First Published: Frontline, Vol. 7, No. 3, July 17, 1989.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
The debate still rages over exactly how many died on June 4 in Beijing. The Chinese leadership claim 300, mostly soldiers and police. The New York Times also thinks it was a few hundred, but with the composition reversed, overwhelmingly demonstrators. Most student oppositionists estimate 2-3,000 dead, while the state media of the “Republic of China” (that is, Taiwan) claim 20,000 fatalities. (Maybe that figure popped into their heads because that was the approximate number of Taiwanese nationalists butchered by the Kuomintang “security forces” in the late 1960s.) But whatever the exact “body count” was, an even more important question remains: what did the June 4 martyrs die for?
Did the Chinese student/worker upsurge really signal a “Revolt Against Communism” as Time gushed in its June 10 cover headline (and as Deng Xiaoping loudly maintains)? Or did it represent an embryonic left-oppositional current against the consequences of the “market reforms” and for a genuine “people’s democracy”? I think the latter.
The movement is by no means a homogeneous one. In Beijing, you had the phenomena of hundreds of thousands of students and workers singing the Internationale at an unveiling of a facsimile of the Statue of Liberty! You had students quoting Patrick Henry, but also loudly praising Gorbachev and becoming outraged when the giant portrait of Mao towering over Tiananmen Square was defaced. You also had strikes in Beijing and Shanghai led by a newly emerged non-Party Workers Union. Much of their outrage centered on the erosion of working class living standards under Deng.
The political character of the anti-martial law protests internationally has also been very mixed. For example, on June 5 in London, several thousand demonstrated against the crackdown. Most were PRC students, but the crowd included several hundred British leftists, primarily Trotskyists. (All three wings of the British Communist Party, the Euro-communists centered around the journal Marxism Today, the expelled pro-Soviet “Tankies” – labeled such because of their support for the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 – and the “Leninist” faction, basically abstained from the rally. All three groups, however, as well as literally every left organization in Britain, have denounced the shootings.) Among the Chinese students, the ideological spectrum ranged from supporters of Zhao Ziyang to a sizeable “Red Guard” contingent who called for a new Cultural Revolution. At the end of the rally, everyone sang the Internationale.
Across the globe in San Francisco, it was a very different scene. Approximately 20,000 rallied at the Chinese consulate and then marched through the city to Chinatown. The crowd was composed primarily of Chinese and Chinese-Americans, although several hundred others participated, primarily leftists but also including a few dozen ultra-right-wingers, among them Young Republicans, supporters of the exiled Tibetan Dali Lama, and representatives of Lyndon LaRouche’s latest organizational incarnation.
Most of the signs, whether in Mandarin or English, carried vague calls for Freedom and Democracy. There were, however, quite a few explicit “Death to Communism”-type signs, and the presence of the local Kuomintang and right-wing Taiwanese students was clearly felt. Their influence wasn’t strong enough, though, to prevent the left from marching and carrying out bustling newspaper sales (especially to the PRC students).
In conversations with the Chinese students and scientists that day, my companion and I encountered absolutely no overt anticommunist sentiments, although we did hear some impossibly contradictory opinions. One student, for instance, told us that he thought Mao was a great man and that kicking out the Japanese and KMT was of great historical significance, but that Taiwan today wasn’t so bad. Another, an ex-Red Guard, now a physicist in his forties, thought that Mao made tremendous contributions, but that the Cultural Revolution was a disaster and that China wasn’t really ready for socialism, and that maybe it needed to revert to capitalism and go through a period of capitalist development to achieve the economic level and technological superstructure to make socialism work the next time around.
The march ended in Chinatown with the burning of a flag with the hammer and sickle emblazoned on it. The march organizers, the Chinese students and scholars association, disapproved of the torching but took no action to stop it.
Other Chinese students were far more forceful in their opposition to anticommunist rollback. From June 19 to 21, a series of meetings was held in Honolulu by a coalition of overseas Chinese student organizations. One of the keynote speakers was “Xiao Li.” This was a pseudonym used by a leader of the Student Cultural Society in Hunan, who was able to leave the PRC after June 4. In an interview published in Working Class Opposition (June 1989) he presented his views, beginning with his view of the similarities between what’s been happening in China and in the USSR under Gorbachev:
“We would like for the Soviet masses to know what the economic reforms have done to workers in Shanghai, Canton, Beijing, Wuhan, Xiamen and Shandong. These reforms reintroduced unemployment as a product of industrial competition; professional and labor sickness have reappeared as a consequence of the cuts in health insurance made to increase productivity; the quality of products has deteriorated because now prices are supposed to compete; corruption, privilege, even prostitution have risen as products of decentralization of the economy.”
On the situation of national minorities in both countries he said: “The Armenians, and for the matter the Tibetans or everyone oppressed by the Han Chinese (our version of the Great Russians) need the establishment of a complete and different social and political structure.”
As regards the “Free World”: “Of course, I’m of the opinion that the Great Western Powers have little to teach the Soviets or the Chinese on this matter. After more than 200 years of domination over most of the world, the bourgeois democratic nations have proven themselves incapable of dealing with the national aspirations of the Palestinians, the Irish, the Black people of South Africa, only to mention a few. I don’t see the Armenians or the Georgians, or our own people, having much to learn from the Western way of dealing with these problems. It is the same thing in the economic arena. I don’t see the point of replacing Deng, Li and other privileged rulers of our country with the Rockefellers, Rothchilds, the tycoons and owners of banks, industries and lands that rule your countries.”
But when asked if he was a Marxist, Xiao Li opined that: “I don’t really know. I’m not even at the point at which many French Marxists are talking about the ’crisis of ideology’.”
So the movement is rife with contradictions. Its overall thrust, however, is emphatically against restoring capitalism. Sure, there are a few hundred individual exceptions, but “wanna-be” Donald Trumps don’t link arms and sing the Internationale while APCs crush them to death.
The movement therefore needs genuine allies, especially in the U.S. There’s an urgent need for those of us who consider ourselves part of the socialist left (despite our very real differences) to unite against the grotesque crimes being carried out falsely in the name of socialism, and to do what we can to counter the intense anticommunist barrage, which is of course aimed at the left as a whole.
Such a United Front could hold rallies, teach-ins, demonstrations under its own banner at Chinese consulates and the Washington, D.C. embassy, form contingents at any and all actions not dominated by the KMT, and last – but for damn sure not least – try to build links with PRC students who aren’t yet enamored with the wonders of U.S. “free enterprise.”
The political composition of such a coalition would not be the same as, for example, an alliance organizing a picket line at the local federal building against contra aid. There, anyone and everyone who opposed U.S. intervention would be encouraged to participate, regardless of whether or not they wanted to see a socialist transformation of the Central American isthmus. The Beijing crimes, however, call for a radically different political analysis than one would apply to the contra war. Despite a certain brutal similarity in their methods, the June 4 atrocities were committed by a ruling bureaucratic caste of a post-capitalist society, not – as in Central America – by the ruling class of the world’s foremost imperialist power.
In 1949, capitalist property forms were overthrown in the world’s most populous nation. More than at any other time since the ending of the Korean War, there is a U.S. ruling class consensus to totally take the “People” out of the “Peoples Republic.” Their collective appetite has been whetted by Deng’s erosion of collectivized property forms and post-liberation gains. Naturally, the recent events have greatly fueled their hopes fora genuine counter-revolution. Anyone who is a socialist (of whatever of Heinz’s 57 varieties) can see that would be a tremendous setback, not only for the people of China, but for the entire planet. So a basic point of unity for a left united front would be for a socialist democracy in the PRC, a denunciation of the repression and the phony “anti-counter-revolutionary” rationale behind it, a repudiation of the U.S. government’s blatant hypocrisy and a rejection of “sanctions,” and a clear unambiguous opposition to any “rollback” of whatever gains of the Chinese revolution that still remain.
At the risk of sounding doctrinaire or, even worse, as pale pink yuppie cynics would label it, “politically correct,” there are times when you have to clearly draw the class line. It is tragically unfortunate that there couldn’t have been such a coalition in place to have responded immediately after June 4, as happened elsewhere in the world. But it ain’t over yet. The crisis facing the Chinese people and the tiny clique of octogenarian Stalinists ruling over them is far from resolved. There will be another explosion, and maybe the next time around there can be a united left response in defense of those incredibly heroic rebels who, despite all their confusion and illusions, are our comrades, not theirs.
Stan Woods is an independent-socialist activist and an occasional journalist. Born and bred in West Virginia, he presently lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.