Authoritarianism 101: Protests in China in 1989

Student Voices
You’re listening to Authoritarianism 101, part of the hashtag AHR Syllabus Project, produced by The American Historical Review.

Daniel Story
In this episode: How do authoritarian governments seek to discredit protests? Historian Jeffrey Wasserstrom discusses the government response to a protest movement that took place in China in 1989 centered in the heart of Beijing in Tiananmen Square.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom
I’m Jeffrey Wasserstrom, and I teach Chinese history and world history at the University of California, Irvine. What I’m interested in in this module is the way that protests that take place in authoritarian states are viewed and talked about radically differently by the authorities that the protests are challenging and by the protesters themselves, and how this specifically works in China, and in one point in history, in 1989 when the biggest nationwide protests against the Chinese Communist Party in the last decades took place, and were disparaged by the official press in one way and by officials in one way, but were thought about very differently by the people who were taking part in them. There are some basic things about China that it’s very useful to know about. China was ruled by emperors and by imperial ruling families up until 1911. There was a revolution in 1911 that ended that period of rule by emperors, and founded something called the Republic of China. The first time that there was a China that was not ruled by a dynasty. Soon after that took place, the country spiraled down into a period when regional military strongmen were competing for power. There were rival political parties that were founded that tried, in a sense, to get the revolution back on track. One was called the Nationalist Party. It was led by a guy named Chiang Kai-shek. The other party was the Chinese Communist Party. It was founded in 1921. And so from the late 1920s until 1949 you had an on-again, off-again battle between the Nationalist Party and the Communist Party. They allied together during World War II, when Japan invaded the country, and they kind of formed a fragile alliance against a common enemy. But then, from 1945 to 1949 they fought a kind of last ditch battle with each other to figure out what the future of China would be. The Nationalist Party ended up being backed by the United States, and the Communist Party ended up being backed by the Soviet Union. In 1949 the Nationalist Party retreated from the mainland and set itself up on Taiwan, and Taiwan, from 1949 on, has been known as the Republic of China, and the communists took control of the mainland and established what they called the People’s Republic of China in 1949.

Documentary
October the first, 1949 was the day the People’s Republic of China, the world’s most populous country, was proclaimed a communist state. Till that day, the People’s Liberation Army, led by Mao Zedong, had fought a bitter civil war against the Nationalists. Now they were victorious, and Mao took over the reins of government. The Nationalists fled and set up a rival government in Taipei.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom
One of the important things to know about this history is that both the Nationalist Party on Taiwan and the Communist Party on the mainland claimed that what they were doing was continuing a revolutionary tradition that began in 1911 and that they were carrying forward a revolution that had gone off track in one way or another. And so both of them, when there were challenges to their rule in the nationalists in Taiwan, or on the mainland, the authorities referred to the people who were challenged them as counter revolutionaries. The events in the module took place 40 years later, in 1989. The Communist Party had stayed in power on the mainland. The Nationalist party had stayed in power on Taiwan. Both of those places were ruled in authoritarian ways. While Chiang Kai-shek was alive, he had a personality cult. While Mao was alive, he had a personality cult. They both had little tolerance for dissent and moved against political opponents. After they died, there were some moves in both places to potentially reform what were one-party states. And so the 1989 protests on the mainland was in some ways to push for a quicker reform, a move away from kind of completely hardline authoritarian structure to something with more flexibility and more room for personal expression, which was starting to happen. And so that’s the kind of background to think about. So, in the middle of the 1980s the Communist Party was undergoing a period of reform. Deng Xiaoping, the sort of most powerful leader to come after Mao, had said something wasn’t working, the country wasn’t getting strong enough, in part because its economy was a mess, it was too cut off from the rest of the world, and he wanted to introduce economic reforms, and also talked about some degree of political reforms. And the economic reforms were opening up to international markets and allowing some degree of capitalism to come in alongside of socialism. This was a time when many countries under authoritarian rule of the time were experimenting with some degrees of reform as well. The Soviet Union was experimenting with reforms under Gorbachev. But in each place there was a different kind of balance between changes relating to politics, in which reform might mean allowing more freedom of the press, allowing more freedom to protest, and maybe even thinking about elections that would allow competing political parties to have a chance. And then there were economic reforms, which were clearly about economics, about markets, about private property, and things like that. In China, what became clear by the middle of the 1980s was that the government was hesitant about political reforms, even though it talked about in some. There were some leaders, though, who wanted to push for more political reforming along with the economic reforming. In 1986 students in Shanghai, and in some other parts of the country as well, took to the streets to try to put pressure on the government to be as serious about political and cultural reforms as they were about economic reforms.

News Report
They marched again today in open defiance of a ban on protest with dozens of banners and even a poster of the Statue of Liberty. Protesters stressed that they’re not denouncing the Communist Party, but insisted they’ll keep marching until officials agree in ongoing negotiations to more open local elections and to fair coverage of the protests in local media.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom
The protests of 1986 were short-lived. The government didn’t crack down on them very hard, but they issued some statements that if the students kept protesting, then there would be stronger measures taken. They said that the students might have been talking about moving China forward, but actually there was a danger that they would move China backward. After that, a leader of the government, who was more in favor of the kind of political reforms as well as economic reforms, Hu Yaobang, who had argued for taking a soft line toward the movement, was demoted radically. He was somebody who was the second most powerful person in China, besides Deng Xiaoping, and was actually sort of clearly Deng Xiaoping’s chosen successor. He was demoted to being a minor official. Flash forward a couple of years, in 1989 Hu Yaobang dies unexpectedly, and he’s one of the sort of younger of the core leaders, and he became a hero to some of the people pushing for reform, because in part he had been demoted after being associated with the kind of cause that the students have been involved in. So some students gathered to mourn him, and also to raise again these kinds of ideas about pushing toward more reform. Also, this was a period when there was a rise in prices that was making people feel some economic pinch. They also felt that with the economic reforms, a lot of the people who seemed to be getting rich fastest were people with official connections. So they brought up themes about democracy and more freedom of speech and more freedom of expression, but they also called for an end to official corruption. And they also used the mourning for this reformist official who had died young to say that it’s unfair that people so good die young and people older who are more locked in their ways live on and on. So it was a challenge to the authorities, but in a way the authorities had to allow the event to take place because Hu Yaobang was still an official, so you have to be allowed to gather to mourn somebody who is seen as part of the state. But then the protests began steamrolling. They got bigger and bigger. Their center was in Beijing with students there gathering at Tiananmen Square. Over time, there were also similar protests. In cities around the country, more than 100. In Beijing, people from other social groups began to join the students on the streets, so it became a multi-class social movement and a multi-city protest movement, unlike anything that had happened in China since 1949. These began in mid April, and in late April, the government issued a statement, an editorial saying the students are sending China back into turmoil. The students said, “No, that’s not what we’re doing. We’re actually patriots. We’re doing this for the interests of the country.” They claimed they weren’t trying to overthrow the Chinese Communist party, they were just trying to get it to live up to its own promises and to get rid of the things that were problems, like corruption. So the movement grows. There was some division within the leadership over whether to crack down on it or not, but it became clear as it went on that the hardline members of the ruling group that wanted to crack down had the upper hand. There were film crews from around the world, newscasters coming to China, at the same time, because there was a summit between Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union and Deng Xiaoping. There hadn’t been a summit like that for a very long time. The authorities kept hoping the movement would die out, and the summit could be the main international news story, but the protests went on, so they were getting a lot of global coverage. There was just a frustration by the authorities. They had denounced the movement as counter revolutionary and creating turmoil, and that hadn’t gotten the crowds off the street, so they decided that the only way to do this was through force. Martial law was declared. Martial law was a claim that the city was out of control, and that the only way to restore order was to have very strict rules preventing gatherings, and to enforce those rules with force.

So, the sequence of events is, you have middle of April, the movement begins. Late April it grows. Early to mid May, it really just blooms even further. And there is a kind of carnivalesque side to it, students on the square. There’s a lot of rock and roll, which fits in with this. Chinese rock musician Cui Jian becomes a hero to the protest, goes down to the square to express his support. But then in the middle of May, and then late May, it’s clear that the government is going to take this very hard line. Troops begin to move toward the city, and are actually turned back by giant crowds in late May, but then the key clash, turning point, comes in early June. Late in the night of June 3rd, the troops roll in.

News Report
Good evening. It is now Sunday morning in Beijing, and Chinese army troops have retaken Tiananmen Square, where thousands of demonstrators have been camped for the last three weeks. The army moved in with a vengeance, at some points firing into the crowd before they actually got to the square. By some counts, more than 100 people are dead, hundreds more are injured. For the latest, now we’re going to go to correspondent John Sheehan in Beijing.

The military advances took place over a period of 24 hours. First, unarmed troops were sent into the city. They were surrounded by tens of thousands of Beijing citizens. They were stopped in their tracks, and eventually they went back the way they came. It looked like people power was once again victorious over the People’s Liberation Army, but the army wasn’t finished. Forces of thousands began to move into the city from three directions. These were not the unarmed troops of yesterday. These were battle-ready combat troops. They moved ahead, sometimes firing as they went. There were ugly scenes of rock throwing, hand to hand combat in the streets. Now people are running away from the gunfire, from the advancing troops.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom
Tanks and soldiers began firing on crowds with automatic weapons. The main bloodshed was near Tiananmen Square. Most of the holdouts on Tiananmen Square are able to leave it, but there’s a lot of killing nearby, both students and other protesters, but also just ordinary citizens of Beijing who just get caught in the clashes.

News Report
Through the night. There was so much shooting, so many people wounded, so many people dead. The hospitals are overflowing with casualties. We’ve been able to get some hard information on numbers of casualties. Eight hospitals that would give information add up to 325 wounded, 150 dead. At least four other hospitals say they cannot total the figures now, they’re too busy, or they refuse to say on the telephone.

Jeffrey Wasserstrom
And it’s important to note there were a small number of soldiers who once this military crackdown began were attacked by crowds, the movement had been peaceful, but at that point there were some clashes, and there were a small number of soldiers who were burned alive in their armored vehicles. On June 5th, the day after the massacre, there was a lone man who stood up in front of a line of tanks, and was kind of trying to block a line of tanks. And the front tank pivoted to not run over him, and he sort of moved in front of it. And this was an amazing kind of standoff, and it was an extraordinary photograph, and it became the most famous photograph associated with the movement, and one of the most famous and easily recognized photographs of the late 20th century. So, to set the document in context: This is an expression of how the Chinese Communist Party wants people to understand what took place. It’s presenting a view of the events that has the soldiers as heroes that are saving the country when all the gains that had been made by the country by the revolution were being endangered by what was viewed as a counter-revolutionary takeover. If you had this idea that these were patriots who were trying to do the best for the country and move it forward, and they were being threatened by forces that were trying to hold the country back, what this statement was saying was actually the opposite was true, according to the Communist Party, that it was the soldiers who were acting as patriots trying to move the country forward at a time when it was being threatened. There’s a vilification of the people behind the action. So when you have that tank man photograph, the tanks are seen as representing an evil force, unless the imagery from something like Star Wars—they’re representing the forces of the Death Star and the Empire crushing bold rebels, and what this document is doing is reversing things. It’s like this is actually not the case, that in fact the people who were pure and on the side of good were the soldiers who were attacked by crowds. The system was being threatened by people who wanted to take China backward. It’s presenting the events in almost kind of a mythic terms as this kind of great battle between forces of good and evil. It’s trying to make the case for the forces of martial law being the forces of good.

Daniel Story
This episode was produced by Daniel Story for Authoritarianism 101, part of the American Historical Review‘s #AHRSyllabus project. For more info and additional resources, visit historians.org/a101.