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Our Life and Times by Kevin A. Barry and Mary Holmes
March 2001
China's rulers exposed by Tiananmen Papers
The Tiananmen Papers, published earlier this year in the West, document the
decisions made by China's ruling Communist Party (CP) elite between April
and June, 1989, leading up to the imposition of martial law, the bloody
suppression of mass, nationwide demonstrations, and the aftermath of the
June 4 massacre. The papers were delivered by Zhang Liang, pseudonym of an
anonymous CP member, to western scholars, most of whom agree on their basic
authenticity.
The transcripts of meetings detail the split within the CP on how to
respond to the students and workers and youth who took over Tiananmen
Square. The rulers saw the students as a clear threat to their hold on
power. Deng Xiaoping, the ultimate authority at the time, declared on April
25 that the protests were "no ordinary student movement...This is a
well-planned plot...to reject the Chinese Communist Party and the socialist
system at the most fundamental level." According to the transcripts, Deng's
declaration, nearly verbatim, became the editorial in the next day's
PEOPLE'S DAILY.
The Tiananmen Papers expose a great number of replies to the editorial from
the public who supported the students, whose original aims were to root out
official corruption. The papers also give a detailed view of the scope of
the protests throughout China. According to Zhang, the compiler, the
demonstrations involved millions of people, workers and peasants as well as
students. The CP was especially fearful of independent activity among
workers, and emerging student-worker alliances.
Li Peng was in the faction which called for the army to crush the
occupation of Tiananmen Square. The eight "party elders", with Deng in
control, sided with military force. Zhao Ziyang, opposed to martial law,
was deposed as CP general secretary and replaced by Jiang Zhemin, who now
is also president. Li, now chairman of the national assembly, holds the
second office in the CP. Zhao remains under house arrest.
In the week after the June 4 crackdown, CP leaders were alerted to clashes
in every provincial capital and in every major city. Far from a
"well-planned plot," Zhang Liang described what happened as "autonomous,
spontaneous, and disorderly." Yet Zhang is himself described as a reformer
from within the CP who distances himself from any substantial involvement
for mass movements.
China's current rulers have branded the Tiananmen Papers as fake, but they
are circulating now on the internet and will be published in Chinese
sometime this spring. China's current rulers have refused any open
discussion of events surrounding April-June 1989. Hundreds of political
prisoners from the revolt remain in jail under harsh sentences.
The CP knows that in 1989 it was close to losing its grip on power. This
helps to explain the vicious state attacks on the seemingly benign and
apolitical Falun Gong movement. The CP leadership must have been shocked to
see 10,000 Falun Gong practitioners appearing to come out of nowhere to
surround their compound in Beijing on April 25, 1999. This occurred despite
tight security on the eve of the tenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square
massacre.
More importantly, international support is rallying around Cao Maobing, an
electrician who tried to form an independent labor union at a state-owned
silk mill in Jiangsu Province, eastern China, after the official
CP-controlled union did nothing to help the workers on issues concerning
pensions, unemployment benefits and corruption of factory management. Cao
was forcibly put into a psychiatric hospital, and was given drugs and shock
treatment after going on a hunger strike in January to protest his
detention.
It is an old Stalinist practice to forcibly commit people with dissident
ideas into mental hospitals. Nonetheless, a new generation in China is
seeking new ideas and some are turning to a re-examination of Marx's
Marxism through conferences, translations, and new commentaries.
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