Initially, its reforms made the Deng Xiaoping regime the most popular since 1949, but the transition to a market-based pricing system and the lifting of price controls, meant prices of goods rose faster than wages, and those living in the Beijing area were particularly penalised. Between 1987 and 1989 an increase of over a third in consumer prices caused workers and students to fear that soon they would no longer be able to afford staple goods; many took to the streets in protest.[15] The government rescinded the price reforms in less than two weeks, but inflation continued to soar.
Oppositionists, many of whom were CCP members and/or ex-Red Guards, put up posters on Democracy Wall in Beijing and began to produce magazines to sell to the crowds who flocked there.[16] The youth on the streets sang the Internationale, as if to say to the regime and to world opinion, “Look we are not in favour of capitalism, we are not counter-revolutionaries.” There was no co-ordinated list of agreed demands but reports concur that right from the start there were calls for greater democracy (free speech and a free press, removal of restrictions on street demonstrations); and anti-bureaucratic demands such as the call to publish the assets of the CCP tops and their families and – given the nature of the protestors – an increase in funding for education and an increase in teachers’ salaries.[17]
However, what had started as a student and youth protest began to spread to workers. The privatisation of SMSOEs, and the drive for profit meant workers were laid off to cut costs and many who still had a job had suffered a significant fall in living standards. The protestors, initially students but subsequently joined by workers, occupied Tien An Men Square in central Beijing for seven weeks. All around were placards and meetings protesting against poor living conditions, rising unemployment, poor career prospects, and the lack of democracy in China. At its peak, over one million supporters of the Tien An Men Square protest marched in demonstrations in 24 cities across China. The elements of a political revolution were appearing.
Certainly, there were many rank and file CCP members who sympathised with the demonstrators but they had no organisation or structure to make their opinions felt, and they had no theory which allowed them to reach a correct appraisal of events.
At first, a section of the CCP tops were prepared to tolerate the student protests, but having workers join in was far too dangerous for the regime to tolerate. Workers in the Capital Steel Corporation, one of the Beijing steel plants, went on strike, as did small groups of postal workers and bus drivers, and the number of workers involved was growing rapidly. The Beijing Workers’ Autonomous Federation (BWAF) was founded; it existed for only a short time but was the only independent Chinese workers’ organisation in the PRC since 1949. An independent observer present in China at the time claims that similar independent workers’ groups came into existence in Shanghai, Xian, Hangzhou and Guangzhou.[18] This, of course, made the initiative quite intolerable to the Party tops. Those who were prepared to adopt a more relaxed policy towards the protesters were swept aside, and the movement was crushed.
The central demands of the BWAF were published on May 21, a month after the students started their struggle, and it can be seen immediately how the initiatives of the students had sparked an important development amongst the workers.
Firstly, the BWAF demanded total independence, it would not be under the control of any other organisation, and it would be a democratic organisation in which workers would participate of their own free will. It requested that it be recognised by employers as having equal status with other mass organisations.
Secondly, the basic aim of the BWAF was to put forward the majority views of the workers on economic and political questions and never be a simple welfare organisation, as were existing state unions.
Thirdly, the BWAF demanded the authority to monitor the activities of the CCP and other workers’ representatives in firms and businesses that were the property of the state (collectively owned) to ensure that the workers really were genuinely the masters of those firms.[19]
The BWAF challenged the CCP on a crucial issue, calling for the workers to be the real masters of the collective factories. In the context of the direction being taken by the CCP towards capitalist restoration this was clearly a revolutionary socialist demand and one the CCP could not tolerate. The regime had to respond quickly, which it did with a mailed fist. On 4 June 1989, the Chinese army moved into the square killing several hundred demonstrators. It is claimed that the troops entered the square at the point where the BWAF had its headquarters in a tent, and made their first targets the core leaders of the BWAF.[20] The BWAF was declared an illegal organization and disbanded.[21] Through its brutal clampdown, the regime made certain it retained a tight grip on society. The massacre at Tien An Men square marked a definitive victory of the hard-liners in the CCP.
The movement around Tien An Men Square raised the hopes of many workers and youth, and had the potential to topple the Deng regime, but the lack of a coherent leadership and disciplined organisation meant it was never able to realise that promise. The masses were defeated. After Tien An Men the regime sought out all the key leaders many of whom disappeared or spent many years in prison. Indeed at the millennium some 50 protesters from Tien An Men Square remained in jail, nearly all were workers. At the same time the bureaucracy temporarily slowed down the process of market reform to restabilise the situation. The crushing of the Tien An Men protests meant a swing to the right in the political pendulum and once equilibrium was restored, the movement in the direction of capitalism intensified.
In 1989, the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe collapsed one after another. The Russian bureaucracy had lost control of the situation and a chaotic transition to capitalism opened up. The Soviet Union resisted a little longer, but it too eventually succumbed to the same process, with the regime collapsing in 1991. These Stalinist regimes were so rotten that they fell with hardly any resistance on the part of the bureaucracy. The system they represented had passed its limits and had decayed from the head down.
Undoubtedly, these events had an impact on the Chinese Stalinists. Up until then they had been introducing market reforms, opening up whole areas of China to capitalist investment, but with the state-owned sector still dominant, and the process could still have been reversed. However, the CCP leadership was united in its determination to accelerate the process of “market reform” as a means of stoking-up the economy and so dampening social unrest. After Tien An Men and the collapse of the Soviet Union a growing proportion of the bureaucracy saw capitalist restoration as the solution to their own crisis, but were determined that the process would take place under their firm control.[22]
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Vogel, E. Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China. Harvard U.P. 2011.
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Jung Chang, Wild Swans, Flamingo, 1991.
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Kosuth, D. Tiananmen Square …, International Socialism, Issue 66, 2010.
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Thompson, P. Democracy and Popular Power in Beijing, Radical America, 22(5)17-26 1990.
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Mandel, E. For the Beijing Commune, July 1989, http://www.ernestmandel.org; www.tsquare.tv/links/Walder.html.
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Thompson, Op. cit.
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China Labour Bulletin, 26 Nov 2014.
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Shambaugh, D. China’s Communist Party, University of California Press, 2008.