PRC at 75: Deng Xiaoping never delivered on young people’s desire for freedom

Read RFA’s coverage of this in Chinese.

Editors note: This is the second in a series of profiles of Chinese leaders on the 75th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China.

Many in China under Communist Party leader Xi Jinping look back to the economic boom-time under late supreme leader Deng Xiaoping with nostalgia, as a freewheeling era in which it was easier to get rich, and when the government had less control over people’s lives. But the reality of life under Deng was much grittier, political activists and commentators told RFA Mandarin in recent interviews.

In June 1983, postgraduate philosophy student Chen Kuide was singled out for political criticism after taking part in an academic conference in the southwestern city of Guilin, as part of a political campaign against “spiritual pollution.”

It was just a few years after then supreme leader Deng had kicked off a slew of economic reforms and “opening up” to the rest of the world in the wake of the death of Mao Zedong and the trial of the Gang of Four that marked the end of the Cultural Revolution.

But despite the rosy glow that often suffuses people’s memories of China in the 1980s, the political campaigns didn’t stop when the universities reopened and the government started the massive task of rehabilitating people who had been persecuted under Mao and his wife, Jiang Qing.

Instead, Deng launched the “spiritual pollution” campaign targeting anyone with any liberal tendencies, who advocated humanitarianism, market economics or appreciation of the arts for their aesthetic, rather than social, value.

By the time Chen got back to his dorm at Shanghai’s Fudan University, there was a red circle around his name on a list in the municipal government, and Chen and a fellow student were suspended from their studies for three months. Luckily for Chen, the campaign was later called off and he was reinstated. 

His friend with government connections told him at the time: “There was a red circle round your name, as if you were going to be exiled to Qinghai or something.”

Leaving aside the upbeat official narrative of “reform and opening up,” the 1980s was not an easy time to be Chinese, according to veteran U.S.-based democracy activist Wang Juntao.

“I don’t think there was any golden age during the 1980s,” Wang said. “Intellectuals back then were pretty unhappy with Deng Xiaoping and Zhao Ziyang.”

Fall of Hu Yaobang

A 1980 amendment to the country’s constitution deleted a clause protecting people’s right to “speak out, air their views freely, hold debates and make big-character posters,” while a 1978 amendment made two years after Mao’s death deleted their right to “reproductive freedom,” amid growing concerns about the burgeoning population.

A system of film censorship was set up in 1980, while the right to private ownership of land disappeared with a constitutional amendment in 1982.

Nationwide student protests in 1986 were sparked by local officials’ insistence on interfering in local elections to the People’s Congresses, and spread from eastern Anhui province to Shanghai and Beijing, in protests that lasted 28 days.

Former 1989 student leader Chen Pokong also took part in the 1986 student protests in Shanghai.

“We didn’t do anything much; just walked along the street and sometimes sat in front of the city government,” he said. “We weren’t trying to overthrow the government, just asked them to move a little faster and meet some of people’s demands for democracy and equality.”

“It all fizzled out peacefully in the end, because the weather was cold, and the winter vacation was about to begin, and a lot of students wanted to go back home for the Lunar New Year,” he said.

Soon afterwards, news emerged that premier Hu Yaobang would resign to take the fall for those protests, blamed for his “ineffective leadership.”

Then the party expelled a number of prominent dissidents from its ranks, including journalist Liu Binyan, physicist Fang Lizhi and author Wang Ruowang.

“Before that, I didn’t have much of an impression of Deng Xiaoping — he just seemed like a short little guy among the old guys in charge of the Chinese Communist Party,” Chen said. “But he had suddenly made such a big move, and I started to think about why that would be. I felt he didn’t really understand young people or our ideas.”

“Once young people get started with economic reform, they’ll immediately start to want political reform too, and as soon as they start to interact with the West, they’ll want freedom and democracy,” he said.

“But this old man just wanted to take a leisurely walk — he was behind the times, and not suited to ruling the country. He should have let younger people take charge,” Chen said.

1980s political purges

Following the 1986 protests, the right to demonstrate was stripped from students in Beijing, with the passage of new regulations warning that anyone who took part in “unauthorized parades” would be prosecuted. Those rules were enshrined in national law after the 1989 Tiananmen Square mass protests.

“For me, there was nothing good about the 1980s. Anyone who tried to fight for freedom and democracy was still suppressed,” said Wang, citing the heavy jail terms handed down to 1979 Democracy Wall dissidents Wei Jingsheng and Wang Xizhe.

“The political purges continued throughout the 1980s, and large numbers of people were affected each time,” he said. “I think people who remember the 1980s as a good time probably didn’t care much about politics.”

“I don’t think there has ever been a good time under the Chinese Communist Party, and that hasn’t changed.”

U.S.-based former Party School professor Cai Xia agreed that life was still pretty tough for ordinary Chinese.

“The door had been left open just a crack for people to push open if they tried hard enough … and people just wanted to survive,” Cai said. “They had been poor for more than a decade.”

Cai said most of the “reform” and “opening up” under Deng was largely the work of the people themselves, spurred on by new “household responsibility” contracts for farmers, by the return of exiled intellectuals to the cities in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, and by new rules allowing people to set up in business for themselves and sell their wares in “free markets.”

“Even Deng Xiaoping admitted this when he said, ‘we didn’t do anything; it was the people who were creative, and we just affirmed their creativity’,” Cai told RFA Mandarin in a recent interview.

Part of the perception of the Deng era as a golden age stems from his lionization in Western media, including his nomination by Time Magazine as “Man of the Year” twice, an honor it has bestowed on just four non-U.S. citizens.

“Historical evaluations of Deng Xiaoping were really too complimentary,” veteran journalist and political commentator Hu Ping told Radio Free Asia, adding that Deng had little to do with the crushing of the Gang of Four, nor with the rehabilitation of millions of people persecuted unjustly during the Mao era.

Cai said that before he ordered the People’s Liberation Army to clear Beijing of unarmed civilians, causing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of deaths, Deng was a master at going with the flow, and allowing things to happen, rather than initiating change.

“He basically put his legal stamp on some new economic phenomena that were emerging among, and driven by, ordinary people,” she said. “In terms of his vision and ideology, he was still pretty conservative, and was looking to maintain the status quo in China over the long term.”

Only ‘partially de-Maoified’

Former high-ranking Chinese Communist Party aide Yan Jiaqi, who once worked for late ousted premier Zhao Ziyang, said that China did enjoy some good years before the 1989 bloodshed, citing new rules limiting presidents and premiers to just two terms in office.

But in written comments to Radio Free Asia, he said Deng had only “partially de-Maoified” China, paving the way for current General Secretary Xi Jinping to take the country further to the left, and step up authoritarian controls over people’s lives in recent years.

Morally, Hu likened Deng to a doctor who has cured a large number of patients but murdered some along the way.

“Because of the Tiananmen massacre, Deng is guilty for a thousand years, regardless of what he did before or after,” he said. “It makes no difference.”

And the crackdown pretty much shut down any hopes of political reform, he said. 

“A country that achieves rapid development along such a pathway will be more confident, more arrogant, and more powerfully authoritarian,” Hu said. “And it is bound to be far more contemptuous, hostile and fearful of universal values like justice, human rights and democracy, and to pose a greater threat to peace and freedom around the world.”

While Wang put the sense of hope in pre-Tiananmen China down to youthful dreams, Chen Pokong can still remember being overwhelmed with a dizzying sense of new possibilities, simply because people now had regular access to something outside of their daily lives.

“I remember that there were really new things every day, new clothes, new books, new music, new dances,” he said. “I had the feeling that the country would move forward into the future, no matter what happened.”

That belief was soon to be shattered, with the news that People’s Liberation Army soldiers had opened fire on civilians in Beijing on the night of June 3, 1989, on the orders of Deng Xiaoping.

Chen Pokong was lying in his dorm room in Guangzhou when a classmate shouted the news. He tuned into Hong Kong radio to find out more, and wrote big-character posters on the Sun Yat-sen University campus in protest at the bloodshed.

Chen Kuide, meanwhile, had accepted an invitation to study at Boston University. He flew out of Beijing on June 5, a day after seeing smuggled Hong Kong TV footage of the massacre.

The sense of fear as his university shuttle bus threaded its way through army roadblocks on the way to the airport, with people cycling there after public transportation was suspended, was to be his last, lingering memory of China.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie. Edited by Luisetta Mudie and Paul Eckert.