rights and free speech? What about elections? What about the corruption of the lawless ruling class? These issues won't go away until they are solved.
Since 1989 the regime's responses have been fourfold. First, economic development to soothe unrest. Second, insistent xenophobia to divert youthful passions. Third, empty promises of political reform to satisfy finicky foreigners. And fourth, cruel repression, including imprisonment and extralegal murder, of those who still speak up.
Clearly these have not worked. Economic development, for example, has been impressive and real, particularly in coastal regions, but without law and legitimate government it rests on shaky foundations—and these grow more shaky, not less, as that growth continues in a political and institutional vacuum. Why, one asks, have so few observers been pointing out such problems?
Misjudgments about China
Hence the second lesson: The new documents reveal how completely some of our China policy intellectuals have fallen down on the job. Some of our specialists have allowed themselves, like the Soviet experts of old, to be drawn into official groupthink. Jiang Zemin once described Tiananmen as "much ado about nothing"—and a number of Americans have, in effect, paraphrased him.
But the worst mistake of our experts—worst because it leads to terrible misjudgments about the future—has been to buy into the idea, assiduously promoted by official Beijing, that the 1989 agenda for political reform had been forgotten and that economic growth alone would see China through.
Anyone who believes that should read the personal testimony of the reforming prime minister Zhao Ziyang, ousted at the time of the massacre and under house arrest ever since. (See quote nearby.) Zhao had started out as a "put the economy first" reformer but gradually realized that political change was indispensable.
"For years I've been a bold activist in economic reform but cautious in the area of political reform; I used to call myself 'a reformer in economics and a conservative in politics.' But my thinking has changed in recent years. I now feel that political reform has to be a priority; if it is not made a priority, then not only will economic problems get harder to handle, but all sorts of social and political problems will only get worse."
—Ousted Chinese prime minister
Zhao Ziyang in June 1989
Zhao has been a nonperson these eleven years, but we will now be hearing more of his viewpoint, which is widely shared inside China, particularly as the struggle begins to form the Communist leadership that will succeed Jiang Zemin and the rest of the group that came in after the massacre. Their surprisingly durable political spell has now been broken, in a Chinese version of the Wizard of Oz, with Zhang Liang (the pseudonym of the Chinese compiler) and professors Andrew Nathan and Perry Link pulling back the curtain to reveal the puny reality behind the facade.
That China will remember these authors as heroes is certain. But we may ask whether their brave action will bring the result they clearly hope for. Will it help shift China back onto the path of reform?
Strong Opposition to Reform
Alas, the final lesson from the very texts they publish is discouraging. A sense of the bright might-have-beens of 1989—that reform might actually have happened—is a subtext of the book. Yet to read The Tiananmen Papers is to be reminded of the ugly reality, among China's rulers, of strong opposition to reform.
The verdict in 1989 was not close. Despite massive popular support the liberalizers were buried by a hard-line avalanche. In the corridors of power, as the transcripts show, there was wide agreement—among Communists whose convictions were still alive, and misguided patriots who imagined foreign plots everywhere, and corrupt officials with money and power at stake, and opportunists like those who became the current leadership—agreement that the people must be silenced, even if that meant calling the army.
All these groups are still strong. When China does begin to change politically—as it must, unless it is to collapse again into poverty and ignorance—we may expect them to resist as bitterly and as resourcefully as have the Communists in Russia, Yugoslavia, Romania, and elsewhere. The world should be aware that for China, more crimes and tragedies almost certainly lie ahead.
Arthur Waldron is a visiting scholar and director of Asian studies at AEI. An earlier version of this article appeared in the Wall Street Journal on January 10, 2001.
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