DEMOCRATIC MOVEMENT IN CHINA GOING?
By Gregor Benton
In late 1978, an original dissident movement sprang up in the main cities of China under the slogan of de-
For several months this movement had the protection of liberalizers like Deng Xiaoping in the Party top and the strong approval of leading intellectuals and cultural figures in the media, the universities and the academies, so that it was able to win ground and widen its support. But it is now clear that, for the leaders around Deng at least, this movement was from the very start a disposable tool, and that once it had done its job of helping to winkle out the Maoist old guard and get the modernisation programme underway, it could be tossed aside and scrapped like similar ones before it.
It is now three years since the streets of Beijing first rang to the shouts of youthful dissent and the first unofficial journals tumbled out of patched-up mimeographs. In those three years the movement has suffered repeated blows, first to the head and later to the body. In early 1979, a few of its best leaders and organizers vanished into the camps and prisons where most of them still remain--bloodied but unbowed. Throughout 1979 and 1980 new currents followed, until finally all the main leaders of the unofficial movement, and many of its active supporters, were rounded up in a nationwide swoop in April 1981.
But there are excellent reasons to think that this movement will sooner or later revive, and when it does so it will doubtless have learned from Deng's betrayal that it is far wiser to sink roots deep into the wider society than to depend on this or that faction in the Party top. One reason is that the men and women of the democratic movement have long experience of political repression ever since their days as Red Guards in Mao's Cultural Revolution, and are therefore not likely to go down under this new wave of it. Another is that the movement has quickly differentiated in the course of its development, sprouting liberal and Marxist wings each with a powerful and well-formed critique of present-day Chinese society. This differentiation has immeasurably strengthened the dissenters and overcome much of their earlier political and intellectual leclecticism, without--as Liu Qing's 30
WHERE IS THE prison testimony shows--destroying an ounce of their solidarity.
Finally, although the authorities have cast the net wide, reports smuggled out of China suggest that it caught mainly the big and medium fish, leaving most of the small fry still at large. So, it was therefore not wholly unexpected when news came out of China in the summer of 1981 that Zeren ('Duty'), the national organ of the Alliance of Unofficial Journals, is still appearing clandestinely even after the final crushing of the open movement in April.
The Chinese democratic movement has many varied points of intellectual reference, ranging from
Dada and Montesquieu's l'Esprit des Lois to Trotsky, Tito and the humanist writings of the young Marx. Wei Jingsheng, the movement's first prominent martyr, has argued forcefully for 'free enterprise' as the only economic system compatible with political democracy. Wang Xizhe, a veteran dissenter whose 1974 wall-poster (co-authored with three others) was in some ways the start of the unofficial movement in China, has searched out the elements for a powerful and original critique of bureaucracy from the Marxist classics. Others are placed somewhere between these two poles.
THE ORIGINS OF THE MOVEMENT
The Cultural Revolution of 196668 was critical in two main ways for the emergence of the democratic current in Chinese politics in the late seventies. First, it plunged China into a terror that traumatised all social classes, not least the political elite--parts of which began to question their commitment to the methods of dictatorship. Second, it spawned the Red Guards, who swept China for a time and got an appetizing taste of political independence.
The disaffected elite included a large group of top political leaders, managers, intellectuals, Party cadres and others in the official world who had suffered persecution during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, when the search for 'class enemies' grew ever more frenetic and the norms of political behaviour collapsed
Throughout the mid- and late seventies these people trickled back into offices as the smashed administration was slowly restored. Many of them were far from the hacks and stooges that their Maoist critics said they were. A good few had fought for the revolution in the thirties and forties, and even more had stubbornly-if surreptitiously--resisted Mao's excesses in the fifties and sixties, often at great personal cost to themselves and their families. Luckily for China, Mao was no Stalin, and while he had few scruples about purging his rivals, he normally stopped short of killing them, on the grounds that once dead they could never be reformed. And thus many of those who returned to power after his death in 1976 were not career bureaucrats, as in Russia after Stalin, but experienced and independent-minded people, including a thick sprinkling of indomitable old revolutionaries.
Naturally these 'returnees' were unlikely to question the ultimate foundations of their own power, but some of them were prepared to tolerate new thinking about the relationship between democracy and socialism, and for a while the fruits of this rethinking enlivened the pages even of China's main theoretical journals. It was from 'returnees' like Yu Guangyuan... that the strongest official pressure came for the democratization--within limits--of China's political life and the strengthening of legal rights and guarantees.
The few hundred activists in the unofficial movement, which is the second and more enduring strand in China's democratic fabric, might have been eliminated much sooner had they not been connected to the hundreds of thousands who in varying degrees represented the democratic movement in the official world, and who were deeply questioning and doubting Maoist methods and values. These unofficial activists first entered politics as Mao's instrument in the faction fight of 1966-67, but they soon exceeded the limits that Mao's group had set for them. AFTER SHOCKS OF THE CULTURAL
In analy sing the Cultural Revolution it is therefore necessary to make a sharp distinction between the anti-bureaucratic, egalitarian im-
pulses that motivated its activists, and the efforts of Party leaders to manipulate it from above. True, most Red Guards became bogged down under the influence of competing groups in the Party leadership in an increasingly violent power struggle in which factional ties quickly overwhelmed political principle, still a minority successfully resisted the meddling of Party leaders and developed independent political positions.
After September 1967 the new ruling group around Mao, having managed to oust many of its rivals in the Party-state, finally set about suppressing these troublesome 'little generals' and consolidating its position in the country. But it lacked a broad stable base either in society or in the Party, and therefore had to resort more and more to dictatorial methods to keep itself in power. The betrayed Red Guards responded in various ways to this experience. Some retreated into cynicism, apathy or the assiduous cultivation of self-interest. Others gave themselves over to a melancholy romanticism of the sort best exemplified by the recently popular 'new wave literature' or 'literature of the wounded', with its recurrent themes of tragedy, betrayal and sacrifice. But a minority persisted with the political critique of bureaucracy that they had begun during the Cultural Revolution.
For them, as the essays of Wang Xizhe, Yi Ming and others show, the experience of the Cultural Revolution was by no means all bad, and given the chance they would doubtless distance themselves from some of the more extreme denunciations of it current in the West. The Cultural Revolution taught them the value of 'linking up to exchange revolutionary experience'--a lesson that they now put to excellent effect. It also taught them how to write, to edit and to mimeograph. But above all it taught them that 'to rebel is justified, ' and although the Maoist leaders at first tried to manipulate this rebellion to their own ends and eventually suppressed it altogether when it began to depart too radically from their circus-script, the lesson was not the sort that you could easily forget. THE SOCIAL COMPOSITION OF THE
DISSIDENT MOVEMENT
China's democratic movement is made up overwhelmingly of stateemployed manual workers and technicians who identify almost without exception with the workers and peasants' cause. True, some are the offspring of influential Party officials and army officers or of foreign-educated scientists and technologists, but even many of these people work in factories or workshops. It is quite common in China for people with influence to seek 'backdoor entry' to jobs in industry for their
After all, factory work has high social status in China, and for a generation that went without formal education at a crucial time in their lives it is always better than the chief alternative: transfer to a village as part of the xiafang or 'Down to the countryside' programme. sult is that proportionately more well informed through family connections about political struggles at the highest levels, work in urban industry in China than is the case in the Soviet Union or in Eastern Europe; and it is largely from among these people that the leaders of the democratic movement are drawn. This is extremely important for understanding the nature of dissent in China, and the differences between it and dissent in the Soviet Union, which is mainly practised by intellectuals, many of them highly placed. In China even dissidents from well-off backgrounds distance themselves from their origins by wearing patched clothes of coarse peasant-style cloth, and all vehemently eschew the elitism common among their Soviet counter-
China's democratic movement activists were under no illusions about their strength in the winter of 197879, and were well aware that they owed their freedom to publish and organise solely to the benign disposition of some Party leaders. True, a mass movement--the main factor behind the rapid collapse of the 'Gang of Four', and the democratic movement was directly descended from those events. But for the time being the broader social forces of April had withdrawn from active political roles and were ready to entrust the affairs of state to the new Deng government. Some saw the latter as a direct outcome and guarantee of the 1976 political ferment.
Although Deng had shown no enthusiasm for throwing the Party open to criticism in 1957 and Mao had had no difficulty in turning the Red Guards against him and Liu Shaoqi as symbols of bureaucratic corruption in 1966, Deng had been both a main opponent and a main victim of the Cultural Revolution, and--so one hoped-had emerged wiser from the trauma. Others supported Deng because they were tired of struggling, or because the alternatives looked worse, or because they feared to rock the boat while it was changing course and all sorts of perils-- especially economic ones--lay ahead. So the democratic movement was temporarily beached, and would have to make the best of it until a new rising of the tide.
But some of the movement's bolder supporters were not content to bide their time and hold their tongues in the hope that they would continue to be tolerated. Instead they strove to break out of their isolation, and relentlessly exposed the gap between Deng's promise and his pracDISSIDENTS TRY TO LINK UP WITH
In 1979 sections of the movement tried to forge links to broader social bases, especially the returned xiafang youth and the shangfang petitioners. The conditions of the millions of young people sent out to the villages (xiafang) before and after the Cultural Revolution were often extremely harsh, and many believed that the procedures by which they had been chosen for rustication were arbitrary or discriminative. After the fall of the 'Gang of Four' the government took steps to improve the conditions of xiafang youth and allowed many to return home. The effect was to set in motion a huge influx of other young people into the big cities, where they petitioned for relocation back to their homes.
These xiafang youth were joined by crowds of peasants who had come to the cities to demand redress of wrongs done them by officials under the Mao regime. Together these two groups were known as the shangfang or 'Up to petition' movement. In many cities they staged demonstrations and even riots. According to a Beijing wall-poster written by Zhang Xifeng, an agricultural worker from Shanxi, at one time there were 10, 000 such shangfang 'refugees' sleeping out on the streets of the capital, where they lived by begging, theft and prostitution.
According to Zhang, these people were harassed, beaten and occasionally rounded up and interned by the city authorities. The authorities were in no position to put a quick end to the political and social grievances of the shangfang petitioners, even if they had had the will to do so. Not only were their grievances too many, but they originated mainly at the local level, to which the new 'liberal' norms had seldom sunk. The shangfang masses, largely unorganised and voiceless, were therefore an ideal target for the proselytising of the articulate but numerically weak democratic movement. When peasants wrote about their grievances on Democracy Wall, dissidents copied their statements and published them in their journals to give them a wider airing. Some activists organised and led demonstrations of poor peasants and other petitioners in front of the government buildings at Zhongnanhai.
In post-Mao China, wronged citizens are a class numbering millions, and had the democratic movement succeeded in giving shape and direction to even a small part of them they could have become a new and convulsive force in Chinese politics and might have destroyed the narrow framework within which the Party leaders were trying to hold the liberalisation, But the Party leaders were not unaware of the danger and came down heavily on oppositionists -- the best-known example was the woman activist Fu Yuehua--who strove to make such links.
THE ROLE OF STUDENTS AND
INTELLECTUALS
Two other groups that played an important role in China's recent protest and dissent were the students and the cultural non-conformists.
Students were the main force in the Red Guard movement of the Cultural Revolution, but they played practically no independent political role in the decade after 1968. Students in the early seventies were educated according to the norms and standards of the Mao group, after 1976 were poorly suited to the goals of the new pragmatic leaders, which stressed science and technology. Not surprisingly they showed no great enthusiasm for the programme of the new government, although there is a little evidence that they opposed the changes after Mao's
As for the classes of students recruited after 1976, most could be expected to identify closely with the new leaders' goals, in which they were destined to play a star role. It was therefore only natural that students at first took no great part in the struggles and debates that marked the rise of the democratic movement. But in late 1979 this calm on the campuses was suddenly shattered by strikes and militant demonstrations to protest against various grievances, and the ferment sometimes took overtly political forms. Reports of the 1980 elections at Beijing University reveal a healthy scepticism towards formed authority and a widely held commitment to social reform.
Dissident poets, painters, writers and sculptors, like the Xingxing group that Julien Blaine met in Beijing are inseparable from the unofficial political movement, and unofficial journals regularly carried their poems and stories and advertised their exhibitions. When Wei Jingsheng was gaoled in October 1979, several hundred poets met in public to declare their support for him. This strong link between cultural and political dissidence is natural in a 32 system where art and literature are normally under tight political control. Despite the recent clampdown on unofficial art and the reimposition of a strong political censorship, many cultural leaders clearly approve of the experimentation in new literary and artistic forms, and have done their best to encourage and protect
Occasional calls for freer sexual relations were reported from Democracy Wall. In the past, PRC governments have advocated severe sexual repression, mainly on the grounds that sexual freedom in China would lead in practice to the greater exploitation of women. So it is not surprising that themes of sexual liberation should have been raised during the recent relaxation
Women too have taken the first small steps towards independent organisation, just as they have in the Soviet Union in recent years. During the Cultural Revolution women were told that they 'held up half the sky' and urged to better their position in society. But now repressive notions of traditional 'femininity' are being revived; and the rapid growth of urban unemployment will no doubt affect women first, in China as elsewhere in the world. In the meantime, Chinese women are scandalously under-represented at all levels of political life, especially the top ones. Now that Western trends are being eagerly followed by young people in China's big cities, it surely will not be long before some form of feminism catches on there.
The strategic goal of the postMao leaders is to create the conditions -- political, cultural, social and economic -- for modernising China before the century is up. For Deng, this means streamlining the administration, releasing the energies of the managers and the techand throwing out the old class shibboleths, which are seen as an unnecessary source of social tension and an artificial constraint
Since Deng's return to office hundreds of thousands of officials have gone back to their posts at all levels of the Party-state, and large numbers of purged thinkers, writers, teachers and artists have been rehabilitated (some posthumously).
The cases of millions of common citizens denounced or persecuted over the last thirty years have been put under review, and the 'class enemy' label has been removed from all but a handful of 'unreformed' landlords, capitalists, rich peasants ilitated 'rightists' are scientists and intellectuals whose skills and knowledge can now be mobilised for the good of China. As for the legal system, new procedures have been introduced to replace the old ad hoc methods that caused such widespread dissatisfaction under the 'Gang of Four'.
But the new government quickly made clear the limits beyond which this liberalisation would not go. If a measure of democracy was indispensable for 'emancipating the mind' and thus for promoting scientific progress, this democracy should not go so far as to challenge the Party's monopoly on political power. If legal guarantees were necessary to protect common citizens against the arbitrary exercise of official power, the judiciary should still bow where necessary to the political authorities. For the present leaders have hard-won positions and material interests to defend and little knowledge or experience of democratic organisation even during the revolution. saw the unofficial movement begin to go too far, they therefore took steps to curb it, and then to crush
But for a while, at least, the ferment around Democracy Wall was extremely useful to Deng Xiaoping and his supporters in the government, whose programme still faced opposition from Maoists who had survived the fall of the 'Gang of Four' and from the centrists around Hua Guofeng. Deng Xiaoping, having spent the Cultural Revolution 'in the cowshed', could hardly be blamed for its crises, and for the time being he enjoyed great prestige among ordinary citizens. He was perhaps the only remaining leader who, like Mao in his time, could risk whipping up mass movements on the streets in order to influence decisions in the
By conjuring up the spectre of popular discontent Deng Xiaoping could frighten into submission his opponents in the leadership, who were too compromised with the Maoist past to feel comfortable about protest rallies and calls for human rights, democratic reform and the bringing to book of those responsible for the 'decade of catastrophe'. And so he finally won out in the policy debate. Meanwhile, the movement that he had earlier encouraged was threatening to get out of hand. Sections of it were taking their criticism of Mao to unacceptable lengths, and raising questions about the whole system of Party rule in China. At the same time disorder was breaking out on the streets of the capital, at a time when China's generals were fighting
a difficult war against the Vietnam: ese.
DENG TURNS ON THE MOVEMENT
On 16 March 1979 Deng Ziaoping made a speech setting narrower limits to the political ferment on the streets of China's cities. Wei Jingsheng and others protested, they were seized by the police, and Wei was later gaoled for fifteen years. In November further arrests followed at Democracy Wall, and shortly afterwards the Wall was moved from Xidan to a less central place and was then closed down
In February 1980 the Four Great Freedoms--including the freedom to put up wall-posters --were excised from the Constitution, and subsequently it was forbidden to sell unofficial journals "
These measures hit the democratic movement hard. Most unofficial journals stopped appearing, although a few continued to go out by post, thus getting round the ban on public sales. What ties there were between groups in different parts of China were loose, and it was not easy for them to mount a coordinated response to the crackdown. That is not to say that there were no local protests. Mu Changging, a leader of the Nameless Association, committed suicide in protest against Deng's speech announcing the repression, thus giving the movement its first martyr; and in Guangzhou City, Wang Xizhe and his friends caused a stir by standing up at a public meeting of the Communist Youth League and criticising the suppression of the Four Greats.
A NATIONAL ORGANIZATION
The birth of this new Alliance--it still lives underground in China, although its present strength is not known--was a major achievement which, given time, would have greatly strengthened the movement by providing a vehicle for the practical expression of solidarity across proand by quickening the flow of information and ideas.
At the same time, the movement took steps to strengthen its external ties. In some areas--what bolder challenge to the 'Party of the Proletariat? '--its constituent groups began to win friends among disaffected factory workers. True, China's dissidents were themselves mostly workers, but few of the factory rank-and-file had up to then actively identified with their positions, although many may have passively sympathised with them. Now all this began to change. Here and there the movement began to break out of its isolation and to find new allies outside the
In Shanghai, Fu Shengi, editor of Voice of the People, stood for election in an engineering works after the government had announced--rashly, and not for long--that candidates need no longer have Party approval to be nominated. Fu headed the factory poll at the first count, despite strong Party pressure on the electors to vote for the two official candidates. In Changsha too a dissident student (married to an American woman) collected a large amounts of money from local factory workers to finance his election campaign in the face of ofto intervene in social conflicts in the factories and on the farms, and to win broader support for its political programme. But this possibility did not escape the notice of the Party top..•
"GANG OF FOUR TRIAL'
In late 1980 the trial began in Beijing of the 'Gang of Four' (led by Mao's widow Jiang ling) and the 'Lin Biao clique' crushed after allegedly trying to overthrow Mao in 1971. Jiang Qing, found guilty of persecuting Communist leaders and conspiring to subvert the nation, was given a suspended death sentence, as was her fellow-Maoist Zhang Chungiao; the other defendants in the case were sent to prison for long periods. Although the link between this trial and the final crackdown on the democratic movement may not be immediately obvious, there was such a link and it is important not to overlook it.
First, this trial, repeatedly postponed, signalled a resolution of the power struggle and a temporary stabilisation of the leadership. This had important consequences for the protest movement. as cleavages continued in the Party top, the movement had some slight space in which to work. soon as the dominant faction had succeeded - - for how long remains to be seen -- in imposing its will on the refractory remnants of the Maoist old guard and overcoming the last obstacle to a (limited) criticism of Mao, the game was up.
Second, the trail signalled the definitive and unabashed return to
These were acts of individual heroism; ficial harassment. In Wuhan opposithey gave the movement moral stat-
What the movement needed next was the quieter heroism of the collective: hard organisation. And it almost came within their grasp. In January 1980 three unofficial journals in Guangzhou launched the first national appeal for freedom of the and others throughout China soon followed suit. In May representatives of various groups issued a joint protest against the arrest of Liu Qing; and on 29 August dissidents from Guangzhou, Changsha and Shaoguan got together to discuss setting up a committee to defend Liu Qing. Two days later He Qiu and three others implicated in this action were arrested and held by the police for several days. But despite this pressure from the authorities the moves towards greater cooperation went ahead, and a month later 21 unofficial groups finally joined together in a national Alliance, and appointed He Qiu to edit the all- China unofficial journal tionists even managed to lead a strike. And in Beijing Xu Wenli, editor of April Fifth Forum, wrote an Open Letter to Lech Walesa praising him as a 'shining example for working classes in socialist countries the world over'. Even in the vast countryside pin-pricks of democratic agitation began to appear.
It would be foolish to exaggerate the victories that the democratic movement won among the workers. But the chance was certainly there that it might eventually make ties to large numbers of them, in which case its role in Chinese politics would have been immeasurably strengthened and the government would have found it far harder to suppress when the time arrived. China is a desperately poor country, and Deng's policies are aimed at greatly widening the range of inequalities in it. These are the ingredients for acute social tension. The democratic movement, which inherited from the Maoists a principled aversion to privilege and inequality, would have been strategically placed
'class justice' and thus paved the way for extra-legal measures against political deviants. Officially, this trial was billed as a chief symbol of the return to 'socialist legality' under Deng; and compared with Stalin's show-trials and with the increasingly violent way in which faction -fights were resolved in Mao's old age, there can be little doubt that in principle it was a move for the better. normal standards of justice it was a contemptible fraud. Jiang Qing's crimes, she did nothing that her accusers would not also have done in the fight for power, and in that sense her only real crime was to be defeated. In any case, the verdict against her was clearly reached before the trial, and the trial itself was heavily censored and attended by a raucous and squalid campaign of sexist smears and innuendos. The defence lawyers based their cases entirely on evidence compiled by the prosecution. They objected to none of the prosecutors' questions, cross-examined no prosecution
witnesses and called no witnesses of their own. (See the account of Ma Ronggie, Jiang Qing's defence lawyer, reported in the International Herald Tribune, 8 January 1982.)
Shortly after Jiang's sentencing, Amnesty International said that it was concerned that the standards applied at the trial of the ten former officials might have an adverse effect for the conduct of other political trials in the People's Republic'. Amnesty's concern found little echo in the political world, either on the right (which was busy ganging up with Deng against the Russians) or on the left, which seemed largely indifferent to Jiang's fate. Unfortunately Amnesty - - which has long experience of such things - - was right. It was widely said in China before Jiang's trial that through it Deng wanted to convince sceptical Chinese that the courts 'attack tigers as well as flies'. But if seditious tigers get only the semblance of a trial, should it surprise us when the flies are sent to gaol with no hearing at all?
And so, on and around 10 April 1981, 25 leading oppositionists and an unknown number of lesser ones were arrested in a nationwide crackdown on the democratic movement. As far as is known, these people were not put on public trial and were not formally charged with any crime. At the same time the police questioned many activists not yet arrested, searched their houses and confiscated books, paper and printing equipment.
Is this the end of the road for China's democracy movement? it now go the same way as the Hundred Flowers of 1957, which sank almost without trace under the waves of Party intolerance? A comparison with past unofficial movements sheds useful light on the strengths and weaknesses of China's present dissidents. The course of past criticism movements -- the main ones were in 1942, 1957 and 1966-68 -was drearily, if tragically, predictable: first the Party leaders urge the people to speak out; sooner or later the critics overstep the limits; next the Party leaders reassert control by repressing the critics; and then the themes of criticism lie dormant until the next sponsored round of 'blossoming and contending'. Or so it was until the
Cultural Revolution. first big difference between present and earlier forms of dissent becomes apparent. For whereas the clampdown in 1942 and 1957 was more or less complete, so that the next generation of contenders was forced to start out with a blank
34 sheet, the effects of a political earthquake like the Cultural Revolution could not so easily be wiped clean just because some bureaucrat wanted it so. The Cultural Revolution was a mass movement of unprecedented proportions and it will be some time before its aftershocks die down completely. And the democratic movement started out not with a blank sheet but with a considerable body of theory and experience.
As for the Hundred Flowers campaign of 1957, there are many parallels between it and the recent movement, and these parallels are even officially recognised. The repressing of the Hundred Flowers has been widely described in China's press as the beginning of the 'left' tendency and China's troubles, and victims of the 1957 clampdown have not only been rehabilitated in their tens of thousands but are today saying many of the same things they said before their arrest nearly twenty-five years ago. But the differences are even more striking.
In 1957 all sections of the Party were united behind their historic leader, Mao. The Party had stabilised its rule and had radically restructured the Chinese economy. But Mao's Great Leap Forward of 1954, which plunged China's economy into deep crisis, destroyed much of his support in the Party
Today the combined effects of time's tooth and repeated power struggles have led to the shedding of many old leaders, and China's economy and society are emerging only with the greatest difficulty from a period of debilitating chaos. In 1957 Mao launched the Hundred Flowers by deliberate choice, to curb bureaucratic conservatism in the Party and forestall 'a Hungarian-style incident'. • The forces he mobilised were students and older intellectuals newly emerged from the furnace of thought reform. the democratic movement developed largely independently, over a long period of intellectual ferment and experimentation. It is made up mainly of young workers hardened by years of personal privation and political struggle. It shares some notions with the students of 1957, but on the whole its programmes have greater theoretical depth and articulation than those of 1957.
A comparison with the Cultural Revolution is also instructive. In 1966 the Party leadership was badly split. The students and youth who formed the mass base of the Cultural Revolution were politically raw and easy prey for manipulation from above. The rival factions in the Party hierarchy vied with one another to recruit a following from among the Red Guards, who lost sight of the substantive issues and became hopelessly embroiled in factionalism and violence. But although some of today's dissidents were at one time open to pressure from Deng Xiaoping, most were all along independent of him and followed their own lights, with no more than a token nod in Deng's direction every now and then. Today's dissidents succeeded in avoiding a gross personalisation of their politics despite the stridently personal official campaign against the 'Gang of Four', and argued that one should look not at the shortcomings of this or that individual leader, but at the social system that underlies them.
The two great planks on which the present leaders were hoisted into power are modernisation and democracy. It is unthinkable that they would risk alienating their support by backtracking entirely on their promises of reform. The 'anti-fascist' mood among the Chinese people, particularly the intellectuals and the workers, is too strong, the memory of the 'lawlessness' of the Cultural Revolution is too fresh in people's minds, and the new leaders' authority is incommensurably weaker than was Mao's in 1957, when he cracked down violently on the 'rightists' exposed during the Hundred Flowers. And so the prospect of a Chinese spring remains.
Yet, as the events of recent months show only too clearly, the Party leaders will not tolerate the bolder forms of independent politics advocated by the democratic movement, or open up the system to the fresh gusts of mass-based dissent. Their goal is the creation of a comparatively well-ordered society in which 'democracy' is carefully modulated to reinforce and stabilise the regime. The recent sponsored revival of the handful of docile 'democratic parties' that have supported the government uncritically since 1949 was entirely compatible with that project. The further growth of a nonconformist democratic movement was not. And so the movement was repressed, But by arresting its main leaders and driving its supporters underground, the authorities are running the risk that in the long run they will strengthen its coherence and force it to deepen its roots in the working class and peasantry. * This article is from Wild Lilies,
Poisoned Weeds; Dissident Voices from People's China, Gregor
Benton, ed., London; Pluto Press,
1982.