The article below came to us from China before the protests that blew up in Hong Kong in the autumn of 2014, the most significant mass movement for democratic reforms in China since the Tiananmen events in 1989. The protesters, who were forcibly ousted by the Hong Kong authorities in mid-December, were demanding the right of free elections without vetting of candidates by the rulers of China.[1]
In Beijing in 1989, as the article below demonstrates, the massive entry of working-class demonstrators into the protests is what made the regime feel threatened and then to crack down murderously. The lessons drawn about Tiananmen – the need for working-class independence, for an independent workers’ media including leaflets and newspapers, for workers’ organized armed self-defense, for workers’ councils and a revolutionary working-class party – are crucial for future protest movements anywhere in China.
As in every year since the bloody massacre of thousands of students and workers in Beijing on June 4th, 1989, the 25th anniversary of this historic event was met with a great wall of silence in China. All references to the massacre were scrubbed from the internet; all discussions in workplaces and classrooms were silenced; and any spontaneous vigils or public commemorations that might have taken place were quickly suppressed. This is because the Tiananmen Square massacre, or Liu si (“6.4,” or June 4th) as it is referred to in mainland China, is the one modern historical event that China’s capitalist rulers must expunge from the collective memory of the people at all costs, an event whose terrible reality would lay bare before the masses the truly criminal nature of their ruling class.
As a revolutionary party seeks to embody the collective memory of the working class and its struggles, we must not only recall and relate this tragic episode and its lessons for the international working class; we must also seek to explain to class-conscious workers in China why the process of recovering and learning about the mass struggles of that period is so vital and relevant to our struggles today. We must fight against the official cynicism towards historical truth that pervades Chinese society, and help the working class understand that the veil of secrecy surrounding “6.4” is in fact a weapon in the hands of the ruling class to keep the working class ignorant of the immense power it possesses when it fights in its own collective interests. The fight against state censorship and historical falsification, and for the democratic right of workers’ organizations to publish and assemble, are inseparable from our daily struggles against capitalist exploitation and social misery. We must break the silence about June 4th!
The immediate spark for the Tiananmen protests was the death of former party leader Hu Yaobang on April 15th, 1989, and the calls by hundreds of Beijing University students for a reassessment of his legacy. Considered a liberal reformer at the time, Hu was a veteran Communist Party (CP) chief whose political career had closely followed that of his mentor Deng Xiaoping. He was widely known for his role in rehabilitating victims of the Cultural Revolution and for his tacit support for the activists who hung posters on Beijing’s Democracy Wall. After an earlier wave of student and worker protests in 1986, Hu had been accused of being too lenient and was removed as General Secretary when he refused to expel the protest leaders from the Party. After a humiliating public self-criticism, Hu was forced to withdraw from active political life in 1987, as the Party launched a (second) campaign against “bourgeois liberalization” and growing Western influence.
Yet on the economic front Deng pressed ahead with his market reforms, including a relaxation of price controls and an austerity drive within unprofitable state-owned enterprises. Rising inflation and unemployment in the cities was the backdrop to a growing perception that the Party elite and their kin were directly profiting from the painful transformation of society, since well-connected officials were able to procure goods at subsidized rates and resell them at market prices. Despite government pronouncements vowing a fight against officials profiteering from the dual-track pricing system, the Party was determined to press ahead with the lifting of price controls on basic foodstuffs, leading to panic buying, hoarding and a marked fall in bank deposits in the autumn of 1988. After an emergency meeting of the CP Central Committee in late August, the Party announced a temporary rescinding of price deregulation, but the eventual easing of the economic crisis could hardly compensate for the loss of the political authority that Party leaders had enjoyed in the early reform period.
Mass commemoration activities organized by students quickly turned into demonstrations as tens of thousands of protesters presented their “seven demands” calling for more democratic freedoms and an end to corruption. Official silence and police provocations over the following days enraged the general population, and hundreds of thousands of students began pouring into the square. By late April students had organized themselves under the banner of the “Beijing Autonomous University Students Union,” calling for a boycott of classes, and the newly formed workers’ organization, the Beijing Workers Autonomous Federation (WAF) had issued its first leaflets. Demonstrations and general unrest had also spread to all major cities in China.
With the growing tide of unrest, cracks began to develop within ruling circles. Party reformers under General Secretary Zhao Ziyang (who had replaced Hu Yaobang in 1987) favored a policy of moderation and dialogue, while hardliners centered around Premier Li Peng pressed for a crackdown. Peng took advantage of Zhao’s absence on a scheduled trip to North Korea and, with Deng’s support, rallied the party and military elite for a hard line. The infamous April 26th editorial in Peoples Daily claimed that the protests were “premeditated and organized turmoil with anti-Party and anti-socialist motives.” Deng had intended the editorial to serve as a warning, but it had the opposite effect of galvanizing students into organizing further mass protests throughout Beijing. When Zhao returned to Beijing on April 30th, he appeared to gain the upper hand in the factional struggle as the mood became increasingly conciliatory: press restrictions were temporarily relaxed and a series of “dialogues” were organized with the students. Yet in reality, such dialogues only served as a smokescreen, as Zhao later revealed in his memoirs:
“Originally the idea of the dialogue was to meet directly with the student demonstrators, but [Party leaders] not only denied the participation of any student organizations that had emerged during the demonstrations, they also prohibited the students from selecting their own representatives. They insisted on letting only students from official student organizations participate, which could not in any way have been representative of the student demonstrations. ... Also, when they did hold dialogues, they did not discuss things openly or seek diverse opinions with an attitude of sincerity. Instead they were merely paying lip service, in the same way that they had always handled foreign reporters at press conferences, presenting an image that would benefit themselves politically. This left the students with the impression that the government’s offer to hold dialogues with them was totally insincere.”[2]
Rifts also developed within the student movement as a radical faction emerged to challenge the sentiment among some to return to classes and put faith in dialogue. The radicals pressed for a withdrawal of the April 26th editorial and pushed for bolder tactics to reinvigorate the movement. Thus began the mass hunger strike and sit-in on May 13th, two days before a scheduled visit of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, with hundreds of thousands of sympathizing protesters occupying the Square. This return to flow-tide in the struggle also saw an escalation of mass protests throughout the country in hundreds of cities, with some Peoples Liberation Army (PLA) personnel and even many grassroots Communist Party organizations joining the solidarity demonstrations. It was also a critical juncture for participation in the movement by workers, who until then had been playing only something of a supporting role. A massive demonstration on May 17th was joined by factory workers throughout Beijing, an alarming development prompting senior leaders to close ranks.
Within days martial law was declared (May 20th), Zhao’s faction was effectively silenced and hundreds of thousands of troops were mobilized to begin a push into Beijing. Millions of Beijing residents poured into the streets and began fraternizing with the troops, who in their great majority came from poor peasant backgrounds. Splits began to appear in the army, with some units even going over to the side of the revolution and offering weapons. After four days they were ordered to pull back, as the military brass scrambled to assemble a more reliable elite force for a second, decisive assault. That came on the night of June 3rd, when new troops brandishing semi-automatic weapons backed by tanks converged on the center of the city with orders to clear the Square by the following morning. The bloodletting that followed became known forever around the world as the Tiananmen Square massacre. In the wake of the slaughter in Beijing, large-scale protests and battles continued around the country for many days, including strikes in Shanghai and other major street battles in Guangzhou and Chengdu.
It would be very difficult to say exactly how many people were killed during the massacre, but the official number of only a few hundred is a gross cover-up. Many analysts have pointed out that most of the killings actually took place in the neighborhoods surrounding the square and at the barricades along Changan Avenue, the principal route of the army’s approach. As is the case with all violent counterrevolutions in history, the massacre itself was not simply a bloodletting that allowed for a return to the status quo ante, but an opening of the floodgates of terror over the entire population. In its immediate aftermath, the terror was tangible: criminal neglect of the thousands of critically injured, tens of thousands of arrests, public executions, indefinite detentions, re-education camps, torture, suicides, mass expulsions from the Party and work units, blacklisting of student and worker leaders, endless investigations and self-criticisms, etc. And as usual the brunt of the terror fell on the working class. As the historian Maurice Meissner pointed out:
“Student casualties were far outnumbered by those suffered by workers and other Beijing residents, especially in the outlying working-class neighborhoods ... It was in these residential areas, far from the cameras and the minds of foreign news correspondents, that the greatest slaughters took place. ... Most of those arrested, and virtually all who were executed, were workers. With the obvious aim of terrorizing the population, it became a well-publicized policy to systematically subject arrested individuals to beatings and torture.”[3]
In the longer run the bitter fruits of the massacre were a little less direct but certainly no less real. In the economic and social sphere, the counterrevolution served to deepen the commitment of the ruling class to a whole series of wrenching economic reforms, including the further opening up of China to foreign investment and imperialist super-exploitation. Despite the initial economic paralysis and temporary strengthening of the “anti-reform” hardliners immediately following the massacre, the decapitation of the workers’ movement had removed the greatest obstacle to further economic austerity. Unlike in the Eastern European states, where perestroika (economic restructuring) and glasnost (openness) had moved forward in uneasy alliance during the unraveling of the Stalinist bloc, in China the economic restructuring continued while the relative political openness of the 1980’s came to a screeching halt. In this sense China’s evolution was more analogous to post-war South Korea and Taiwan, whose spectacular economic growth and industrialization took place under the whip of Western-sanctioned authoritarian rule.
What is less known is how Western free-market crusaders had been courted by Deng Xiaoping in the period preceding the massacre, when he was facing increasing resistance to the lifting of price and wage controls. “Chicago School” economist Milton Friedman was invited to China (for the second time) in September 1988, at the height of the economic chaos preceding the Tiananmen demonstrations. He met with Zhao Ziyang and then-Shanghai party chief Jiang Zemin, and offered the same advice he had given to Chilean butcher Augusto Pinochet more than a decade earlier: further privatization, a freer market and liberalization “at one fell stroke.” The Western neo-liberal professors and politicians who denounce China for its authoritarianism and lack of “democracy” share responsibility for the mass slaughter that made possible China’s central role in today’s “globalized” world economy – an economy based on outsourcing jobs from the imperialist countries and the super-exploitation of masses of workers in the oppressed countries.
It is no accident that the earlier trickle of rural migrant labor to the coastal areas in southeast China turned into a flood in the early 1990’s, as this new labor force could be more easily super-exploited and manipulated, now that the restive urban working class had been beaten into submission. The success of Deng’s structural reforms in turn reassured foreign investors who were salivating at the thought of exploiting the cheap migrant labor now being made available.
The migrant workers formed what Marx and Engels called a “reserve army of labor” – a pool of unemployed and under-employed workers that can be used to replace workers who are unwilling to accept lower wages, working and living conditions. Hailing from far-flung rural areas where their experience of life was framed by abject poverty and the isolated labor of peasant agriculture, they were willing to work for far less than the already settled urban working class.
The CP allowed these rural workers to migrate to urban areas to work but barred them from the rights to permanent housing, health care and education for their children that urban workers enjoyed.[4] The migrant workers were thus used by China’s rulers to unleash a massive austerity program against the state sector. Millions of workers were laid off from state-owned companies, and dramatic cuts were made to the gains known as the “iron rice bowl” that had been won by the urban working class: life-time employment and social benefits linked to an employee’s work unit. By the year 2001, tens of millions of urban state-sector workers had been laid off; later many of these older, unskilled workers were recruited into state-sponsored make-work programs to serve in a growing urban underclass of traffic guards, neighborhood security watchmen and streetwise bicycle attendants.
The political and cultural life of Chinese civil society also suffered enormously, despite the apparent material gains and the growth of a new middle class. No doubt there was a certain truth in the motto attributed to Deng Xiaoping that “getting rich is glorious,” but the minority who actually were able to do so profited much more from their corrupt Party guanxi (connections) and speculation than they did from productive investment. As for the middle classes, they soon internalized the post-Tiananmen social contract, trading in their independence of thought and their seats on the locally governing community committees for blind obedience and a rung on the corporate ladder. After all, one day it will be their turn to bark out the orders and interpret the mission statements
The art of political self-censorship became viewed as one of the better tools in the skill-set of career advancement – and rightly so, as it trumped the science of workplace productivity every time. The means justify the ends. Pervasive corruption, nepotism and anti-social pathology were the natural by-products of official contempt for human need and the rule of justice. Some elements who became disillusioned with such vapid cronyism and mindless sloganeering around them inevitably turned to mysticism, and even to cults such as Falun Gong, in the decade to follow. This was all very tragic of course, but it is lawful, as nature abhors a vacuum.
It is true that China under the Communist Party had been plagued by many of these intellectually and psychologically poisonous ills long before 1989, but it must be remembered that the 1980’s were years of social change marked by a seismic shift in political and cultural awakening, particularly among the youth. Since the Tiananmen events, political consciousness and the social bonds of civil society have been almost completely atomized, smothered in the totalitarian vise of pervasive censorship and police repression. It is not just the truth about Tiananmen itself that must be buried, but all roads that may lead there. While discussion on other sensitive historical issues (e.g. the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, etc.) has been allowed cautious, if limited, coverage in the media and popular literature, “6.4” remains a blank space. The Tiananmen genie, the specter of revolution, must never be allowed back out of the bottle.
Though originally billed as a “counterrevolutionary riot” in the period immediately following the events, the narrative has shifted over the years in an attempt to de-emphasize its significance and eventually expunge it from the collective memory. Middle-school and university textbooks make no mention of it at all any more, and the state media are under strict guidelines to censor all but passing references. Even in-depth historical pieces strictly adhere to the censors’ control. Many references to the “Tiananmen incident” refer not to June 4th, 1989, but to the violent suppression of mass demonstrations at Tiananmen Square in the spring of 1976, when protesters turned the mourning of the death of Zhou Enlai into a public forum to voice their grievances against the ruling Gang of Four.
This terminological confusion is not entirely accidental, and has its own inner political logic. What has passed into official historiography as the “Tiananmen incident” (1976) became significant for the post-Mao regime, not because this “incident” was in fact an outpouring of popular rage against the Gang of Four, but rather because Deng Xiaoping’s political rehabilitation after the Cultural Revolution depended on his being cleared of accusations made by the Gang of Four that he had been the “black hand behind the curtain” in promoting the demonstrations. In other words, instead of being treated as an indictment against the Gang of Four, the “Tiananmen incident” was cynically crafted into the textbook symbol of Deng’s victimization. The suffering of the masses counts for nothing; what was important was the creation of a “great man” myth.
The use of the phrase “Tiananmen incident” in the official media and press later came to serve another purpose as it conveniently doubles as two separate historical events, thus further obscuring Deng Xiaoping’s real crime as the mastermind behind the bloody 1989 massacre.
Indeed, all of China’s so-called second, third and fourth generation leaders (Deng Xiaoping, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao respectively) were intimately involved in the events of 1989. Of course, Deng’s central role in orchestrating the crackdown is generally known outside of China, but within China such a discussion is strictly off limits because it would explode the state-sponsored myth that places the great man Deng above the violent, factional politics that defined the Mao era.
Jiang Zemin also played a central role in the unfolding events. As Party leader in Shanghai at the time, he was already infamous for confronting student protesters before shutting down the liberal World Economic Herald and suspending its chief editor in April 1989. He was soon to fly to Beijing to play his part in the final bloody act, for which he was rewarded with the post of General Secretary, replacing the ousted Zhao Ziyang. As for Hu Jintao, during that tumultuous period he was Party boss in Tibet, responsible for overseeing a reversal of the relatively liberal ethnic policies initiated there by Hu Yaobang in the early 1980’s. In March of 1989, independence demonstrations were violently repressed in Lhasa under his watch with scores of casualties, and martial law was kept in place for more than a year.
With so much at stake in covering up the truth about June 4th, 1989, it is not surprising that the state apparatus has gone to extreme lengths to muzzle, intimidate and even murder critics. In 2011, former Tiananmen protester Li Wangyan was found hanged on June 6th in a Hunan province hospital room, just days after being interviewed for a Hong Kong TV program ahead of the 23rd anniversary of the crackdown. In the interview he had vowed to continue the fight “even if they cut off my head.” Li had spent 21 years in prison for his role in organizing workers’ strikes before his release in May 2011. He had been subjected to torture and was almost blind and deaf when he was released. Against the objections of his family, who wanted an independent investigation, the authorities cremated his body after ruling his death a suicide and warned his relatives not to venture outside. Other former leading Tiananmen activists on the mainland remain under constant surveillance, and on sensitive dates they are placed under house arrest.
As part of the “one country, two systems” agreement, Hong Kong remains the one place in China where political activists and Tiananmen exiles can exercise their democratic rights to assembly and produce independent media like websites and newspapers; this locus of activism around “6.4” is a thorn in the side of the mainland authorities. Overbearing pressure from the Communist Party has failed to stem the yearly mobilizations and vigils in commemoration of the massacre. Persistent attempts by Beijing to bully Hong Kong authorities into curbing such freedoms have backfired spectacularly, as mass mobilizations continue to be a popular means of forcing the local authorities not to buckle. A recent attempt in 2012 to introduce compulsory “patriotic education” into the Hong Kong school curriculum met with continuous demonstrations by tens of thousands of teachers, parents and students, leading to a limited victory forcing the authorities to delay its implementation. Protesters saw such a move as an attempt to brainwash students into accepting Beijing’s tortured view of “moral and national education,” a one-dimensional glorification of the “motherland” and Communist Party rule in which historical truth would be harmonized with its bleating, hypernationalist script on the mainland.
A quarter-century after the Tiananmen Square massacre, a new generation is yet to awaken to political consciousness. Unfortunately, the ruling class has been rather successful in burying the historical truth and experience of those events, especially on the mainland, and this makes the task of genuine communists all the more difficult. Nonetheless, we must make an attempt to make an analysis of the dynamics of that historical struggle as it unfolded to the best of our knowledge, and draw crucial lessons for future struggles to help prepare the revolutionary, Marxist perspective and program. Additionally, our assessment must take into account the dramatic economic transformation within China in the past 25 years, and how such a transformation affects and modifies some aspects and tactics of our overall revolutionary strategy.
The fact that the mass of protesters who rose up in 1989 and gathered most visibly in Tiananmen Square were pro-socialist is recognized as being beyond dispute by serious observers and historians. Aside from the singing of the “Internationale” in all phases of the struggle, a key axis of the mobilizations was the fight against growing inequality and capitalist profiteering by Party officials. Yet it can’t be denied that particularly among the students there were illusions that Western capitalist “democracy” would bring greater prosperity than Stalinist one-party rule. Such illusions continue to exist today. In tune with the recent propaganda about the “China Dream,” some young urban Chinese have come to believe that exponential economic growth will eventually translate into a general standard of living on par with America or France, complete with the democratic trappings of such imperialist nations.
But the Western “welfare state” and liberal democracy are now under attack by capitalist politicians. These institutions came into being historically in countries whose ruling classes profited from imperialist exploitation abroad, which fueled the expansion of the middle classes and allowed the capitalists to buy off a privileged section of the working class (the labor aristocracy, as Lenin called it). With these sections of the population at least temporarily enjoying a privileged position in the system, the imperialist ruling classes were able to grant the masses certain democratic rights and social benefits in exchange for domestic civil peace and a softening of the class struggle. That is, the relative democratic freedoms in the imperialist metropolises were systematically linked to the imperialist domination of the billions of exploited masses in the oppressed countries.
The bitter truth is that China is still fundamentally a victim of imperialist exploitation, and a such it simply cannot afford to prop up a labor aristocracy sizeable enough to calm the waves of class struggle in a nation of 1.4 billion people. The dream of a capitalist China based on sharing the imperialist super-exploitation of its own cheap labor could not survive in a country where all workers had the rights to organize and freely express their views. That is why the students’ hopes in the Stalinist “liberals” were suicidal illusions. Democracy is only possible through socialist revolution led by the workers.
Historically, students have been at the forefront of important social struggles in China – like those of the May Fourth Movement (1919), the December anti-Japanese Movement (1935) and of course the Tiananmen mobilizations (1989). But as they are socially amorphous and lack social power, student movements in themselves can play no independent role in major social conflicts. Ultimately, if students are to realize their dreams of seeing oppressive rule overthrown and a society of freedom arise in its place, they must ally themselves with the working class. In today’s China, where the industrial proletariat numbers in the hundreds of millions, the centrality of the working class to the solution of the nation’s social crises is much more apparent than 25 years ago.
In 1989, tensions between workers’ organizations like the Workers Autonomous Federation and student leaders revolved around attempts by students to exclude the “trouble-making” workers’ groups from the Square, as well as the sharply different attitudes students and workers tended to have towards Party reformers like Deng Xiaoping and Zhao Ziyang, whom the WAF openly denounced for corruption and nepotism. While the middle-class aspirations of many student leaders made them pliable to CP manipulation, it was the growing working-class involvement in the protests that drove the regime to act.
The active role of the working class in the struggle raises the critical importance of the weapon of the general strike. This weapon mobilizes various industries and sectors to fight and act as one, and this reinforces the workers’ confidence in their ability to challenge the ruling class and even replace it in holding state power and running society. Certainly many workers and even students were receptive to the idea of a general strike: in response to the June 4th crackdown there were calls issued for a general strike in many cities throughout China, but they came too late. Preparation for a general strike by spreading and explaining the idea in the earlier stages of the struggle would have better prepared the ground for its realization.
In a society as tightly controlled as China, where the Communist Party outlets have a monopoly on the press and near-absolute control of the flow of information, it is absolutely essential that underground workers’ organizations establish a public presence as soon as conditions of struggle permit. While internet-based workers’ and leftist media produced in Hong Kong and elsewhere are useful, the ability of the state to manipulate and shut them down means that printed leaflets and newspapers will always be essential to educating and organizing the workers’ movement. In the early stages of the Tiananmen demonstrations, such workers’ press organs could have provided a lifeline for the crucial flow of news and information about the struggle itself and cut against the tendency of protesters to make decisions based on the disinformation or the statements in Peoples Daily or other official organs. An eyewitness account of the Tiananmen events by an Australian leftist helps to illuminate this dire need:
“You would see underground newspapers taped onto the pole, or lamppost, and everybody would be reading these, and fighting their way to the front to do so. It was like something you read about the Russian Revolution in 1917. It was absolutely tremendous. And anybody who came out with leaflets was literally mobbed. It was like handing out 10 dollar notes in Sydney. I mean people would just come up and grab them off you. People would read almost anything. I happened to get my hands on a capitalist Hong Kong newspaper and even that was ripped to shreds. People were begging me for photographs from it, and so on. Such was the thirst for information and ideas.”[5]
Secondly, the circulation of a workers press with growing contributions from workers themselves helps working people to throw off a certain passive attitude and actively engage in the political process. The initiative of the WAF at the time was commendable in this respect, but in the future a more generalized, nation-wide effort must be made to coordinate the independent and speedy flow of information.
The fight for workers’ councils through which the working class can debate the issues of the struggle and elect delegates to higher bodies of leadership (and recall them) was a key missing ingredient in the Tiananmen struggles, and this is linked to the absence of a revolutionary party. In 1905 and 1917 in Russia as well as 1918 in Germany, 1956 in Hungary, 1979 in Iran and 1980 in Poland, such workers’ councils (soviets in Russian) arose out of the need to make decisions affecting the course of the struggle against the old regime. They also took on the form of a parallel workers’ government within the old society – a “dual power” rivaling the capitalist government and preparing itself to rule in its own right. Certainly many autonomous organizations sprung up in Beijing and challenged the hold of official organizations, but even Han Dongfan, a WAF leader at the time (currently director of China Labour Bulletin in Hong Kong) has admitted that worker self-organization was only in its infancy before the crackdown:
“The reason the workers came out onto the streets was to provide moral support for the students, like a big brother, but there was nothing in particular they wanted for themselves. When we asked factory workers, they said they wanted the government to treat the students better – and nothing more. Even when we got organized and drafted our charter, we wrote in a very general way; there was nothing as concrete as benefits, salaries, working hours or collective bargaining, though we did mention factory democracy, if I remember correctly. Politically and socially, we had never had the chance to be ourselves, as individuals or even as working-class people; we had not been able to base our thinking on what we needed. We were trying to make a leap, but it was our first leap, and we didn’t know how.”[6]
At a certain point in the struggle the idea of representative councils must also take root among the hundreds of millions of poor peasants, and by extension soldiers serving in the armed forces. Such organizations were key to the victory of the October Revolution in Russia, giving an organized expression to the revolt in the countryside.
Millions poured into the streets of Beijing on May 20th to repel the first assault consisting of hundreds of thousands of PLA soldiers of mostly poor peasant backgrounds, and this instinctive fraternization bore great fruit. The desperate, moving pleas and discussions with soldiers over the course of three or four days was another classic characteristic of a revolutionary situation The authorities were soon resigned to ordering the troops to withdraw to stations outside of the capital. Yet the pacifist illusions prevalent among the leading elements of the protesters discouraged attempts by some to agitate for soldiers to come over to the revolution, not as individual conscientious objectors (of which there were many), but as army units switching their military loyalty to the revolution. These pacifist illusions were very dangerous because they helped perpetuate the widely held belief that the PLA, as the “peoples army,” would never fire on its own citizens. Many participants gave accounts of armament factory workers or soldiers offering guns to the students, but the students refused and in some cases even destroyed weapons.
The question of splitting the army is intimately linked to the question of a workers’ militia. When the everyday struggles of workers reach a point where they take on a mass character, the capitalists begin to organize their groups of armed thugs and police agents to counterattack. This also took place sporadically during the Tiananmen occupation, when lightly armed student and worker groups patrolled the Square and at times fought with police provocateurs. Beginning with organizing pickets to defend meetings and demonstrations, such a tactic must naturally evolve into a more permanent workers’ militia to defend the masses and enforce the will of the workers’ organizations against reactionary bands or armed assaults by police. A workers’ militia would also play a key role at a point of revolutionary high tide in helping to split the army, which is absolutely essential to assure victory. To encourage the masses of soldiers to rebel against their officers, the working class needs to show its determination to fight all the way against their rulers, and nothing displays that determination as clearly as the formation of a workers’ militia. A political program that gives peasant- and worker-soldiers reason to join the uprising is key to winning them over.
A deepening revolution by its own logic draws in the most oppressed layers from the depths of society, and the workers’ movement must champion their cause. We have already mentioned the need for peasants’ and soldiers’ councils to give organized expression to the revolt in the countryside, which continues to be of major strategic significance even in the rapidly urbanizing and industrializing China of today. The plight of migrant workers in the cities, now 200 million or so people, is of strategic significance to the success of a workers’ revolution; this is clearly the most important social change in the political landscape since 1989. Though they are by social position part of the working class, they suffer from civil discrimination as non-urban residents and economic super-exploitation as labor-intensive, low-wage workers. A fight must be waged in defense of their civil rights and to grant them equal access to social benefits in the urban areas, principally through the abolition of the household registration (hukou) system.
Women and youth will also play a central role in future struggles, just as they did in 1989. Despite the great strides women have made since 1949, under statified capitalism (and the Maoist cult of the family) most continue to shoulder a double burden as workers and as primary care-givers in the traditional family unit. A burgeoning workers’ movement must also seek to make links with China’s oppressed national minorities (Tibetans, Uyghurs, Mongolians, etc.), and openly champion their right to self-determination. During the spring of 1989 separate protests also broke out in Tibet against the ongoing repression of demonstrations supporting independence, but unfortunately no attempt was made to link the two struggles. The fight against Han chauvinism and the “one China” policy is absolutely essential in breaking the Chinese masses from the ideological grip of the ruling class, and infusing their fighting spirit with proletarian internationalist consciousness.
There is no doubt that Chinese society is a pressure cooker that will explode into mass unrest in the not too distant future. But such a prospect doesn’t by itself assure victory for the working class and the oppressed masses, as the Tiananmen experience, like the Arab revolutions of 2011-13, demonstrates. The historical experience of the Russian Revolution shows that a revolutionary party that is capable of drawing the lessons of the struggle in each of its phases can make the key difference in bringing the revolution to a victorious conclusion, avoiding the tragic pitfalls that have beset many revolutions over the past century. Such a party does not shy away from telling the masses the truth about the capitalist-ruled society in which they live and exposing the pretensions of the many fake “Communist” and “socialist” leaders who objectively act as a brake on the struggle for working-class revolution.
As in pre-revolutionary Tsarist Russia a century ago, booming foreign investment and massive industrialization in China have laid a solid material basis for working-class rule, while politically Chinese society languishes in the straitjacket of censorship and police repression. In such conditions a revolutionary organization must remain underground to preserve its core structure without making a fetish of the underground circles, seeking to organize local workers’ study groups in the principal industrial and commercial centers. Such patient, underground work will play a vital role in preparing a nucleus of theoretically and practically educated worker leaders (cadres) to emerge when the class struggle explodes once again on a national level. Even a small revolutionary organization with roots in the working class and oppressed communities could expand its influence rapidly during a revolutionary period, attracting the most politically conscious and militant elements to lead the fight in the mass organizations for the conquest of state power.
The Tiananmen Square massacre 25 years ago was an enormous defeat for the working class and for the democratic aspirations of hundreds of millions of people. But its lessons can inspire future proletarian revolutionary movements and help guide them to victory.
1. See our analysis, In Defense of the Hong Kong “Umbrella Movement”, page 7 PDF. Our overview of the class nature of China since 1949 can be seen in the articles China’s Capitalist Revolutions; and Imperialism’s China Card .
2. Prisoner of the State, The Secret Journal of Zhao Ziyang
3. Maurice Meisner, The Deng Xiaoping Era (1996), pp. 462-464. This book presents a detailed history of the entire uprising and the regime’s retaliation.
4. Enter the Dragon: China’s New Proletariat
5. Eyewitness in China; the events in Tiananmen Square, May-June 1989 by Steve Jolly
6. Chinese Labour Struggles, New Left Review, July-August 2005;