
Issue No 16		04 June 1999

International

Tiananmen Square Ten Years On

By John Passant

We remember the massacre and the role that working people continue to play in fighting injustice.

Ten years ago, late in the evening of 3 June and into the morning of 4 June, Chinese tanks and troops stormed Tiananmen Square, killing thousands of occupiers. The demonstrators only crime had been to campaign for democracy.

The death of Hu Yaobang sparked the revolt. Hu Yaobang was a reforming leader who lost power in 1987 for being "too soft" on student demonstrators. 150,000 students went to hiss funeral demanding his posthumous rehabilitation. The calls widened to include demands for democracy and an end to corruption.

The movement grew rapidly and after a period of unrest throughout the country students and workers occupied Tiananmen Square. The Square became a focus for the democratic and working class movements in China.

The movement was not just a student one. John Gittings is a China expert and writes for the Guardian newspaper in the UK.

He described the ferment in the month before the massacre thus: "Beijing in May 1989 was a city transformed. In the streets there was a sense of comradeship mixed with excitement that so many people - workers and ordinary citizens - had found their voices. The [government] seemed paralysed and the streets belonged to the masses."

After a month of unrest, the Government on 19 May tried to reassert order. Prime Minister Li Peng declared martial law and ordered troops into Beijing to clear the protesters.

He failed.

70,000 workers in the city's Capital Iron and Steel works went on strike. The Underground workers cut the power off and halted the progress of the troops.

Workers and students built barricades around the city. The barricades were designed not to stop the soldiers but to slow their progress. This meant ordinary Chinese people could argue with the soldiers and get them to join the revolt.

Many soldiers did join the workers and students. Beijing was on the brink of revolution. One eyewitness at the time described how "for 48 hours now the city of Beijing has been entirely in the hands of the people."

5 million people were on the streets of the capital. They were in charge. Everywhere people sang the Internationale as a symbol of their commitment to a better world and to mock the false socialism of their rulers.

Workers began to organise a general strike. Student leaders argued against it, saying it was not in "the national interest." The students won the argument, and there was no general strike. The moment of insurrection was lost.

The hard-liners in the Government seized their chance. Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng sacked Zhoa Ziyang, who sided with the demonstrators. They then ordered the brutal attack on the demonstrators in Tiananmen Square.

The hard-liners knew that the democracy movement was a challenge to the rule of the Chinese Communist Party and like all dictators they responded with guns.

John Gittings described the scene: "The tactics were brutally simple. Armoured personnel carriers formed the spearhead while soldiers on foot shot to kill from both sides."

Repression defeated the revolt. But force cannot keep the Chinese people in servitude forever.

The 1989 democracy movement arose out of the very success of the Communist Party's economic reforms. It is the continuing massive growth of the Chinese economy - it has quadrupled since 1979 - which ensures that in the future there will be new and stronger democratic challenges to the rule of the Communist Party.

To paraphrase Marx, the Chinese Communist Party is creating its own gravedigger - the Chinese working class.

The changes to Chinese society have been monumental. When Mao won power in 1949, China was a peasant country. The working class was small, and played no part as a class in the Chinese Communist Party's victory.

The essence of Mao's economic policies was to replicate Stalin and use the state in an attempt to industrialise the country. Under this state capitalism the state is the collective embodiment of capital, extracting surplus from the working class, and dragging the country up by its bootlaces in a crude accumulation of capital.

Historically it appears state capitalism can be quite successful - for a while. Stalin's version turned peasant Russia into a military superpower. But state capitalism outgrows itself, and the ruling "communist" elite, recognising the economic stagnation their model eventually produces, begin to look for new ways of growing.

Thus under Deng Xiaoping the Chinese Government moved away from Mao's Stalinist state capitalism to a guided market economy. According to the World Bank, China's rate of growth from 1990 to 1995 averaged nearly 13 per cent per year, the highest of any country. Although the rates have fallen since then, the estimated rate for 1998 was still 7.8 per cent.

The consequences have been a massive restructuring of Chinese society. The workforce in China today is over 700 million. There are hundreds of millions of workers, many of whom are concentrated in the major cities. In addition, the country now has a thriving middle class and millions of students.

Part of the process of economic reform has involved a shift away from uneconomic state owned enterprises. The US State Department estimates that these enterprises laid off around 5 million workers each year between 1996 and 1998.

Unemployment is officially around 3 per cent although because unemployed state enterprise workers are excluded from the figures, others put it at 8 to 10 per cent in the cities and higher in the countryside.

Ten years after the massacre, with unemployment in urban areas estimated at over 40 million, with corruption endemic, and with the Chinese working class the mainspring of China's growth, the situation is more favourable for the democracy movement now than in 1989.

As the deposed Zhao Ziyang wrote on the eve of President Clinton's visit to China last year, "The trend of democracy cannot be blocked."

There is little faith in the Communist Party. Han Danfong of the China Labour Bulletin has described the massacre as producing a "collective awakening to the bestial nature of the Party."

Han says that the Government has no idea what to do. "As a result, the countdown to an explosion of anger has already begun. Demonstrations of unemployed workers along with others owed months, sometimes years, of back pay are a daily occurrence."

Han argues that the most important component in the move towards democracy is the fight for the establishment of free trade unions. Han says "Independent trade unions are an indispensable part of this impetus to a new society as well as a strong and democratic mechanism for civil society. We might even say that independent trade unions are the key to building a democratic China."

Tiananmen Square was a dress rehearsal for the future. The Chinese working class has a material interest in democracy. It has the strength to overthrow the corrupt and bankrupt butchers in Beijing.

John Passant is an independent socialist

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  Issue 16 contents

Interview: Opening Australia
Lindsay Tanner talks about new ideas, new policy and new politics in the Information Age.

Unions: An Educated Fightback
A visiting US trade unionist reveals how training better union delegates is the key to reversing the membership slide.

Legal: A Fair Case for Free-Rider Laws
The proposal to enable unions to charge non-members a service fee for negotiating enterprise agreements is consistent with the principle of freedom of association.

History: New Ideas in Labour History
See the latest from the May issue of Labour History, A Journal of Labour and Social History.

International: Tiananmen Square Ten Years On
We remember the massacre and the role that working people continue to play in fighting injustice.

Review: Organising Our Future - What Use the US??
A new paper looks at what Australian unions can learn from the experiences of their American colleagues.

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