Unlikely Partners by Julian Gewirtz

Author:Julian Gewirtz [Gewirtz, Julian]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

10

At the Delta

BY THE MORNING of June 4, 1989, Tiananmen Square had been emptied of the students who had camped out for weeks. They left behind only a few blood stains on the stones, newly scarred with the tread marks of tanks. In the imperial city that spread out below the empty gaze of Mao’s official portrait, an unknown number had been killed and wounded. The clearing of the square took less than twelve hours.1

Because of China’s openness to the outside world in the 1980s, the international media (already in Beijing for Gorbachev’s visit) documented this extraordinary episode—the feverish student movement and the authoritarian violence that terminated it—in real time and in great detail, focusing the attention of the world on Beijing. The U.S. government, under President George H. W. Bush, closely monitored the tumult.2 Even to foreign government observers, it was clear the crackdown would directly affect the reformist economists who had driven China’s intellectual innovation under Zhao Ziyang. A recently declassified telegram sent on June 4 cited Chen Yizi’s Institute for Chinese Economic Structural Reform, which had authored a “declaration supporting the students,” cosigned by the Beijing Society of Young Economists, among other economic organizations—and the telegram predicted the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leadership would crack down on economic research. “Researchers have been told not to leave the country,” the U.S. ambassador to China warned.3

Some of these “researchers,” including Chen Yizi, were able to flee the country.4 But others ran into trouble—the most prominent among them Fang Lizhi, who sought asylum at the U.S. embassy as the mass arrests began. “We had no choice but to take him in,” wrote Bush in his diary, “but it’s going to be a real stick in the eye to the Chinese.” Fang and his wife would remain at the embassy for over a year before being allowed to leave China, amid a diplomatic standoff that brought intense global attention to the precarious and sometimes captive position of Chinese intellectuals after the crackdown at Tiananmen.5

Yet in the days after Deng Xiaoping had authorized the violent termination of the student movement, he attempted to signal internally that his commitment to economic reform remained paramount. On June 9, he made his first appearance since the crackdown, meeting with military officials—whose loyalty had allowed the suppression of the protests and whose continued fealty Deng needed. Deng affirmed his commitment to the work report of the Thirteenth Party Congress, even though that era’s general secretary, Zhao Ziyang, had been sidelined. “Not even one character can be changed,” Deng declared. “We must stick with a combination of planned economy and market economy,” he said, using the formulation associated with the reformist thinkers under Zhao. However, because Hu Yaobang was now dead and Zhao was under house arrest, conservatives dominated the remaining senior Party leadership after Tiananmen. When Deng’s remarks were made public in early July, his phrase a “market economy” (shichang jingji) had been changed to a “market-regulated economy” (shichang tiaojie jingji). The substantial demotion in status

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