What exactly is the Chinese dream?
How familiar is the name Deng Xiaoping to most Westerners today? Most people you could ask on the street would probably never have heard of him. Sadly many more would be familiar with his old party comrade, Mao Zedong. China today arguably owes a lot more to the former than the latter. When Mao died in 1976 shortly after his historic meeting with Richard Nixon, he left behind a country where 80% of the country made less than $40 per year, and where the level of state repression can only be matched today by North Korea. Modern China is the largest global economy, and a world leader in agriculture, transport, and telecommunications, something that can be credited almost entirely to Deng Xiaoping’s legacy.
Introduced to communism in France during the 1920s, Deng was better placed than most to aid the movement in China; eventually taking his place among its elite ranks after participating in the Long March. During the Great Leap Forward Deng had allowed farms to be managed by families instead of collectively by the whole village. Obviously this was in direct contradiction with communist thought, but most heinous of all, his methods actually worked.
The Cultural Revolution of the 1960s was Mao’s ways of asserting control over a party that was slipping from his grasp. The Politburo all secretly knew that the Great Leap Forward had been a disaster, and Mao had quietly agreed to take a backseat role in government. The nationalist outbursts that started in universities gave Mao the excuse he needed to purge Chinese society of any ‘rightist thought’ and soon militant activists were armed with machine guns and looting their neighbours to bring about this new vision. Deng was lucky that he was only consigned to exile for his bourgeois thoughts. Many others in the party (including Deng’s son) were tortured, imprisoned, or killed.
After Mao’s death a power struggle emerged that must have felt similar to Stalin’s funeral. Mao had managed to alienate almost everyone around him except for his wife, and his closest military adviser Hua Guofeng who was his chosen successor. His Wife Jiang Qing was soon placed in prison for the killing’s she’d ordered during the revolution. Hua in turn was seen by the party as a continuation of Mao’s policies, and few stood to benefit from more purges. Deng was able to rally party allies and Hua found himself politically outmanoeuvred, staying in power only as a figurehead. The conditions were that Deng would never officially be the leader of the party, or perhaps more people would have heard of a ‘Chairman Deng’.
What emerged a few years later was Deng's radical vision for a new China. After his tour of the developing economies of Asia in the 1980s, specifically in Singapore, Deng settled on his plan for 'Socialism with Chinese characteristics'. What this meant was the creation of Special Economic Zones (SEZs) in coastal regions across China that would be opened up for investment. Shanghai, Xiamen, and Hainan were all opened up but Deng's jewel in his crown was Shenzhen, opposite the coast of Hong Kong. The settlement was hardly more than a small town in 1985 when he first announced his plan; today it stands with a population of 13 million and covers an area bigger than London.
Deng shouldn't be mistaken for a capitalist wolf in communist clothing. He was committed to the revolution that he’d played such a major role in but he was more pragmatic Chinese nationalist than communist. He talked with other party members about the idea of the free market as that of a bird in a cage, build the cage too small and the bird had no room to move, but build it too large and the bird would fly free from its home.
If Deng’s reforms were a way of expanding the bird cage, by 1989, the bird was stretching its wings. His economic programs of the 1980s had grown the Chinese economy, but at the cost of rising unemployment, inequality and inflation. The students that gathered in Tiananmen Square were also accompanied by thousands of workers, angry at an inflation rate that had hit 30% a year by the late decade.
What actually happened on June 4th 1989? The government today paints the protests as a small band of rag-tag students advocating violent revolution, but this is revisionist history. In retrospect it is easy to underestimate the pro-democracy movement that existed in 1989 and how close it came to overthrowing the Chinese government. Michel Cormier’s book The Legacy of Tiananmen details how the protests were echoed over 400 cities in China attended by hundreds of millions of people. Wang Juntao and Chen Zeming, both of whom were pivotal in the 1989 protests, founded the first independent polling company in China to aid the movement. The Institute became a vehicle for gathering together journalists, students, and anyone who wanted reform, acting as a kind of unofficial party. The book documents how the sheer size of the movement made it harder and harder to agree on policies and make demands of the government. A few days after martial law was declared in May, Wang and the other student leaders met to decide that they would agree to withdraw from the square and ask for a special session of the People’s Congress. At the last moment, the more radical leaders failed to convince the students to leave, leading Deng and the rest of the Politburo to agree that Tiananmen should be cleared ‘by any means necessary’.
“What happened next was really out of our expectations”, said Chen Zeming recalling the event years later, “[They] were naïve, they didn’t really believe the Communist Party could shoot them”.
While any government that is threatened with removal from outside forces will inevitably act to defend itself (the student protests in Paris in 1968 were beaten into submission by French Police) the government at the time recognised a need to avoid violence and could have taken measures to do so. A massacre was avoided by Jiang Zemin in Shanghai who was rewarded by his appointment to General Secretary later in the same year. The soldiers at the square were faced with unarmed protesters and were perfectly capable of using non-lethal means. The lack of direction to the military from a panicked government created the conditions for the massacre, and decisively changed the course of Chinese history. Deng was nearly finished by the events. He was forced to take a minimal role in politics for the rest of his life, but before his death he was able to cement his legacy by televising a tour of China’s SEZs and the economic prosperity that he had created there.
Deng’s political successes should not rid him of the legacy of Tiananmen, but neither should Tiananmen negate what he achieved for his country. Without him, modern China would certainly not exist in its present form. The SEZs today are some of the wealthiest regions in the world and the country's meteoric growth would not have happened without his restructuring of the party, and the country’s negotiation into the WTO.
Some today see modern China as a nightmarish gulag of a country, scarcely better than the Soviet Union in its heyday. Those who think that way might consider what would have happened if the more radical Tiananmen students had actually been successful in their attempts to replace the government and create a democratic China. We have some idea of the result because that is exactly the process that took place in Russia. A military coup forced out Mikhail Gorbachev, crippled the leadership and broke up the union. The odds in the subsequent elections were then tilted rather heavily to favour Boris Yeltsin after his campaign received a $10 Billion loan from the IMF. The Yeltsin government proved extremely unpopular, Yeltsin was disgraced and after a failed war in Chechnya he was succeeded by the Putin-Medvedev duopoly that has stayed with Russia to this day.
Would a ‘democratic revolution’ in China really have been all that different to the Russian experience? In a way, Deng's economic plan may be what Russia would have looked like if Gorbachev's Perestroika had actually worked. He too had aimed for relative economic liberalisation of parts of the Soviet economy and greater autonomy of the member states. Of course there are radical differences between the two countries. China's provinces have far closer ties to the motherland in terms of ethnicity than the Soviet Satellites had with theirs, and the Chinese spent nowhere near the amount on defence as their northern neighbours did. It is however, an interesting thought experiment to run. While it’s very unlikely that the party could have been forcibly overthrown, things might have played out very differently if Secretary Zhao Ziyang had not been removed, or if martial law had not been declared on June 4th.
If the protesters had reached an agreement with the government, and concessions had been made, what would have been the outcome? A new reformist central party led by Deng and Zhao, on a liberalising mission that would see China as a giant South Korea? Or would any reform movement be met with a conservative backlash, crippling the government and leaving the country stuck in economic stagnation worse than 1990s Russia?
We will never know the outcome of that historical turning point, the legacy of Tiananmen means that for better or for worse, modern China is still Deng’s China. It has held on to its communist ideology, revivalist ambition, and economic prosperity at the same time. The party's current leader Xi Jinping can trace his heritage back to the same communist vanguard of Deng’s generation. His father Xi Zhongxun, was a revolutionary veteran who sheltered Mao and his comrades after the Long March, something that didn’t stop him from later being imprisoned and tortured during the Cultural Revolution. [16] Xi has emerged as the face of a far stronger nation that is attempting to merge Deng’s vision with a new foreign policy. Though if one takes a look back at the last two five year plans from the Central Party, how successful have they been at accomplishing their goals?
The issues that featured most heavily in the plan for 2011 – 2016 were the following:
1. Stable and fast economic growth
2. Shifting from an export driven to a consumer driven economy.
3. Developing new information technologies
4. Creating sustainable energy and a cleaner environment
5. Increase anti-corruption Efforts
6. Bridging the gap between the rich and the poor
So how well has this been going for Xi’s congress? The latest 5 year plan revealed in 2016 contains many of the same goals as the last one, with new additions like ‘improvement of the rule of law’, and the implementation of a universal healthcare program.
Economic growth, anti-corruption, and technological investment all get a big plus next to them. Cleaner environment, economic restructuring, inequality reduction, and legal improvement should be marked with a minus or perhaps ‘room for improvement’.
Xi’s anti-corruption campaign is one of the milestones of his presidency so far, rooting out thousands of government officials and taking down the ‘gang of four’ oil barons who held key positions in the party. He has managed to cement his position and curtail the influence of the last political generation. After the economic slowdown that occurred in 2015 the government has still managed to reach its growth target of 6% , and it’s latest unveiling of a quantum satellite has caused the Trump administration to hurriedly introduce its own quantum computing program, citing a need to remain competitive with ‘certain countries’ (that may or may not begin with the letter C).
The investment programs in Africa, along with the Belt and Road initiatives are genuinely revolutionary. These are all areas where the Xi government has been successful, and for this the administration deserves acknowledgement. The issues that relate to social domestic issues however are far more difficult for the party to address.
Pollution in the major cities has seen some improvement over the last decade but not by much, the latest research has concluded that air pollution has been reduced in Beijing by around 6%, which is still far from what would be considered safe for any Western city. In terms of legal reform, the government has flipped between Western style judicial systems and one party rule to resist any separation of power.
The 2011 essay by Zang Jisi In Search of a Foreign Policy outlined how China has had to become more involved in international affairs in order to maintain its rapid growth. Speaking as someone with close connections to the government, Zang outlined how China’s relationship with the United States should be considered a secondary issue compared to the more pressing need to establish good relations with its closer Asian neighbours. This has certainly played out in the last few years, the diplomatic crisis with the Philippines, the Docklam standoff with India, and the recent riots in Vietnam all show how apprehensive neighbouring countries are about the new superpower.
The real question for the future is how the government can continue a micromanaged economic system with a vast state apparatus, and allow more and more people to enter the middle class at the same time. The striking thing about modern China is how much of it manages to operate with the bare minimum of government oversight. Far from an Orwellian dystopia, most developed cities are covered in sprawls of market stalls, coffee shops, and shopping areas that would be violating dozens of regulations in any Western city. The ubiquity of smart phones means that most financial transactions take place online through Alibaba (The E-commerce mega-corporation owned by Jack Ma who has just been forced into retirement by the CCP), and many attempts at censorship are quickly abandoned after the subject is spread viral online.
The country is still a one party state, but the wealthier its citizens get, the more and more its government takes on the role of a citizen’s caretaker rather than a clique of tyrannical bullies. This is not to understate the effects of the party’s rulings in some areas of China. Yu Zhengshen’s sinister programs across Xinjiang and Tibet force hundreds of thousands into re-education facilities where they are made to study Chinese communist slogans. These policies stand out however because they are not the norm across most of the country, the developed regions of China with the educated city dwellers feel like a different world by comparison, the university students who use VPNs, go to coffee shops and watch Western movies have an entirely different mind-set than the rest of the nation. Just this week another student has become the latest in a series of cases of both pupils and professors expelled from their university for posts on social media that basically amount to criticising Chinese nationalism. The culture wars in China are between these educated classes and the rural population who are still under the thumb of the party.
Tiananmen is a banned topic today in China, when it is very rarely brought up in conversation one will discover that most young people are scarcely aware of what happened. Some express sympathy with the victims, many are more convinced that a crackdown was necessary; however there is one common response that is very interesting: That whatever the causes and aims of the protest and the killings, that was way back then, in the prehistoric 1980s when times were bad. Such a thing would never happen today.
Are they right?
Large assemblies of people are banned in the country but they are not at all uncommon. Local protests are a daily occurrence but major ones rarely break out because most of the population is doing relatively well financially and the government is able to control social media enough to pre-empt them. If major protests were to break out in China again as they did in 1989, without the proper legal reform that could help placate such unrest, the government would be left with few options.
The organisers of those protests recognised that democracy when it emerges is dependent on the rule of law and a strong civil society that allows a free and open discourse. President Xi today recognises this on some level, if he shares Deng's vision of China as a giant Singapore; he should take a closer look at the legal reforms that took place there that preceded its financial power. This is the paradox of Deng’s vision for his country. Pragmatic as he was, guaranteeing economic prosperity was his way of making sure that the state was strong and unified, but what happens when the economic prosperity itself threatens the unity of the nation that the party is supposed to represent? At some point it will have to choose between the two. What happens then will decide whether Xi Jinping is the first technocratic super-dictator, or the last of an old guard of communist revolutionaries.
