What Does China Think?. Mark Leonard
were sold as it became an instant best-seller. The reformist prime minister Zhao Ziyang arranged for the series to be re-aired on the main TV channel, Chinese Central Television.
Less than a year after the series was aired, the cultural fever took a decidedly political turn in the Tiananmen Square demonstrations of 1989. What began as a memorial march for the former Communist Party Secretary General Hu Yaobang on 15 April soon turned into a catch-all protest for political reform, workers’ rights and an end to official corruption. This incredible display of people power that dominated the streets of Beijing for six weeks gave the world a glimpse of a democratic China until it was abruptly wiped out by soldiers and tanks on 4 June 1989. The crackdown was more than a human tragedy; it became a defining moment in China’s political and economic development.
The two stories of Tiananmen
One of the students who was glued to the television during episodes of River Elegy was Wang Hui. He had been working on a PhD in Chinese literature when he joined the student demonstrations of 1989. Like most young intellectuals Wang Hui was a supporter of Deng Xiaoping’s ‘Open Door’ policies and a believer in the potential of the market. But when Wang Hui left the demonstrations for the last time he embarked on an intellectual journey that would change his world-view: ‘In the early morning of 4 June 1989, as I departed from Tiananmen Square in the company of the last group of my classmates, I felt nothing but anger and despair.’ As the government rounded up and punished the organizers of the protest, Wang Hui took off to the mountains and spent two years in hiding, getting to know peasants and workers whose experiences made him doubt the justice of unregulated free markets, and convinced him that the state must play a role in preventing inequality.
Until 1989, reformist intellectuals had been united in a journey to the West, regarding political and economic liberalism as a seamless whole, one that would benefit all Chinese people. Their enemies were the ‘conservatives’ who supported the Maoist status quo. After the bloodshed the reformers split into two camps: a ‘New Right’, led by thinkers like Zhang Weiying, who see free markets as the most important goal and are willing to make an accommodation with political authoritarianism; and a ‘New Left’, about whom we will hear more later, led by scholars such as Wang Hui, who emphasize equality and political democracy at the expense of total market freedom.
These tensions had been inherent in the demonstrations themselves. In the West, we saw Tiananmen as a confrontation between a brutal, unreformed communist state and a group of students longing to be part of the capitalist world of liberal democracy. But, in an important essay on the meaning of 1989 (which he wrote retrospectively from exile in 1997), Wang Hui takes the spotlight off the intellectuals and students and puts it on a wider group of workers who came to the square with more concrete social and economic demands. Their involvement in the protests had been triggered by mounting discontent about the radical market reforms of 1988 which had set off rocketing inflation and inequality. These workers had no interest in being part of the West. In fact, what they wanted was price stability, social security and an end to corruption and speculation. Wang Hui sees their concerns as part of the global resistance to neoliberalism, comparing Tiananmen to the anti-globalization riots that erupted in Seattle and Genoa.
According to Wang Hui, there were two different agendas in the square: one group wanted social welfare and protection from the market; the other wanted democracy and protection from the leviathan Communist state. If the protesters had faced in two directions, so did the repression that followed it. According to Wang Hui, the crackdown not only silenced calls for democracy, it also ended public debate about inequality. Once the tanks had done their work, the process of marketization speeded up. The price reforms that had been called to a halt in the second half of 1988 were implemented in September 1989. After Deng Xiaoping reasserted himself over the conservatives in 1992 – using his famous ‘Southern tour’ of the coastal cities of Guangzhou and Shenzhen to restate the case for reform – many more changes followed. The corruption, the smuggling, the unfair distribution of assets, the influence of interest groups on public policy, the overdevelopment of real estate, the problems with the social welfare system and environmental concerns, which the protesters had complained about, got steadily worse.
However, the threat of further repression meant society’s discontent was muted. As Wang Hui says: ‘Just as people have forgotten the sound of social fragmentation echoing behind the excitement at Tiananmen, neither can people remember that the market era referred to today as “neoliberalism” is hiding behind the political spectres of those on the square and has only in this way secured an exemption from social protest against it.’ What he means is that the stodgy, bureaucratic face of the traditional Communist Party has masked the most extensive and ambitious process of marketization and privatization the world has ever seen. By referring to the market revolution as ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, the authorities were able to use quotes from Marx and Mao to repackage the ideas of Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. For Wang Hui, the tanks that pulverized the hopeful intellectual flourishing of the 1980s were working on behalf of market fundamentalism rather than Maoism. Contrary to the view of the repression as a reassertion of Maoist ideology, the authoritarianism was acting to silence workers’ anxieties about inequality. This is Wang Hui’s version of the zebra story.
For Wang Hui, China’s last fifteen years have felt like a hallucination:
those who thought that the movement had speeded up the process of Chinese democratic development discovered that they had been abruptly dragged back into an era they thought was passing away – the old language, old patterns, old characters, old announcements, old faces that should have retired from the scene all took the stage once again. These old patterns created a hallucinatory effect, such that no one became conscious of the fact that the actual functionof the repressive measures was precisely to re-establish the links among market mechanisms that had begun to fail.
On the surface it looked as though the old guard was emphasizing its Communist ways, but in reality market forces were being pushed through with unprecedented speed. This created an ironic situation where right-wing economists like Zhang Weiying – who like to talk about the withering of the state – have, in fact, been the biggest beneficiaries of one-party rule. The Communists have faithfully implemented his ideas for reform, while silencing critical voices on the Left.
Zhang Weiying was not immediately sure how things would pan out so he left Beijing for Oxford University to study for a PhD under the Nobel Prize-winning professor James Mirrlees. By the time he returned to China in 1994, the breakneck pace of reform had resumed. The size of the non-state sector had grown exponentially and China was already overcoming the international opprobrium which its brutal suppression of the demonstrations had provoked. Zhang Weiying immediately returned to the action, dividing his time between the business, academic and policy worlds. As well as sitting on a number of government task-forces, he runs the prestigious Guanghua School of Management at Beijing University, and advises a dozen of the biggest firms in China. Since 1995 he has been the most cited economist in Chinese economic journals.
Wang Hui and the left-wing reformers had a tougher time in the 1990s. Numbed by the ferocity of the assault on the protesters, disorientated by the bizarre alliance of convenience between the Communist Party and the new capitalist elite, and depressed by a growing body of thought that believed that history was coming to an inevitable end, he and his colleagues went underground. They fell back on the three weapons that James Joyce had advocated against repression: ‘silence, exile, and cunning’.
The rise of China’s ‘New Left’
I met Wang Hui in ‘Thinker’s Café’, a bright and airy retreat with comfy sofas and fresh espressos that sits on top of one of Beijing’s largest bookshops. Within a stone’s throw of three of the country’s most prestigious universities – Tsinghua, Beida and Renmin – it reverberates to the sound of earnest intellectual chatter. Today’s Wang Hui has overcome his despair. He has the guise of an archetypal public intellectual: a thin man with cropped hair, wearing a brown jacket and a black polo-neck sweater. He loves discussing abstract notions like ‘enlightenment’, ‘teleology’ and