This article addresses the broad historical amnesia being promoted by the press concerning Tiananmen and Maoism. For its part, MIM has denounced Deng from the beginning of MIM's existence in 1983. While Deng was popular in both phony communist and Western capitalist circles, MIM saw him for what he was--a bourgeois dictator. Yet, some people fooled by the bourgeois media think Deng is a Maoist or that we Maoists are responsible for the Beijing massacre. They taunt us with the Beijing massacre or tell us to move to China or other state-capitalist societies. Actually it is the critics of Maoism responsible for the massacre in Beijing. No truly Maoist people's army would have massacred its people. This article is to clear up the record.--July 27, 1992
From MIM Notes 38, 1989
by mc5
On the weekend of June 3rd-4th, the Beijing regime shot down hundreds of student-led demonstrators opposed to government corruption and dubbed as pro-democracy by the Western press.
The figures for the death tolls are estimates. According to USA Today, the figure was at least 500 deaths. (USA Today, 6/5/89, 1) In the following days there were crackdowns in other cities as well. Estimates of people killed in the whole crackdown in China ranged into the thousands. (New York Times, 10/19/89, 5) In the ensuing struggle the students retaliated with violence. AP published the photo of a military vehicle driver killed by students after he rammed into them with his vehicle. (USA Today, 6/5/89, 6a)
Apparently, the urban areas largely supported the students while the countryside was silent. "In Beijing a poll indicated that 93.3 percent of the residents believed that the student demonstrators' goals were reasonable, compared with 1.5 percent who thought they were unreasonable. The rest had no opinion." (NYT, 8/5/89, 2)
The massacre has reportedly created a small, perhaps permanent armed resistance. Two or three times a week, soldiers in Beijing are attacked by snipers according to diplomats. The so-called guerrillas may be relatives of those massacred. (NYT, 8/2/89, 7)
Citizens seized 1,000 guns from soldiers during the Tiananmen uprising that have not been turned in. (Ibid.)
Demonstrations of thousands occurred across the world in protest of the massacre. The largest demonstrations were in Hong Kong. Under pressure the U.S. government supposedly halted in $685 million in arms shipments. It did not cut off diplomatic ties or impose economic sanctions. (The Plain Dealer, 6/6/89, 1) It did cut high-level non-diplomatic exchanges and got the World Bank and Asian Development Bank to postpone loans to China. (New York Times, 9/30/89, 5)
The reason that the U.S. government did not do more is that the U.S. imperialists obtain electronic intelligence information from China in the kind of alliance against the Soviet bloc that the U.S. seeks to preserve at any cost.
Background to massacre
Students started their demonstrations this year in Beijing with a commemoration of former party leader Hu Yaobang, who died. Hu had lost his job for being soft on the student movement in the past.
Toward the end of April, the CCP ordered the students to stop their disturbances in the streets, but hundreds of thousands ignored the CCP and continued their demonstrations. They maintained an occupation of Tiananmen Square for weeks and started a hunger strike which garnered widespread sympathy. By May 20th, one million people helped occupy the square. The government had reason to fear the movement's attacks on government corruption. The children of government leaders in particular were seen becoming wealthy and travelling abroad because of their special privileges. Out of 28 people with wealth exceeding 10 million Chinese dollars, 26 were found to be children of top officials in one investigation. One scholar found that a majority of those participants in the Cultural Revolution (1966- 1976) were ready for another campaign against government corruption. (Forward Motion, September 1989, 33)
One common poster in the demonstrations said that "Mao's son died in Korea." This referred to the fact that Mao gave his son no particular privilege. He died fighting for the communists in North Korea when China aided Korea in fighting the Western imperialist invasion.
Something of a Mao revival occurred with demonstrators carrying posters of Mao, especially outside Beijing. This is not to say that all the demonstrators sang the communist song "Internationale," which some did. There was also an important section of the movement dedicated to copying the West as the mock Statue of Liberty brought to Tiananmen proved.
CCP power struggle
Deng Xiaoping is the most powerful leader in China. Deng, Yang Shangkun and Li Peng appear to be mainly responsible for the massacre.
The wake of the Tiananmen massacre left an apparent power struggle in the Chinese Communist Party heirarchy. Jiang Zemin, a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo --the highest committee in the Communist Party --who is little known to Western China-watchers emerged as the new Communist Party leader called General Secretary to replace Zhao Ziyang, who received blame as a "splittest" in the party who broke party discipline and bore responsibility for China's economic problems. Like Hu before him, Zhao appeared soft on the student demonstrators and met with students in the square when his purge was already imminent. After taking over Zhao's job, Jiang issued the formal opinion of the CCP that the Tiananmen rebellion was a " counterrevolutionary rebellion aimed at negating the leadership of the Communist Party of China and overthrowing the socialist system." (AP in Ann Arbor News, 9/26/89, 1) Scaring Westerners even more, Jiang said China was having "a serious class struggle." (New York Times, 9/30/89, 5) He said the rebellions "aimed at overthrowing the Chinese Communist Party's leadership and subverting the socialist system, at (sic.) turning China into a bourgeois republic and reducing it once again to a dependency of the Western capitalist powers." (Ibid.) This is the most radical rhetoric out of the CCP in over ten years. It does not mean much in terms of the economy though; it's just a new type of justification for repression.
Jiang also admitted some problems have become worse in recent years including "abuse of power for personal gains, corruption and degeneration, which result in alienation from the masses of people." (Ibid.) Despite the tough talk, Jiang is one of the parents of children studying in the United States. 70,000 have taken the privilege and failed to return to China. (Ibid.)
For being replaced by Jiang, Zhao receives a higher salary and better treatment than Jiang Zemin. (Ibid., 7) Such is admittedly crude evidence, but it supports the theory that Jiang, Zhao, Li and Deng are all part of the same state capitalist class. They don't imprison or kill each other for their disagreements, just students.
Imperialist media tarnish Mao
The New York Times started its editorial on the Tiananmen massacre with the following: "Mao Zedong taught Chinese Communists that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Deng Xiaoping believes it." (New York Times, 6/5/89, 16)
No where in the editorial does the New York Times explain that Deng Xiaoping came under attack by Mao for his repression of students and that in fact Mao purged Deng just before his death in 1976.
When Deng did things the capitalist media liked, it proclaimed him a hero. When the same man massacred the students, they blamed Mao. It's no-lose politics for the capitalists. Even the slogan "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun" is taken out of context. It omits that Mao had to liberate China from imperialists who oppressed China with guns. It omits that the United States sent millions in military aid to Mao's opponents. If Mao thought that power grows out of the barrel of a gun, so did Roosevelt and Truman. So did the New York Times when it supported that military aid.
Mao certainly instructed that the army should not attack its own people. "In recent weeks of the standoff between China's army and democracy-seeking students, soldiers had told the crowds, 'We will never kill Chinese,' just as spiritual leader Mao Tse-tung commanded." (USA Today, 6/5/89, 2a)
Media confuse issue
Perhaps the most important story of summer 1989 was the massacre of student demonstrators in Beijing, China. As a story it is most instructive in how the U.S. media consistently misleads public opinion. The same corporate press that effusively praised Chinese Communist Party leader Deng Xiaoping for his pragmatism in moving China into capitalist-style economic organization turned right around and started denouncing "hard-liners" and "conservatives," who only weeks before were described as "reformers" and "pragmatists." It is the nature of the corporate media that its use of blitz style publicity, photos and headlines and repeated cliches makes it easy to have historical amnesia.
Time magazine had named Deng Xiaoping Man of the Year twice in congratulatory tones. Blatant capitalist propaganda sang the praises of Deng Xiaoping. Named "Success Story of the Year for 1985" by Success magazine editor- in-chief Scott DeGarmo, Deng Xiaoping was said to make "a Horatio Alger hero look like a piker."
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Why does Time magazine contradict itself on Deng
Xiaoping?
a. It doesn't know what it is talking about.
b. It has no consistent theory, only the consistent
task of glorifying capitalism.
c. It has a total of two people in China covering the
whole country.
d. All of the above.
__________________________________________
__________________________
Whenever there were problems in China, the media could refer to "conservative" bureaucrats who opposed Deng Xiaoping's program of decollectivizing agriculture and running industry on a profit/loss basis. It were as if China were only poor because it was stuck on socialism and did not adopt Western business practices.
Then, Deng Xiaoping orders the crackdown on students and suddenly he becomes described as a "hard-liner" himself. No one ever suggested that the very people who advocated free markets, unemployment and private or quasi-private property in agriculture were also the same people in favor of repression of political movements in China.
The hidden ideological agenda in virtually all media coverage --and there are only a handful of Western reporters generating all coverage of China, a maximum of two per agency like the Associated Press, United Press International and the New York Times-- is that the good guys are the ones advocating capitalism. The theory goes that if China gets capitalism, democracy and freedom from repression will surely follow.
It's a tired refrain that South Africa should have disproved long ago. Black South Africans can attest to the fact that free markets and capitalism do not bring about political freedom, never mind an escape from the pervasive political violence, starvation and disease afflicted on the majority of the world's population exploited by the capitalist system.
________________________________________________________________
"To protect or to suppress the broad masses of the
people --that is the fundamental distinction between
the Communist Party and the Guomindang, between
the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and between the
dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of
the bourgeoisie." Mao Zedong, June 1968
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Endless space in the papers is spent hand- wringing over whether Deng Xiaoping and other aging Communist Party leaders will see the light and install Western-style democracy or at least another so-called thaw. A little history on Deng Xiaoping and the other leaders of the government would have gone a long way to answer the question.
In 1966 China had a student movement. It too focussed on corruption of bureaucrats and used posters freely to criticize authorities. The ideological slant of the student movement of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1969) was different than the one today, but the response of Deng Xiaoping was the same: repress it. It was the action of Deng Xiaoping and his cohort of Communist Party leaders that led Mao Zedong in 1966 (now described by the media universally as hard-liner of hard-liners, fanatic of fanatics etc.) to declare that "it is anti-Marxist for communists to fear the student movement. . . . The Central Committee of the Youth League should stand on the side of the student movement. But instead it stands on the side of suppression of the student movement." (2)
______________________________________________________________
"It is anti-Marxist for communists to fear the student
movement."
Mao Zedong commenting on Deng Xiaoping's
efforts to repress the students in the 1960s.
______________________________________________________________
By this Mao referred to the efforts of party leaders who personally went to campuses and ordered student activists locked up in cafeterias and cut off from the outside world for putting up posters critical of certain party leaders. Indeed, the suppression of the student movement by a faction of party leaders, the second in rank being Deng Xiaoping, became one of the central issues in the Cultural Revolution. On the one hand was Mao and his followers who said it was impossible to have socialism without the mobilization of the people in both economic and political affairs. On the other hand were people like Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun, who declared that "cadres decide everything." (3)
In their self-criticisms in 1966 Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi admitted that their anti-corruption and anti-student campaigns repressed the masses of people and oppposed Mao. (4) For these and other non-Marxist practices Liu Shaoqi lost his power as second to Mao in China and Deng Xiaoping lost his party and government posts.
The current number two de facto power in China behind Deng Xiaoping is Yang Shangkun. He and his relatives in the military were the ones ordering the troops to massacre the demonstrators. He was also one of the targets of the Cultural Revolution attacked by the Maoists. It is therefore grossly ignorant of history to associate Yang with Mao. The Western media and governments always opposed the Cultural Revolution, the student movement that started it and the purge of Liu and Deng during the Cultural Revolution. That movement was too radical for the West, so it supported its repression by Deng and Liu. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao and his much villified followers the Gang of Four succeeded and ousted Deng Xiaoping from his top government posts only to return him to his posts after an attempted military coup and oust him again just before Mao's death. After the death of Mao in 1976, however, leaders more to the liking of the Western media came to power --including Deng Xiaoping again. One of the first actions taken by the new leader Hua Guofeng was to change the constitution of China to take out the right to strike and to put up political posters. People who put up posters received prison sentences. Then across the board, various groups in society were told to stop making political demands in the name of advancing China's modernization. Propaganda came out saying that the most admirable quality of the working class was its discipline in following orders. For women, the most cherished role became that of raising children for the "socialist motherland." The new regime indirectly supported the fascist slogan of keeping "the trains on time." In this new authoritarian atmosphere, it also opposed the old slogan that dockworkers "should not be slaves to cargo tonnage." In other words, the dockworkers should get to work and show results in the number of tons of cargo they put out and shouldn't organize production by any other criteria.
The West is concerned about its ideas about democracy, but it did not care that Deng implemented anti-democracy in the workplace and women's roles. Maoists on the other hand support democracy for the working classes-- the proletariat and peasantry in both politics and economic matters. It is especially hypocritical to associate Mao with Deng when Mao purged Deng and the West supported Deng all along until the massacre.
Notes:
(1) E.L. Wheelwright and Bruce McFarlane, The Chinese Road to Socialism: Economics of the Cultural Revolution (New York: Monthly Review, 1970), pp. 235-6.
(2) Stuart Schram ed., Chairman Mao Talks to the People (New York: Pantheon Books, 1974), p. 253.
(3) This slogan repeated by Chen in Beijing Review, no. 13, 1984, p. 16.
(4) Hong Yung Lee, The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: A Case Study Berkeley:University of California Press, 1978), pp. 36-41.