THE 20TH anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre ranks second only to the 60th anniversary of the Chinese revolution of 1949 in historical significance. The communist party’s fateful decision to suppress the mass movement for more democracy by force protected their regime from a mortal threat, enabling them in the following decade to harness the existing market reforms to a growing globalisation of the world economy.
A remarkable symbiosis developed between China’s mighty manufacturing ability based on its huge pool of labour power and the consumer revolution in the United States based on easy credit and financial deregulation. As a result China looks altogether more modern in 2009 than in 1989 – all the more so after the recent convulsion which has engulfed the world economy. That country is now widely seen as the principal emerging power, and is more and more acting like one.
Official China now regards the decision to crush the Tiananmen movement as entirely justified. Otherwise, the argument goes, it would have been impossible to direct the subsequent economic revolution successfully and China would have been in dire risk of disintegration. An ideology of stability and nationalism was substituted for communist egalitarianism, founded on the growth of an immense new urban middle class and the continuing flow of cheap labour from the rural interior. One party rule is justified by these results and retrospectively by counter-posing the Tiananmen movement against this new form of patriotism.
In fact a noble patriotic spirit also inspired the millions of students and ordinary citizens who made up that movement. They demanded that democratic and legal changes should catch up with the economic transformations that followed Deng Xiaoping's reforms introduced in 1978. They sang the Internationaleon their demonstrations and were determined to see a freer, less corrupt and more equal China. The student movement rapidly attracted mass support by crystallising general frustrations. These criticisms were fully reflected within the Communist party leadership, which was divided between reformers led by Zhao Ziyang, who wanted to respond to the protesters' demands and Li Peng who rejected them.
Despite the ruthless success with which the protest was suppressed the issues raised by it continue to have salience for Chinese society. Corruption arising from the communists’ monopoly of power is an endemic problem. Legal changes to allow its capitalist market system operate effectively are similarly frustrated. Huge inequalities thrown up in these two decades could become intolerable in an economic downturn, despite the great increase in living standards. In spite of the heavy restrictions on media and independent political organisation, the Chinese have certainly not lost their appetite for protest or petitioning about injustices. The authoritarian modernisation of the last two decades is steadily coming up against its limits, as Chinese society becomes more demanding in its search for greater human rights and political accountability.