Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World after 1989. Kristina Spohr
rel="nofollow" href="#litres_trial_promo">[118] By June 1989, Hungary was undoubtedly on the move but here change was occurring peacefully. On the other side of the world, however, the forces of democratic protest and communist oppression collided violently and with dramatic global consequences in China’s Forbidden City.
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On 15 May, just before noon, Mikhail Gorbachev landed at Beijing’s airport to begin a historic four-day trip to China. Descending the steps of his blue-and-white Aeroflot jet, he was greeted by the Chinese president Yang Shangkun. The two men then walked past an honour guard of several hundred Chinese troops in olive-green uniforms and white gloves. A twenty-one-gun salute boomed in the background.
The long awaited Sino-Soviet summit showed that relations between the two countries were returning to something like ‘normal’ after three decades of ideological rifts, military confrontation and regional rivalries. The Soviet leader certainly viewed his visit as a ‘watershed’. In a written statement issued to reporters at the airport, he remarked: ‘We have come to China in the springtime … All over the world people associate this season with renewal and hope. This is consonant with our mood.’ Indeed, it was anticipated that Gorbachev’s visit could seal the reconciliation of the two largest communist nations at a time when both were struggling through profound economic and political changes. ‘We have a great deal to say to each other as communist parties, even in practical terms,’ observed Yevgeny Primakov, a leading Soviet expert on Asia, ahead of the meeting. ‘This normalisation comes at a time when we are both studying how socialist countries should approach capitalism. Before, we both thought that socialism could be spread only by revolution. Today,’ he added, ‘we both stress evolution.’ There were fears in Asia and America that this summit meeting might even presage a new Sino-Soviet axis, after years when the United States had been able to capitalise on the rift between Moscow and Beijing.[119]
Gorbachev arrived in a city gripped by political upheaval. For over a month students from across China, but especially from Beijing, had been on the streets. Their frustrations against the authorities had been simmering for several years but the immediate trigger was the death of Hu Yaobang, former general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (1982–7) – the man who in 1986 had dared to suggest that Deng was ‘old-fashioned’ and should retire. Instead Deng and the hardliners had forced out Hu in 1987, who was then lauded by the students as a champion of reform. In the weeks after Hu died on 15 April 1989, more than a million people turned out to protest in Beijing – denouncing growing social inequality, nepotism and corruption and demanding democracy as an all-purpose panacea. What started out as law-abiding protest quickly swelled into a radical movement. And the stakes rose even higher for both sides, after the party newspaper the People’s Daily, in an editorial on 26 April, characterised the demonstrations as nothing less than ‘turmoil’ and denounced the students as ‘rioters’ with a ‘well-planned plot’ to cause anarchy. They were accused of displaying unpatriotic behaviour, of ‘attacking’ and even ‘rejecting’ the Chinese Communist Party and the socialist system.[120]
On 13 May, two days before Gorbachev’s arrival in the capital, a thousand students began a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square, bedding down on quilts and newspapers close to the monument honouring the nation’s heroes. The Soviet leader’s visit was a pivotal moment for the young Chinese protestors, for it offered an unprecedented opportunity to air their grievances while the eyes of the world were upon them. They carried banners in Russian, English and Chinese. One read ‘Welcome to a real reformer’; another ‘Democracy is our common dream’.[121] Gorbachev – a household name from the media – represented to them everything the Chinese leaders were not: a democrat, a reformer and a changemaker. Their aim was to take their case straight to him – over the heads of the regime – while embarrassing their leaders into making concessions. The students delivered a letter with 6,000 signatures to the Soviet embassy asking to meet with Gorbachev. The response was cautious. The embassy announced that the general secretary would talk with members of the public but it gave no details about who and when.[122]
New dawn for China?
The CCP leadership was caught in a cleft stick. For weeks the summit talks had been meticulously prepared: the Chinese government wanted everything to unfold without a hitch. Instead, the centre of their capital had been turned into a sea of demonstrators chanting to the world media ‘You have Gorbachev. And who do we have?’[123] The massive student protests were therefore a major embarrassment, especially considering the presence of no less than 1,200 foreign journalists, there to cover the summit but now taking every opportunity to interview protestors and broadcast live pictures of the chaos into which Beijing had descended. And the government could do nothing to stop them, for fear that repression would be beamed around the world. It was, as Deng tersely admitted, a ‘mess’. He told insiders: ‘Tiananmen is the symbol of the People’s Republic of China. The Square has to be in order when Gorbachev comes. We have to maintain our international image.’[124]
On Sunday 14 May, the day before the summit talks, the students made clear that they had no intention of complying with appeals to their patriotism by the Chinese authorities, who had called on them to clear the Square. On the contrary, some 10,000 held a vigil in the middle of Tiananmen; by daylight on Monday the crowd had swollen to an estimated 250,000. Top party officials spoke repeatedly with student leaders, promising to meet their demands for dialogue and warning of grave international embarrassment for China if they did not desist. All this was to no avail. In fact, the students’ obduracy forced a last-minute shift in Chinese protocol – changing the whole dynamic of the summit.[125]
The grand red-carpet entrée for Gorbachev up the sweeping steps of the Great Hall of the People that faces Tiananmen Square had to be abandoned. Instead there was a hastily arranged welcome ceremony at Beijing’s old airport and an incognito drive through backstreets and alleyways to enter the National People’s Congress building by a side door. Only when safely inside would Gorbachev enjoy a lavish state banquet hosted by President Yang.[126]
The situation was equally delicate for Gorbachev. The only appropriate response, it seemed, was to keep completely out of China’s internal politics and pretend that everything was running normally. But privately the Soviet delegation was shocked. Largely in the dark, they wondered whether China was falling apart. Maybe the country was in the midst of a wholesale ‘revolution’, perhaps on its political last legs? Gorbachev tried to act with appropriate ‘reserve and judiciousness’, as he put it later, but as soon as he saw the situation first-hand he felt they should leave for home as quickly as possible.[127] Obliged to speak to the press once during his visit, he offered only vague answers. He dodged questions about the protests – admitting he had seen the demonstrators with their banners demanding Deng’s resignation but saying that he would not himself assume ‘the role of a judge’ or even ‘deliver assessments’ about what was going on.[128] Of course, he said, he was personally for glasnost, perestroika and political dialogue but China was in a different situation and he was in no position to be ‘China’s Gorbachev’. Indeed, he had told his own staff on arriving that he was not keen to take the Chinese road, he did not want Red Square to look like Tiananmen Square.[129]
Conversely, the Chinese leadership did not want Beijing to go the way of Budapest or Warsaw. The visit of the prime champion of communist reform provoked intense debate within the CCP. On 13 May Deng had made clear his dogmatic hard-line position to the politically reformist Zhao Ziyang. ‘We must not give an inch on the basic principle of upholding Communist Party rule and rejecting a Western multiparty system.’ Zhao was not convinced: