The preceding chapter deals with the question of how it was possible for the counterelite of post-Mao China to voice its criticism of the Communist regime. The rest of this work will answer the question of what criticism the counterelite expressed during the late 1970s to late 1980s. Having surveyed the institutional basis of opposition and paraopposition in post-Mao China, we can now turn to the major events that symbolized the conflict between the ruling elite and the counterelite. My analysis begins with the ruling elite's appeal to rationalism and the counterelite's response, which formed much of the background against which the political drama of Dengist China developed.

Background: obstacles to Deng's advance and to his four objectives

Late in 1974, when China's premier Zhou Enlai was hospitalized for an incurable cancer, Deng Xiaoping, an early victim of the Cultural Revolution, was appointed by party Chairman Mao Zedong as vice-premier for day-to-day administration of state affairs. After taking over this key post, Deng began to push bureaucrats to make systematic adjustments to correct the disastrous consequences of the Cultural Revolution. This move disappointed and enraged Mao, who regarded the Cultural Revolution as his last political masterwork. The aging chairman put his remaining energy into a “Criticize Deng Campaign” and early in 1976 replaced Deng with Hua Guofeng, a Politburo member in charge of the police.

In the spring of 1989, the world witnessed massive antigovernment demonstrations in major Chinese cities, followed by a military crackdown by the People's Liberation Army. Since then, a question raised again and again in scholarly circles has been: How could it be that under the Deng Xiaoping regime, when the People's Republic had experienced its greatest prosperity, there could occur the largest popular protest in the PRC's history?

In fact, it is not unique for a regime like the Chinese one under Deng to face popular protests. Since Tocqueville published The Old Regime and the French Revolution, scholars have been familiar with the paradox that unrest and revolutions break out more often when things go from bad to better than when they go from bad to worse. What the Deng regime experienced is but the latest example of the famous “Tocqueville effect” – the inability of a group in power to control change.

In the late 1970s, when Deng and his allies had just returned to office, the country was in a total crisis. Politically, major sectors of Chinese society still lived in the shadow of the great terror of Maoist “class struggle” campaigns. Economically, many peasants of even the once most prosperous rural areas had been reduced to beggars; and the urban population suffered from declining income and shortages of virtually all kinds of consumer goods.

If someone were to ask me, What is the most agonizing intellectual experience you have ever had? without hesitation my response would be: Writing a book in a foreign language. Finding the precise words to express even simple, familiar thoughts can sometimes be laborious. Rending complex or subtle ideas using a relatively meager vocabulary feels as painful to me as one would imagine it to be for a long-starving Somali mother squeezing milk for her baby from wizened breasts. Every sentence compels a compromise. What I write down is never exactly what I want to say. I can only select from the narrow choices available to approximate, from a far distance, what I am trying to say. The vivid, the sophisticated, the subtle, and the personal style are all sifted away, leaving only the dry, the rough, and the basic. I feel myself in a constant process of self-distortion.

The basic difference between what one writes in one's native language and what one writes in a strange foreign language is that, in the former, one's thoughts command words that, in turn, penetrate and stimulate one's mind. But in the latter, words dictate one's thoughts and only float on one's mind.

This chapter covers the eve of the 1989 Spring Democracy Movement. In late 1987, party chief Zhao Ziyang at the Thirteenth Party Congress announced that China was still in the “primary stage of socialism” and urged the party-state bureaucracy to be more tolerant of economic and social practices that were conventionally regarded as nonsocialist. The theory of the “primary stage of socialism” was used to justify the economic reforms that had introduced many semicapitalist methods into China's economy. In the counterelite's interpretation, Zhao's announcement was a shy admission of the impracticability of socialism in China. In the relaxed political climate following this announcement, the counterelite began openly debating the best way to end communism in China, which resulted in two competing programs: “enlightened despotism” and “liberal democracy.”

Background:

the political implications of the Dengist economic reforms

As I pointed out earlier, when I discussed the dual-traffic policy of “anti-Left in economics and anti-Right in politics,” the core of the Dengist reform program was economic restructuring aiming5at productivity and efficiency. In this regard, the reforms were based on a simple principle: Any economic methods were acceptable as long as “socialist public ownership” was maintained. With this base line, the Dengist leadership allowed a variety of market mechanisms and capitalist entrepreneurship to operate.

In this work I examine the interaction between the PRC ruling elite and the counterelite by focusing on a series of events that occurred during the post-Mao era. The standard for the selection of events is that they constituted the major issues in the conflict between the two elite groups concerning the direction of reform; they both received great attention from and exerted a major impact on the politically concerned Chinese population, thereby exercising a noticeable influence on the courses of political development.

Some of the subject matter of this study is highly publicized and some is politically sensitive. Because of this, some needed material was easily obtainable (e.g., material about the regime's political appeals) while other material was not (e.g., material about the reaction to the appeals from social segments that had less access to means of expression). The material used in this study is of varying quality and can be classified as follows.

1. Information I accumulated when in China. Sociological literature usually divides information of this sort into two categories, “background knowledge,” which the participant obtained as the result of living a long time in the society, and “formal knowledge,” which he collected as the result of his purposeful research. With regard to the former, my life experience in China provides the background.