Tiananmen, 30 years later
Tags: China, Communism, Politics, News, Tiananmen

On June 4 (as the Chinese call it), the Communist Party of China (CPC), using military force, evicted the students who had occupied it since April from Tiananmen Square. At the end of the 30th anniversary of that date, it is pertinent to ask about the future of democracy in the Asian giant.

Those events put the powerful leader Deng Xiaoping against the ropes. The most conservative wing of the Communist Party, which had already warned him that private enterprise, the market and the profit motive as an engine of the economy violated his concept of socialism, accused him of the price that the US demanded to help him. in its economic reform it was the liquidation of the socialist system for the sake of the liberal democracy demanded by the students in the Plaza. But Deng’s interpretation of both the events of Tiananmen and the subsequent collapse of communism in Europe and the end of the USSR was that the reform effort had to be redoubled, instead of the backward movement demanded by the conservatives.

After a couple of years of braking, Deng relaunched the reform on a trip to the special economic zones of southern China in early 1992. At 84, he found enough energy and mental clarity to make the country one last big favor. The result was the fastest economic development process in world history. In 2014, China’s GDP, at purchasing power parity, exceeded that of the United States. The $ 700 per capita income of 1989 has become the current 10,000. A similar success gives the CCP enormous legitimacy, reflected in international polls. According to last year’s Edeman Trust Barometer Global Report, 84% of Chinese people approve of their government’s performance, the world’s maximum, compared to 49% in the US, 44% in France and Germany, 43% in the United Kingdom United or 40% in Spain.

The main political effect of the Tiananmen events was the dismissal of the CPC General Secretary, Zhao Ziyang, champion of the political reform from within the system, adopted by the XIII Congress in October 1987: separation of Party and State (they had begun to eliminate the cells of the Party in ministries, companies, universities, etc.) and creation of a system of checks and balances without suppressing the monopoly of the political power of the Party, giving greater power to unions, the Youth League, and so on. After Tiananmen, Deng, who had previously endorsed the ongoing political reform, said: “Separating the State Party is a sign of bourgeois liberalism.” And that is where the Political Reform ended with a capital letter. Since then, however, important political reforms have been launched, which the West tends to underestimate because they do not go in the direction of liberal democracy: legal protection of private property, opening of the CCP’s doors to private entrepreneurs, democratic elections on a local scale, etcetera. The system of collective management that replaced the one-man dictatorship of Mao, with limitation of the number of mandates and retirement age, has been diminished by the removal of the limit of two mandates to the head of the state, but for the other charges it is still valid. . A peculiar mechanism of the Chinese system is the consultative democracy consisting of a vast system of consultations prior to economic and political decisions; in the case of five-year plans, for example, it lasts several years in search of consensus among the various interests and levels of power. In China there is no democracy, but public opinion. The Party constantly listens to it and attends to it, knowing that its power ultimately depends on it. Thus, the cleanliness of the air that is breathed in large cities has become one of the highest priorities.

An increasingly rich, educated, informed, traveled population (130 million tourists went abroad last year), with large middle classes (some 300 million) in rapid rise, may one day request a greater degree of participation in the political process. If so, the power will have to find formulas to accommodate that demand. In the economic field China has achieved its enormous success based on an original mix between a large public sector (managed by a very effective meritocracy, heir to the millenarian mandarinato, which Greenspan called “the best political class in the world”) and a private sector that produces about two thirds of the GDP (the Chinese is, above all, a businessman of race, as demonstrated by the minorities of overseas Chinese, who control the economies of China’s neighboring countries and are known as the Jews of Asia) . I wonder if there would be a similar mix in politics: a greater degree of participation in the political process that citizens consider sufficient, that is the key, while maintaining the effectiveness of the authoritarian state. The balance of opposites is an essential principle of Chinese thought.

The White Paper on the Construction of Political Democracy in China, published by the CPC in 2005, reads: “Democracy is the result of the development of the political civilization of mankind, it is also the common desire of the people of all The world, but the democratic principle takes shape in different ways according to the countries and the circumstances, China has the right to define its own model of democracy with Chinese characteristics, taking into account its history, its political culture and the current conditions of China. . What the CCP categorically rejects is the universal value of Western interpretation of the democratic principle, liberal democracy. The Chinese political system will be, in short, what the Chinese want it to be. It can not be excluded that one day it will include elements of liberal democracy, although it will always have its own characteristics, as does its economic system.

Westerners have to give time to time. And stop seeing China according to the color of crystal or pretend that it is in image and likeness. George Kennan, the main US political strategist in the last century, wrote in 1951 those words dedicated to Russia, perfectly valid for China: “Give them time, let them be Russians, let them solve their internal problems in their own way. That people spreads in the direction of self-esteem and enlightenment in the Government are things that constitute the deepest and most intimate process of national life, there is nothing less understandable for foreigners, nothing in which foreign influence can do less well “

I WOULD NOT WANT to finish this reflection without remembering that TVE was the only television in the world that remained in Tiananmen Square the night of June 3–4, 1989, when the troops occupied it. Filmed the output of the students who were there, about 3,000 grouped around the Monument to the People’s Heroes. The following days most of the world press said that the troops had massacred them in the Plaza. This is flatly false and is now generally admitted. That the dead were inside the Plaza, or in its accesses and in the large communications junctions that lead to it, does not change the essence of what happened. Due to a series of circumstances, the images filmed by José Luis Márquez, one of the most valuable exclusives that TVE has achieved in its history, were not edited adequately. It is time for it to be done and disseminated.