Too Late for the Dark Ages? : A Taste of Reform May Spark Demands by China’s Peasants

The brutal suppression and massacre of demonstrators in Beijing’s Tian An Men Square have silenced the pro-democracy movement in China’s capital city for the moment. Student and union leaders have been killed, arrested or have gone underground, while Beijing’s population is being subjected to a huge propaganda campaign, including official encouragement to inform on their neighbors.

As the world reacts with horror to the images and stories coming out of Beijing--people killed indiscriminately, civilians run over by tanks and medical personnel fired on for tending the wounded--Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng praise the “brilliant” work of the army while systematically lying to their own people and the world about the brutality of its military assault. China’s apparent devotion to economic reform, cultural openness and at least limited political reform has been replaced by fascist-like murder, Stalinist purges and “big brother” surveillance.

Just how long this retreat into the political dark ages will last is difficult to say. For Deng to eliminate the pro-democracy movement, he must not only arrest student and labor leaders, but also carry out a massive purge of the Chinese Communist Party, since many of its rank-and-file members and leaders, such as the recently deposed General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, supported the movement’s basic goals, especially greater press freedom.

More important, the hard-liners confront a fundamental dilemma: The social and ideological basis of democracy in China was created by the very policies that Deng introduced into the Chinese economy and society. Following his recent reappearance, Deng pledged a continuation of the “open door” policy, yet it is that openness--particularly the communications revolution--that has generated considerable grass-roots support for political change.

A long-term repression of Chinese society is certainly within the capacity of the Communist Party’s control apparatus, but it would require near total insulation from the outside world. Deng can jail and even murder individual proponents of reform, but he cannot destroy an idea with tanks. Unless China returns to its hermetic isolation of the 1960s, the forces for change will continue to sweep through the society.

For Western observers it is very difficult to judge the long-term social impact of the crackdown and the possibility of a renewed pro-democracy movement. Now that the hard-liners have assumed tight control, at least at the top, many Beijing residents have apparently resigned themselves to defeat by complying, at least superficially, with martial law. In a country where political conformity has been the norm for perhaps 2,000 years, people who poured into Tian An Men Square two weeks ago are now informing on their neighbors.

Just as Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin were able to exploit their populations’ social and political characteristics to strengthen dictatorship, so too can Deng, like Mao , draw on Chinese traditions like conformity and an absence of local organization to perpetuate their rule. Communist totalitarianism’s denial of the fundamental right to free association is made easier by China’s long history of social fragmentation and factionalism.

From Chiang Kai-shek to Mao to Deng, Chinese leaders have exploited the lack of social cohesion to impose despotism.

Yet the events in Beijing prior to the massacre indicate that unprecedented sociocultural changes have taken place in China over the last decade of reform. During the 1986-87 demonstrations that I witnessed, students in Beijing were generally isolated from other groups, especially workers, who exhibited little sympathy for their goals. This time around, however, a fundamental political bond seems to have been created between students and workers, which may explain the regime’s harsh response.

In justifying the vicious crackdown, Deng said that the students were copying the freedom movement in Poland and Hungary, where broad elements of the population have forced liberalization on the government. Indeed, recent inflation, unemployment and “deregulation” of the price structure, and the system of subsidized housing evidently spurred broad working-class support, as in Poland, for major political reforms.

The most important unknown, however, is the political sentiment of China’s 600 million to 800 million peasants. Although Deng believes that “there is no problem with the peasants,” the government’s resort to IOU’s to pay for state purchases of grain have created considerable unease, and even acts of violence, in the countryside.

Peasant participation in the democracy movement was apparently nil, while many student leaders, at least in America, still consider China’s rural population too ignorant to play a major political role. Yet with the penetration of market forces into the countryside and the growth of de facto property ownership, a rural social basis for democracy also may be gradually emerging. Deng Xiaoping and student leaders may see China’s rural population as inherently conservative, but once the rural people make a conscious connection between their economic interests and political democracy, an unreformed Chinese Communist Party will be finished.