First Published: Frontline, Vol. 7, No. 2, July 3, 1989.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
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Contrary to initial reports in the mainstream press, the world’s socialist governments and communist parties have for the most part responded to the military crackdown in China with criticism and condemnation. But such sentiment was not universal, and ruling parties tended to be more cautious than those out of power.
The extremes of opinion in the international communist movement were most evident in Eastern Europe. The Hungarian government, currently engaged in a far-reaching process of internal democratization, denounced the use of military force and encouraged mass demonstrations at the Chinese Embassy in Budapest.
In contrast, the German Democratic Republic issued a statement declaring that “the political solution of internal problems persistently strived for by the party and government leadership of the People’s Republic of China has been hindered owing to violent, bloody riots of elements hostile to the government. As a result, the People’s Army found itself forced to build order and security by employing armed force ...”
The official Soviet response was a statement approved by the full Congress of People’s Deputies by a show of hands June 6. “Now is not the time for unconsidered, hasty conclusions and statements,” the Soviet legislature said. “However high the passions run at times, it is important to search patiently for such adequate political solutions as would be determined by the aim of consolidating society.”
“Of course, the events happening in China are in internal affair of the country,” the statement continued. “Any attempts at pressure from the outside would be inappropriate. Such attempts only blow up passions and do not promote stability of the situation in any way.”
The careful wording and tone of the Soviet statement came as no surprise. The summit culminating a long, high-priority Soviet effort to normalize Sino-Soviet relations had just taken place, and Sino-Soviet ties remain at a delicate and pivotal stage. While in Beijing, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had walked a similar verbal tightrope, commenting that the demonstrations were a “painful” but “necessary” part of renewing socialism, while placing events in China in the context of the trend toward democratization in all socialist countries.
Unofficial statements, however, gave more clues to the thinking of important figures in the Soviet Communist Party, especially those identified with militant support for perestroika. Georgi K. Shakhazarov, a close aide to Gorbachev, said that he had personally wanted to include an explicit appeal against violence in the Congress statement, but that it was approved before he had a chance to suggest it. He added that the statement’s appeal for “wisdom and reason” was an implicit call for an end to violence. Boris Yeltsin, who has emerged as the most popular leader of those arguing for acceleration of reform and sharper struggle against Soviet “conservatives,” criticized the official resolution as “wrong”. The Chinese army actions were “a crime against their own people and against humanity,” Yeltsin said. “It is necessary to give a principled, independent evaluation of a crisis like this.”
In the immediate aftermath of the crackdown the revolutionary governments of Vietnam, Cuba and Nicaragua were subject to a classic Washington misinformation campaign, with U.S. media outlets falsely reporting that they supported the crackdown. The reports were without evidence and were denied by representatives of all three countries. Important details of the misinformation effort were exposed by columnist Alexander Cockburn in the Wall Street Journal June 15.
The Vietnamese foreign minister held a press conference deploring the bloodshed and saying his government hoped for a “peaceful” and “democratic” solution. The Cuban government offered no official statement on the Chinese events, but Angel Pino, press attache of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C. said claims that Cuba supported the Beijing massacre are “an absolute fabrication .. .I don’t know who cooked it up.”
Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega issued a statement criticizing the violence in China, just as he abhorred the violence in South Africa and Palestine. “If we are going to condemn violence, we must do so clearly, forcefully, wherever it takes place,” he said. The FSLN endorsed as its own a position taking by Nicaragua’s National Association of University Students, which refers to “indiscriminate repression” and asserts that “we cannot find any reason to justify this kind of reaction ... a military response does not address the concerns, does not clarify the doubts, does not kill the demands.”
The excuse seized upon for the distortion of Nicaragua’s position was the fact that Barricada, the FSLN newspaper, included a quote from a Chinese government statement as part of its coverage of events in Beijing. But this was in context of several days of full-page coverage filled with blaring headlines referring to repression, condemnation, figures of thousands dead and 10,000 wounded. The Nicaraguan government strongly protested the U.S. media’s misinformation: “To conclude that Barricada supported the violence in China by the mere fact that the newspaper, as part of its extensive coverage on the events in that country, quoted a Chinese government statement, is more than absurd; it is malicious, yellow journalism.”
A number of communist parties not in power were particularly strong in their criticisms of the crackdown. The Italian Communist Party (PCI), largest in the world outside the socialist countries, denounced it in the strongest possible language and led protests at the Chinese Embassy in Rome. Newly elected PCI secretary Achille Ochetto went beyond specific criticism of the Chinese government to distance his party even more than previously from the current political systems in the socialist states: “In the East, communism is a term that has no relation any longer to its historic origins, and constitutes a political framework that is completely wrong,” he said.
The French Communist Party, the second largest in Western Europe, also strongly denounced the massacre and led protests at the Chinese Embassy in Paris.
In Japan, the half-million member Japanese Communist Party termed the massacre a “brutal outrage” and “inexcusably savage act.” While other Japanese politicians were urging caution and balance, the communists issued a special edition of their newspaper, Akahata (Red Flag), condemning the massacre just hours after it occurred.
While differing widely in their analyses of the roots of China’s crisis, the major publications and organizations of the U.S. left were nearly unanimous in condemning the government’s military crackdown. The only voice supporting the Chinese leadership was the Workers World Party; which termed the repression a justified response to a “violent counter-revolutionary rebellion.” And the Communist Party USA was a partial exception to the left consensus: no official party statement has been issued, and CPUSA chair Gus Hall’s assessment in the People’s Daily World, while expressing concern over the loss of life, stopped short of explicitly criticizing the decision to use force against the protesters.
In These Times, the main publication of the influential democratic socialist current on the U.S. left, published an editorial (June 21) denouncing the “brutality” and “contempt for human life” of the Chinese government and contrasting it to positive changes taking place in other socialist countries. The main analytic emphasis was on the need for political pluralism in every country; the pro-democracy movement in China was located as “part of a worldwide groundswell for political democracy that is an inevitable result of the communications revolution.” In These Times argued that a “one-party state is incapable of meeting the needs of modem society and no longer tolerable.” It concluded with an assessment of the future of the socialist countries: “The people of China, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe do want economic decentralization ... an end to the stifling bureaucracy ... civil liberties and rights ... But they do not want to replace their government bureaucracy with a corporate one ..... The uprisings in the East will not end in a triumph of corporate capitalism, but they will create the possibility of a truly democratic socialism.”
Similarly, the Nation magazine (June 26) argued that “the Chinese students were crying anathema not at socialism, as our clever pundits would have us believe, but at all the perverted bureaucracies that demand the sacrifice of political freedom on the alter of national security.” Its condemnation of the Tiananmen massacre targeted U.S.-China military and economic relations as helping transform China into the kind of “modern national security state” that requires democratic transformation.
The main organizational expression of U.S. left social democracy, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), issued a statement hailing the student protesters for “leading the fight for democracy” and criticizing China’s “repressive status quo.”
The Guardian newspaper, which writes from an independent Marxist-Leninist perspective and has covered China’s protest movement extensively over the last two months, added its editorial voice (June 14) to the call for democratization of socialism: “The massacre ordered by a small entrenched group intent on retaining power at any cost has pushed the People’s Republic of China to the brink of civil war and heaped discredit on socialism, both in China and internationally. For Ieftists worldwide, the brutal actions of this authoritarian clique illustrate the crucial importance of the struggle for socialist democracy.”
The Guardian editorial also argued that the events in China “underscored the danger inherent in ’market socialism’.”
An opinion piece by former Guardian editor Jack Smith in the same issue pressed a similar logic, arguing that “the Chinese party is now reaping the bitter harvest it so methodically has sown these last dozen years by its renunciation of revolutionary socialism and its so far partial but continuing restoration of capitalism and the class system.” In the following issue, an opinion piece by Cliff Durand, who has been the Guardian’s main newswriter on China, stressed the call to democratize socialism and implied a favorable view of the Cultural Revolution as an effort to achieve this objective.
Writing before the crackdown in the CPUSA’s newspaper (May 25), party chair Gus Hall devoted his main stress to criticizing the “U.S. and world capitalism and their media mouthpieces” for “using the student protests to push the ideas that socialism is hopelessly anti-democratic, that the Communist Party is hopelessly bureaucratic and insensitive to people’s needs and desires.” Hall argued that the student demonstrators made “big efforts to get workers to join in ... They failed. The class question obviously stood between them.” He added that “martial law was proclaimed” in order to prevent “anarchy and chaos.”
Three days after the crackdown, the People’s Daily World (June 6) published a firsthand report from Beijing by its associate editor and Moscow correspondent Carl Bloice which painted a different picture. Bloice wrote that the protest “at one time swelled to nearly two million people” and that “in a real sense it was not a ’student demonstration’ after May16, when hundreds of thousands of local residents of all ages began pouring into the streets either to join the action or to cheer the demonstration ... By May 19, many more workers had gone on strike and large rallies were under way almost constantly in neighborhoods where mostly workers live.” Bloice argued that “for the authorities, it was never a case of handling a revolt, for there was none. What there was ... was a protest.” He concluded that “The brutality is simply incomprehensible. Nothing I saw in Beijing could justify it.”
Though the CPUSA issued no formal statement on the crackdown, the People’s Daily World published an in-depth analysis by Hall on June 8. The center-piece of Hall’s explanation for the Chinese military action was his argument that “because the original, more concrete demands got lost in chaos and anarchy, I think the struggle began to take on elements of a political power struggle ... Refusal to observe the martial law imposed to restore order directly challenged the government. On this basis, the Chinese Party leaders called it a ’counter-revolutionary rebellion’.”
Hall refrained from criticism of the government’s action, but did write that there will be many “questions.” He stated that “the party leadership will have to examine and explain” whether military force was necessary, and, once ordered into action, “whether the army over-reacted and whether it had adequate command leadership.”
Hall traced the roots of the crisis not to lack of democracy or problems with economic reforms, but to problems in political education of the masses. “I am convinced that the main lesson emerging from many of the developments in some of the socialist countries is that the roots of the problems lie in flawed and weak ideological work .. .Ideology is the most potent and crucial element in molding a human being with socialist consciousness ... Solid, constantly nourished Marxist-Leninist ideological work .. .is the guarantee against conflict and violence in the process of building a strong socialist country.”
The Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), the lone U.S. group still openly backing “Mao Zedong Thought” and the legacy of the Cultural Revolution, condemned “the crimes of the counter-revolutionary Chinese regime“ and extended its “wholehearted support to the valiant students and workers doing battle with that regime.”
The League of Revolutionary Struggle, whose origins lie in the Maoist current of the 1970s and which has generally continued to support the Communist Party of China’s political positions, also criticized the crackdown. Its newspaper, Unity, editorialized that the sentiments behind the movement were “against the corruption in Chinese society and their profound desire for a better, more prosperous, more democratic socialist China .... above all, Unity condemns the actions of the Chinese government, because it is not in the spirit of socialism nor in the spirit of the Chinese revolution and the Chinese Communist Party to deal with contradictions among the people through the use of brute military force.”
Except for the Workers World Party, whose origins are in the Trotskyist movement, all U.S. Trotskyist organizations strongly supported the protesters and denounced the Chinese government.
Broad circles of progressive activists unaffiliated with any socialist group condemned the crackdown, with some 50 leading figures including Norma Becker, Ron Dellums, Ed Asner and Daniel Ellsberg signing a letter supporting the student pro-democracy movement. The Mobilization for Survival condemned the “brutal massacre of Chinese people.”
(Frontline’s editorial statement, which condemned the crackdown and presented this newspaper’s analysis of the roots of the protest and the general trend toward democratization of socialism, appeared in our previous issue, June 19.)