1989 – All Fall Down
As you look back over the years, some days and some dates stand out very clearly. The reasons vary: many are personal, perhaps relating to family or to work. Others are connected to broader issues. For me, more than any other year, 1989 stands out for two events, five months apart. These were moments of worldwide historical importance, one in China and one in Russia, but personally memorable too, as I visited both places at around that time.
I had first visited China in 1983. Like many tourists, this was a ferry trip across from Hong Kong, and then a bus tour of the nearby mainland. I wanted to go there because the country and its people intrigued me, especially Chairman Mao whose death seven years earlier had seen the end of the infamous Cultural Revolution. Like many other youngsters, when I was a student I had bought my copy of The Little Red Book, or, as it was titled, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse Tung. A collection of aphorisms, almost all immediately forgettable, it sat alongside the other essential document, Marx and Engels tract, The Communist Manifesto. Unlike Mao, those two could churn out whole paragraphs of memorable prose.
After Mao, Deng Xiaoping became the country’s new paramount leader, and quickly he initiated a program of economic modernisation. Living in Australia, I tried to follow events in China, and can still remember the excitement created by Deng’s goal for the ‘Four Modernisations’. Deng was trying to shift the country away from its inefficient and costly central economy to a market or consumer driven system, and saw modernising agriculture, industry, national defence, and science and technology as critical. He started by privatising the agricultural sector, removed centrally controlled prices, and introduced incentives to boost productivity. The emphasis on growth combined with encouraging entrepreneurial behaviour was transformative. It was also opposed by many leaders, wedded as they were to Mao’s collectivist model of the country, and to the traditional communist ideology.
Another radical change was Deng’s ‘Open Door Policy’, to encourage businesses to set up and invest in China. Excited by what I was reading, I seized the opportunity to learn more in that first visit to China, travelling with a friend to visit Shenzhen, then the poster-city for Deng’s new approach, a special economic zone and the site of rapid development. For a first-time visitor it was difficult to fully appreciate what had been happening but, certainly, there were skyscrapers being built, factories everywhere, and new housing. I felt slightly let down, as I had imagined it would be unlike anything I had seen before, and it wasn’t. I visited a pre-school in lovely premises, where the children sang a nursery song in English! Of course, much of what I saw had been set up to encourage interest from overseas enterprises, but as our bus left the new area the poverty all around Shenzhen was obvious.
What wasn’t so obvious to an outsider was the extent of opposition to Deng Xiaoping, especially from the conservative side of the Communist Party, led by Chen Yun. Chen challenged many of Deng’s proposals, and that struggle between a market economy and a centralised economy has never gone away. Perhaps surprising given his overall political position, Chen favoured using the market to allocate resources to a greater degree than Deng. Chen Yun called his approach the ‘birdcage economy’, suggesting “the cage is the plan, and it may be large or small. But within the cage the bird [the economy] is free to fly as he wishes”, (the quote comes from the aptly named The Bird in the Cage: Market Reform under Socialism, by Ronald Coase and Ning Wang).
Deng Xiaoping continued to bring about reforms. By 1985, price controls had been relaxed, there had been some privatisation of state-owned enterprises, (SOEs), and a slow decentralisation of state control was taking place, allowing provincial leaders and even towns and villages greater autonomy. Some were allowed to compete against the SOEs. In an all too familiar way, it soon became apparent that while the reform process supported economic growth, it also encouraged corruption. Previously low fixed prices were abandoned by the market-based system, allowing people with money and connections to buy goods cheaply and then sell them at a higher price. While some argued the way forward had to be a true democracy supported by a firm rule of law, others held on to greater government control.
If the government was facing challenges, there was more trouble brewing in the universities. In mid-1986, after returning from a position in the US, an astrophysics professor, Fang Lizhi, started touring China to talk liberty, human rights, and a western democratic system with its separation of powers. This accelerated the view that political reform was the only answer to China’s ongoing problems, a proposal which had gained widespread appeal among students. Deng Xiaoping warned that Fang was blindly worshipping Western lifestyles, capitalism, and multi-party systems while undermining China’s socialist ideology, traditional values, and the party’s leadership. No matter. In December 1986 student demonstrations sought support for economic liberalisation, democracy, and the rule of law. Deng’s team managed to tamp down the protests, but China watchers were convinced more was to come.
In 1988 the party leadership under Deng decided to start changing over to a market-based pricing system. In a country used to price controls, set from the centre, many worried Chinese took their money out from the banks. The government panicked and dropped the price reforms within a fortnight, but the genie was out of the bottle. Inflation soared: workers were worried they couldn’t afford basic foods, and these worries were heightened when unprofitable SOEs were pressured to cut costs, threatening the livelihoods of the huge numbers of Chinese workers who relied on the so-called ‘iron rice bowl’ that provided them with centrally managed benefits, including job security, medical care, and cheap housing.
Did I mention corruption? The emergence of a private sector bred profiteers who took advantage of lax regulations. These same people couldn’t help themselves, and many flaunted their wealth in front of those less well off, feeding emerging discontent over the unfamiliar spectacle of unfair wealth distribution. Many Chinese concluded greed, not skill, was the crucial factor for success. All this fed into a widespread public disillusionment over where China was heading. Many citizens did want change, yet such is the nature of a centrally controlled country, the power to define the correct way to get there continued to rest solely in the hands of an unelected government, not in the preferences of the majority.
Make enough changes, and rifts at the top are bound to emerge. In China, there was a deep and growing divide between two groups in the central leadership. The reformers, ‘the right’ in the terms of the moment, were led by Hu Yaobang, and favoured political liberalisation and a flowering of ideas, using these as a channel to voice popular discontents and pressure for further reform. The conservatives, ‘the left’, led by Chen Yun, felt the reforms had gone too far and pushed for greater state control to ensure social stability and a better alignment with the Communist Party’s socialist ideology. Both sides knew they needed the backing of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping to carry out any key decisions.
Hu Yaobang died in early 1989, just as the student movement was gaining ground. The PRC now faced growing protests in a confusing world of rapid economic development and social change. Among many concerns were inflation, corruption, the limited preparedness of graduates for the new economy, and restrictions on political participation. Despite disorganisation and a multiplicity of overlapping and confusing goals, university students rallied around calls for for greater accountability, constitutional due processes, democracy, freedom of the press and freedom of speech. The focal point for protests was Tiananmen Square, where, at its height, about one million people assembled. As the protests developed, the authorities responded with both conciliatory and hard-line tactics. Meanwhile hunger strikes began building support for the demonstrators around the country. Eventually the protests spread out from Tiananmen Square to some 400 cities.
The end of the story is well known. On 20 May, under instructions from the CCP top leadership (with Deng Xiaoping now in agreement), the State Council declared martial law. They brought around 300,000 troops to Beijing, and advanced into central parts of Beijing in the early morning hours of June 4. The Tiananmen Square protests, known as the June Fourth Incident in China, ended as troops armed with assault rifles implemented martial law, firing at the students and those trying to block the military’s advance into the Square, killing both demonstrators and bystanders in the process. Estimates of the death toll vary from several hundred to several thousand, with many thousands more wounded.
News of the massacre first appeared in the West on June 5. The events were captured on videos and immortalised by the image of a lone man standing in front of a column of tanks leaving Tiananmen Square. The ‘Tank Man’ has become one of the most iconic photographs of the 20th century. As the tank driver tried to go around him, he moved to remain in the tank’s path. He continued to stand defiantly in front of the tanks for some time, then climbed up onto the turret of the lead tank to speak to the soldiers inside. After returning to his position in front of the tanks, the man was pulled aside by a group of people. Unnamed, his fate is still unknown, although in 1990 Jiang Zemin stated he did not think the man was killed. Anonymous, but Time later included him in their list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th Century. The protests were crushed; his opposition lived on.
After being distracted by events in Tiananmen Square, over in Russia observers were soon back tracking Mikhail Gorbachev and his reforms. Gorbachev had first become prominent eleven years earlier, when he was appointed a Secretary of the Central Committee. The next few years were characterised by frequent changes at the top in the Soviet Union. Leonid Brezhnev had died in 1982, after 18 years as the First Secretary and head of the Communist Party. He was succeeded by Yuri Andropov, widely expected to be a reformer, but he was dead 18 months later. His replacement was Konstantin Chernenko, but he too died soon after his election, after a mere 13 months as leader. Long standing member of the Politburo Andrei Gromyko, then in his late 70s, proposed Gorbachev as the next General Secretary. Despite concerns that at 54 years-old he was too young, he was elected unopposed. It seems likely his colleagues were unaware what a transformative leader he would turn out to be.
History will always remember Gorbachev pursued ‘glasnost’ (openness) and ‘perestroika’ (economic restructuring). However, I rather like the comment he was the exemplar of the ‘Sinatra Doctrine’. This wasn’t a reflection of Frank Sinatra’s somewhat dubious, possible links into organised crime, but rather referred to a phrase which had been used in October 1989 by a Foreign Ministry spokesman commenting on a speech by Foreign Minister Eduard Shevardnadze. The spokesman commented, “We now have the Frank Sinatra doctrine. He has a song, ‘I Did It My Way’. So, every country decides on its own which road to take.” When asked whether this would include Moscow accepting the rejection of communist parties in the Soviet bloc, he replied: “That’s for sure … political structures must be decided by the people who live there.” Wow, that sounded almost democratic!
As Gorbachev began his reform process, internal concerns were balanced against external praise. However, it was Ronald Reagan, visiting the Berlin Wall in 1987, who challenged Gorbachev to go further, saying “General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization, come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” Despite the invitation, the dismantling of the ‘Iron Curtain’ began in Hungary, not Germany, with a ceremony in June 1989, when the Hungarian foreign minister Gyula Horn, and Austrian foreign minister Alois Mock, called on ‘all European peoples still under the yoke of the national-communist regimes to [claim] freedom’. It proved to be symbolic, without any action, and the policing of the wall continued. However, the symbolism was potent.
By August 1989, Europe was witnessing a chain reaction. A proposal to open the border was put forward at the ‘Pan Europa Picnic’, widely advertised on posters and flyers, many distributed to East German holidaymakers in Hungary. More than 600 East Germans attended the event on the Hungarian border, and in three waves broke through the Iron Curtain and fled into Austria. Although the Hungarian border guards had threatened to shoot anyone crossing over, when the time came, they didn’t intervene and allowed the refugees to escape. Without any intervention by the Soviet Union, suddenly the separation of the Eastern Bloc from the rest of Europe was ended. Less the three months later, in November 1989, there were mass protests in East Germany. Tens of thousands of East Berliners flooded checkpoints along the Berlin Wall and crossed into West Berlin. On 9 November the informal dismantling of the Wall began: even though it officially remained guarded, the intra-German border had become meaningless. The official dismantling of the Wall by the East German military commenced in June 1990.
I was to visit China many times after a second time there in 1988. Despite the events at Tiananmen, it seemed various changes and reforms continued. The country developed a ‘socialist market economy’, companies prospered, and the quality of life for hundreds of millions of Chinese continued to improve. However, crushing the protests at Tiananmen Square had signalled the Communist Party’s continuing reliance on maintaining control, and the use of those controls has become even more extensive since Xi Jinping has taken over. So hard to discern in the present carefully controlled environment, but I suspect the battle between reformers and conservatives remains present but under the surface to this day.
In contrast to the occasions I have had to visit China, I have only been to Russia once. I was in Leningrad, as it was still called, as Gorbachev battled to change the country, and watched him on television with the hotel staff. The economy was in disarray, and he had the country glued to events, hoping for a better life. In the end, changes in Berlin signalled the end of Soviet control in many countries, but just as in China, Russia’s new freedoms were short-lived, and it has fallen backwards, the country once more controlled by a dictatorial ruler.
Both Tiananmen Square and the fall of the Berlin Wall had a major impact on international relations, and their aftermath still affects geopolitics in 2021. China lives under oppressive control. Europe is largely free, even as Russia is trying to reclaim the glory days of the old USSR. Perhaps one difference is instructive: for Europe, there was a physical barrier to be brought down, its collapse was visible; but China lacked the evidence of a physical wall to be swept away. Do all dictatorships eventually fail? I believe they do, eventually.
