by Wendy Liu
For Those Whose Concept of China Has Frozen in the 1970s and for Anyone
Who Would Like to Know About Today's China.
5. Last Radiance of the Setting Sun
The horrible June 4th 1989 incident in which the Chinese government crushed the student democracy movement in Beijing's Tiananmen Square with military force made the country look bloody red again. The crackdown was in fact a reflection of panic on the part of the Chinese government,
weakened and confused by the philosophical and theoretical change in the Communist Party of China and by its own policies of economic reform and opening-up which had unavoidably led into the country not only new products, new capital, new technology and new management as
expected, but also new beliefs, new ideas, new expectations, as well as new lifestyles of other lands and systems.
The Tiananmen tragedy revealed a government struggling bewildered, flustered and scared. It demonstrated a political party hanging onto the last radiance of the setting sun: its ideological guidance, namely the orthodox Marxism, Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought, for nearly four
decades. The students, with their tears and blood, may not have achieved what they wanted to achieve. The world community, with their support and outrage, may not have seen what they wanted to see. But together they gave the Chinese regime the unmistakable message that its old way didn't work any more.
Riding the Tiger of Reform
The Chinese regime didn't collapse. The powerful instinct of survival saved it. On one hand, it couldn't accept or cope either with the demands of students or with the wishes of freedom-loving people around the world for more radical changes in China towards democracy. On the other hand,
the Chinese government learned the sternest lesson of reality, especially with Tiananman tragedy, that there was no way out for China without furthering reforms. Using the Chinese proverb "qi hu nan xia" to describe the situation, the Chinese government was like someone riding on a tiger, to get off would be to face death. The only thing it could do was to keep riding it. The tiger, however, was the reform. Therefore, despite the momentary jerky and violent reaction of the Chinese government in the summer of 1989, it did not stop the reform but stepped it up in the
new decade of the 1990s.
The most visible effort on the part of the Chinese government to continue with the reforms after the 1989 tragedy was Deng Xiaoping's extensive tour of southern China, his last, in 1992, pushing for the speeding up and deepening of the reform. Speed up and deepen it did, and in dramatic fashion.
(To be
continued...)
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