Twenty years ago today in China the prolonged pro-democracy demonstration in Tiananmen Square was brought to a brutal end, when troops and tanks moved in and hundreds of people were killed on the streets of Beijing. While the western world remembers this event, it's worth bearing in mind that June marks another, very different anniversary. Just 20 years ago democratic reforms in the Soviet Union also astonished the world. Contested elections brought into being the First Congress of People's Deputies, held between 25 May and 9 June. From the outset, this was a legislature in which the executive was criticised and real debate took place. Its proceedings were televised live and watched by more than half the adult population.
In 1989 it looked as if Russia and China were travelling in opposite directions. What was then still the Soviet Union was moving towards democratic and accountable government. In China, radical economic reform had already made great progress, but the response to the Tiananmen Square demonstrators of Deng Xiaoping (the father of the Chinese economic reform) was to impose martial law.
China and Russia remain two countries fascinated, influenced, and sometimes repelled by the experience of the other. Had the Soviet experience continued to be one of evolutionary democratisation as it was between 1986 and 1989, it would have had a very positive influence in China. Twenty years ago, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist party Zhao Ziyang told Mikhail Gorbachev that Soviet political reform was being followed with huge interest in his country and that the intelligentsia were demanding that China emulate the example of perestroika. Zhao himself, as his newly-available posthumously published reflections (Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang, 2009) make clear, had personal sympathy with the goal of political reform and was opposed to the ruthless crackdown on the pro-democracy demonstrators. Visiting Chinese research institutes in 1988, I myself found enormous interest in the Soviet perestroika. I even heard party intellectuals say: "We need a Chinese Gorbachev."
Attitudes are very different now. In the conservative backlash that followed Tiananmen, Zhao lost the party leadership and before long was under house arrest (in which he remained until his death in 2005). And today not only opponents of political reform but also those who favour democratisation in China see the Soviet experience as a reason for caution. In Beijing this spring I met many intellectuals who favoured further reform, but their overwhelming emphasis was on "step-by-step" change. Any desire for far-reaching political reform is overlain by acute consciousness of what followed the 1989 democratisation of the Soviet Union—its rapid breakup.
It may be, however, that the Chinese have read too much into the Soviet experience. Han Chinese make up 90 per cent of the population of China whereas Russians constituted only 50 per cent of the inhabitants of the USSR. While further political liberalisation would—as in the Soviet case—raise expectations among national minorities and make the task of managing inter-ethnic conflict harder, a comprehensive Soviet-style collapse would be extremely unlikely in China.
The Soviet Union's breakup was not just a consequence of the liberalisation and partial democratisation of the Soviet system, although Gorbachev's reforms did facilitate the peaceful dissolution of the USSR. It was not even simply due to the fact that Russians made up less of the USSR's population than the Han Chinese do of China. The fact that all 15 Soviet republics—not just a few of them—went their separate ways was overwhelmingly due to Boris Yeltsin's inordinate desire to be the sole master of the Kremlin. This led him to demand Russian "independence" from a Soviet Union in which Russians were not only the largest single nationality but also politically and culturally dominant. Gorbachev spent much of his last year in office attempting to secure voluntary agreement on a radically reformed and loosely federal union that he believed a majority of the republics could be persuaded to join. By putting a spanner in those works, Yeltsin acted in a way that was hardly in Russia's national interests. It is unlikely that he would have a counterpart in China.
Two other considerations, apart from Soviet experience, inhibit those in China who are in principle attracted to the idea of more democracy. One is the memory of the 1960s cultural revolution which saw the temporary destruction of the economy and educational system and produced years of suffering for educated Chinese citizens. That experience marked them for life. The other factor is the social structure of China. Two thirds of the population are peasants. And Beijing's educated strata are unwilling to trust the political judgment of the peasant majority.
The Chinese Communist party (CCP), like the Communist party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in the post-Stalin era, contains an enormously wide spectrum of political opinion. Lip-service continues to be paid to Mao, whose face still adorns Chinese banknotes. But Maoism is anathema to most of the party leadership and to a majority of party intellectuals.
Yet there are other Chinese communists—especially some who work in the ideological rather than economic sphere—who remain nostalgic for Mao's rule. In an odd parallel with Brezhnev's Soviet Union, these Chinese ideologues, who think that a cultural revolution every six or seven years would be a good thing, argue for the rehabilitation of Stalin. Recent Russian history books that go some way to restoring Stalin to favour get translated into Chinese, but the subtext of their Chinese sponsors is about returning to Mao, not Stalin. In Brezhnev's time, when overt criticism of Stalin was prohibited in the Soviet Union, many Russian books and articles attacking Mao and Maoism were written for the cognoscenti who knew that for Mao, they should read Stalin.
In post-Soviet Russia, however, esteem for Stalin has grown, especially within the ranks of the Communist party of the Russian Federation (CPRF). A secretary of the CPRF, visiting Beijing, recently told his Chinese counterparts that they needed to avoid the major mistake of the Soviet Union which, after the death of Stalin, had been to lose control over ideology.
While those sentiments strike a chord with the more backward-looking officials in China, the main thrust of ideological change has of course been in a different direction. In 2001, the Communist party announced that it would "represent the advanced productive forces in society." It was soon clear that this meant the party should co-opt the entrepreneurs in the private sector. More bluntly, capitalists were now welcome to become communists! Indeed, it is a little-known fact that a few years ago the leadership of the CCP seriously considered dropping the word "Communist" from the name of their party. This more inclusive approach to party membership, together with the creation of a large private sector in China and its embrace of a market economy, are a far cry from the ideology of Marx, Lenin and Mao. When a young Chinese communist recently said to me, "Many members of the Communist party are not Marxists," she was by no means divulging a state secret.
Of course, the creation in China of what has sometimes been called "party-state capitalism" has not been an unalloyed success story. The dramatic reduction of absolute poverty has been a great achievement, but the impressive economic growth of recent decades has been accompanied by vastly greater inequality (as well as environmental degradation). And with the current global economic crisis, the prospect of still more millions of Chinese workers becoming newly unemployed raises the spectre of increased social unrest. Should the global recession last for as long as several years, this is likely to be to the advantage of conservative communists within the CCP.
Among reformers, however, there are those who sympathise with the political dimension of the Soviet perestroika, notwithstanding how it ended. Gorbachev, while he was still general secretary of the Soviet Communist party, evolved into a democratic socialist. And many Chinese reformers today would like to see China succeed where the last Soviet leader failed—by making a transition to social democracy.
In one significant respect there has already been a convergence between recent Chinese ideological innovation and the Soviet perestroika. It was a major breakthrough that Gorbachev had by 1988 declared that there were universal values and interests which transcended class values and any particular interests. All of humanity had, most basically, a common interest in preventing nuclear war and in protecting the natural environment. That may seem no more than common sense, but the idea was fiercely attacked by those who saw this as sidelining a "class approach." It was, therefore, also an ideological breakthrough of some significance when the Chinese prime minister, Wen Jiabao, expressed support for the idea of universal values, as he has done on a number of occasions over the past two years. Previously, the notion had been resisted in China, mainly on the grounds that it was another name for westernisation or American values. The kind of "universal values" that led to the invasion and occupation of Iraq naturally had little appeal.
But among the genuinely universal values that Wen embraced, as Gorbachev had 20 years earlier, were science, democracy, the rule of law, freedom and human rights. It is true that there remains a huge gulf between word and deed in most of these areas. However, the very fact that in China today, as in the USSR during the second half of the 1980s, conservative communists have strongly criticised these universal values indicates that more than window-dressing is potentially involved.
One of the lessons of political change in the Soviet Union was that ideas matter. In the early years of perestroika countless commentators in the west dismissed the new thinking espoused by Gorbachev as hot air, divorced from political reality. They took the same view when he said in 1988 that the citizens of every country had the right to decide for themselves what kind of political and economic system they should live in. In 1989, however, the countries of eastern Europe became non-communist and independent without a shot being fired by a Soviet soldier. It was ideational change that paved the way both for the dramatic transformation of foreign policy and of the political system.
In a consolidated communist system, and one in which communists have come to power indigenously rather than by the imposition of a foreign power, it is normally from within the communist party itself that fundamental change comes. The varied political undercurrents in the Communist party of the Soviet Union, which came to the surface with a change of leadership in 1985, were far more important than most observers realised at the time. The same is surely true of China today.
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