Dreaming of Tiananmen

The immediate impact of the protests in China should not be overstated. Yet, this is the first sign of cracks in the post-Tiananmen consensus that built 21st-century China

Over the past week, a lot of people around the world will have been thinking about the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. The ongoing protests in the People’s Republic of China, sparked essentially by its draconian “Covid Zero” policy, do not approach the scale or nature of the 1989 protests. Nor are they either large or widespread enough to force the Chinese Communist Party to change course about anything it sees as fundamental to its rule. Yet they are in many ways of a different quality from localised protests in the past. Some former leaders of the 1989 student protests, who are now in exile in Taiwan or in the West, have noted that these are the first demonstrations in China that have explicitly referenced the liberal freedoms that the Tiananmen Square activists were fighting for.

There is another aspect to these protests — which followed nationwide revulsion at a fire in Xinjiang’s capital that killed several people — that is worth noting. Previous protests were often against local issues like regional air pollution and corrupt officials, or specific issues, such as depositor protection following the Evergrande collapse at the beginning of this year. The catchment areas and those energised by the protests were strictly limited. Not only is Covid Zero a far more pervasive issue, but recent weeks have seen the growth of rhetorical solidarity between otherwise quite disparate pockets of discontent. Ethnic minority-dominated Xinjiang, workers at the Foxconn plant that makes iPhones in Zhengzhou, and students from elite universities in Chinese megacities would not before have had any reason to make common cause.

Again, the immediate impact of these protests should not be overstated. Much dissatisfaction could be relieved simply by making it clear to the Chinese populace that there is a path out of the pandemic, and the central government has already started trying to do so. Yet it is also the first sign of cracks in the post-Tiananmen consensus that built up 21st-century China.

The leading architect of that consensus, by an odd twist of fate, also died this week. The mainstay of China’s “third generation” leadership, Jiang Zemin, was 96, and his public appearances had become increasingly rare of late. He had been the focus of rumours early in Xi Jinping’s reign as disapproving of the direction of policy; and the removal of some of his proteges from important positions had been an important marker of Mr Xi’s consolidation of power at that time. Jiang’s passing, together with the apparent public humiliation of his successor Hu Jintao at the Party Congress a few weeks ago, served to underline how distant today’s China is from the country of Hu Jintao, of Jiang Zemin, and even of Deng Xiaoping. Collective leadership and technocratic consensus under these leaders provided the foundation for China’s growth and political stability; Mr Xi’s China looks less likely to grow or be stable.

In another quirk of history, the Tiananmen protests themselves were set off partly by the death of a popular second generation leader, Hu Yaobang. Hu, as General Secretary of the Party till 1987, and Zhao Ziyang, as his Premier  and then his successor as General Secretary, led the formal structures of power while the paramount leader Deng himself was technically “merely” Chairman of the Central Military Commission and the Central Advisory Commission. But Hu was associated closely with attempts to set legal limits on the Party’s power and influence; and Zhao with financial reforms, political openness, and government transparency. Memorials for Hu’s life and work eventually swelled into the broader protests associated with Tiananmen.

Zhao, as General Secretary, tried to engage with the protestors; but Deng sided with Party hardliners and martial law was declared. Zhao was fired as General Secretary, and famously wandered out to deliver a final speech to the students assembled at Tiananmen, calling them to “think rationally” while promising the “door to dialogue” would always be open in China. The Party elders then summoned Shanghai’s local boss to replace Zhao as General Secretary. That boss was Jiang Zemin.

Jiang Zemin was, therefore, unavoidably central to both the bad and the good of post-1989 China. He represented the Party’s choice —which was, in the 1980s, by no means pre-ordained — to turn decisively away from greater freedom for the people and limits on its own power. But he also represented rule by consensus; structured economic modernisation (disappointing some of the hardliners who had summoned him to Beijing); and the beginning of the grand bargain between Party and people in which the people would be quiet as long as the Party delivered rapid progress and made a good-faith effort to represent all their interests. Perhaps the greatest difference between the protests today and those of 1989 is that, in the China that Mr Xi is building, protestors would perhaps be willing even to take the future that Jiang promised over the dreams of 1989.