Tiananmen Square The Making of a Protest

Tiananmen Square: The Making of a Protest

In Book Reviews
07:35 PM, May 24, 2021
Venkataraman Ganesan

The mystery surrounding the tragic happenings on the 4^th of June 1989 at Tiananmen Square[1] is as lost to the world as are the cerulean skies to the environment of Beijing itself. While unverified conspiracy theories and unauthenticated ‘protagonist’ accounts abound, the actual facts are unfortunately shrouded in a cloak of anonymity. Every now and then there emerges a precious detritus of truth, which alas forms an insignificant trifle of an otherwise elusive and gigantic jigsaw puzzle. The reporting of the unfortunate events that occurred on the 4^th of June, by the Indian media, has putting it mildly, ranged from the lukewarm to the invisible. Maybe the reporting was shaped by the necessities and contours of time itself. The 1980s were times when Sino-Indian relations were on a welcome mend. The shrewd and incisive Deng Xioaping[2] as the paramount leader of China, approached India with an avuncular overture by proposing that all border quandaries ought to be resolved through a ‘package deal’. Deng subsequently and effusively welcomed Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi[3] when the latter visited China in December 1988 with the words, ‘I welcome you to China, my young friend.’

Now, more than three decades later, Vijay Gokhale[4], former Ambassador to China and an expert on Chinese affairs, provides a very nuanced perspective on the proceedings and procedures, that acted as pre-cursors to the calamitous episode that unraveled itself on the 4^th of June. For all those who are looking for a ‘tell-all’ version of the catastrophe, this is certainly not the book. But for those interested in getting an invaluable and firsthand account of the intricacies, intransigence and inviolable precepts surrounding Chinese politics, Gokhale’s book is an indispensable primer. As Gokhale himself reveals, “I have always wanted to tell this story since I witnessed it thirty-one years ago in Beijing, but my circumstances prevented me from doing so until now.”

Beginning his book by stirringly charting the rise of the unrelenting, patient, and indefatigable Deng to the highest pinnacle of power in China, Gokhale, chronicles the intricate fabric of relationships threading Deng with some of the most powerful and eccentric characters forming the Chinese Communist Party and the Politburo at the time. Deng brought along with him a few of these people whom he considered to be his faithful allies if not uncomplaining acolytes. Hu Yaobang[5], one of the veterans of the ‘Long March[6]’ and an avowed Mao supporter was brought in as the General Secretary.

But for a providential intervention by a powerful local communist commander by the name of Tan Yubao, Hu would have been beheaded after being persecuted and removed from power following the death of Mao[7]. Another Deng favourite whose fall from ignominy was even more spectacular than his rise was Zhao Ziyang[8], who was named the premier. Popularly referred to as a ‘reformist leader’, Zhao was instrumental in formulating many industrial and developmental policies on a national scale. He also established a series of sprawling Special Economic Zones in coastal provinces with an avowed objective of attracting foreign hubs.

As Gokhale informs his readers, small but apparent eddies of economic, social, and political discontents were brewing as early as 1985. The Government’s liberal spending on infrastructure had let to an Industrial overheating. Even though Mao’s collectivist farming policies were shown the door and agricultural policies were fine tuned to reflect market conditions, a boom in agricultural productivity failed to translate into industrial gains. Inflation had reared its double digit head. Hu and Zhao in the meantime had got themselves into an internecine tangle with the economic planners led by the veteran Chen Yun[9] on the shape and structure of reforms. While the duo proposed an initiation of urban reforms in the form of price and wage reforms, contentious positions were taken within the party on the primacy of price and wage reforms as against enterprise reforms. Tiny frictions that threatened to end up in a major fracture began to mushroom within party lines.

Meanwhile powerful remnants of the Mao legacy such as Hu Qiaomu[10], who was in charge of the Party’s Propaganda Department and Deng Liqun[11], (known as ‘Little Deng’ to differentiate him from Deng Xiaoping,) leader of the Party’s Policy Research Office commenced an ‘anti-bourgeois liberalization’ campaign. This campaign had at its nub, the stifling of what was termed by the party apparatchiks as Western ‘spiritual pollution’. This ideological concoction represented every ilk of promotion of liberal ideas of any kind that would lead to the establishment of Western-style capitalist democracy and thereby usher in the ultimate destruction of the Chinese Communist Party.

The economic eddy found an unlikely handmaiden in the form of a social and intellectual vortex. A troika of ‘liberal intellectuals’ took on Deng and the party rooting for the promulgation of democratic and capitalist principles within the Chinese order. Prominent and the oldest of the trio was Wang Ruowang[12]. Once jailed by Chiang Kai-Shek[13] when he was all of sixteen, Wang 1986, authored a controversial essay titled, ‘One Party Dictatorship Can Only Lead to Tyranny’, which mooted for public discussion between the citizens and their leaders. The second component of the discomfiture inducing band was Liu Binyan[14]. Liu was banished to a labour camp during the infamous Cultural Revolution as he was labelled a “rightist.” He came out of the shadows as a writer for the People’s Daily. In 1985 his article, ‘A Second Kind of Loyalty’, elucidated that cadres should rely on their own conscience and not on the diktat of the Party. Enough to more than just rankle the astute Deng. The unlikeliest member of the trio was an astrophysicist, Fang Lizhi[15]. Also banished by the Party and relegated to the coal mines during the Cultural Revolution[16], Fang was a very vocal and vociferous proponent of his ideas. On the 15^th of December 1986, Fang announced himself in the most inauspicious of all possible ways by giving an interview to the Beijing Review. He boldly but injudiciously opined that the process of modernization in China was ‘bound to involve a change in the concept of who leads in the political and economic fields’, and that ‘it was necessary to create ‘an atmosphere of democracy and freedom in the university … there can be no doctrine that can hold a leading or guiding position in an a priori way’. As expected, all three of them were swiftly and surely expelled from the Party.

Meanwhile, within the hallowed portals and secret bowels of the Party, a political undercurrent was simmering that threatened to erupt into an uncontained disaster if left unheeded. Once protégé of Deng, Hu had begun to assert a need for undertaking a process of ‘political reform’. Nothing could be more blasphemous than even lending freedom to such thoughts. Deng, using all his tact and diplomacy, tried to limit the ambitions and aspirations of Hu. But it was to no avail. Hu even had gone to the extent of demanding a thoughtful and civil deliberation on a phrase, ‘bourgeois liberalization’ that had squirmed and squiggled its way into the draft of a policy document titled ‘the ‘Resolution on Building a Socialist Spiritual Civilization’. Hu’s continued presence and positions were beginning to have deleterious impacts on the Party. Deng decided that enough was enough and Hu was sacked as the general secretary and long term loyalist Jiang Zemin[17] installed in his place.

On the 15^th of April 1989, Hu Yaobao died following complications stemming from a cardiac arrest. At his memorial service his widow gave an incendiary speech, on foisted the blame of Hu's death on how harshly the party treated him, telling Deng Xiaoping "It's all because of you people." This indirectly led to the third and most fateful swirl of them all, the student protests. As Gokhale informs his readers, tens and thousands of students thronged the Tiananmen Square by the 18^th of April 1989. The atmosphere began to take on a restive hue since the students in addition to paying obeisance to Hu also began making demands of the Government. They primarily wanted the Party to acquiesce on four uncompromising demands: greater education and job opportunities; the elimination of benefits to the children of cadres; greater responsiveness to the citizens’ needs by the government; and some personal freedoms. There was an electric buzz to the atmosphere which prompted ABC News’ Todd Carrel to exclaim that ‘if history is a guide, they will crack down soon’ with reference to the Chinese law enforcement agencies.

The students themselves as Gokhale brilliantly illustrates were a divided and abrasive lot. Unbeknownst to the vast teeming and throbbing crowd, the self-proclaimed student leaders had hidden agendas of their own. Wu’er Kaixi[18], a Uighur by ethnicity and a student at the Beijing Normal University was a showman par excellence who was given to a vacillating sense of duty. Surreptitiously eating on the sly during hunger strikes he was an expert at grandstanding and a natural before the media. Employing a bullhorn he impudently demanded that Premier Li Peng[19] personally come out of the Great Hall of the People to receive a petition from the students.

Yet another prominent student leader was Chai Ling[20]. A graduate student at Beijing Normal University, Chai proposed a hunger strike on the evening of 11 May. This was in spite of the fact that the Beijing Students’ Autonomous Federation had resolved against a hunger strike. The crevices amongst the students and their demands and ideologies were slowly beginning to widen and form a chasm. And all this drama was unfurling, in a singularly embarrassing manner for Deng, on the eve of an extremely important visit by then Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev[21]. As Gokhale reveals, “nothing describes the sense of helplessness better than the words spoken by Mikhail Gorbachev to Rajiv Gandhi, the prime minister of India, two months later. Speaking of his meeting with Deng, Gorbachev told Gandhi, ‘At one of the moments of the main conversation with Deng Xiaoping, a group of students nearly got into the building. There were slogans like “Gorbachev, you are talking to the wrong man”, and “58–85, a hint about my age and Deng Xiaoping’s age”.”

The tinder box was finally lit when Deng issued a strong statement in the newspapers about a group of unruly and intemperate students creating ‘turmoil’ and threatening to disrupt the stability of a nation. Zhao also signed his own political demise by resorting to making impertinent statements and slyly attributing all the incendiary comments hurled at the students, at the doorstep of Deng. What exactly happened on the 4^th of June, is not recounted by Gokhale in detail. However, he provides a fascinating insight on the hypocrisy of the Western media as they went about indulging in brazen speculation and rumour mongering thereby making an absolute and capital mockery of journalistic ethics. A bunch of Australia diplomats claimed that the students had told them of having received “assurances from PLA units in the capital, that these units would prevent fresh PLA units from assaulting the square, and that some of the units from the Beijing Military Region were in revolt.” This was despite the fact that the People’s Daily had reported that all seven military regions, including Beijing, had pledged loyalty to the Party.

Gokhale ends his book with a very telling chapter that introspects on the naivete of the Western World in its understanding of China, and its inadvertent role in making a behemoth out of an unassuming but ambitious nation. “The Chinese approached their relations with the West with open eyes. Outwardly they courted and feted the West. Inwardly, they concluded that the US represented an existential threat and resolved to tackle it. They are convinced that it is the ultimate aim of the Americans – to subvert the Communist Party of China by introducing ideas about Western capitalism and democracy into China, until it erodes the ideological foundation of the regime. They know it as a ‘peaceful evolution’, first articulated by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in the 1950s. They completely distrust the Americans and are now in a position to challenge them in many areas.”

Image Source: News18

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