Could 1989 Have Led to Democracy in China?
nationalinterest.org
nationalinterest.org
> What if China's hardline military ruler, the eighty-five-year-old chain-smoker Deng Xiaoping, had passed away at the beginning of 1989 instead of hanging on for another seven years?
I think the same authoritarian system would have survived, however we would instead see statements like “if only the radical reformer Deng had survived and continued his reforms then 1989 could have been a turning point of democracy.“ It’s like the people who say “what if Kruschiev had not been deposed”
if Khruschev had not been deposed by Brezhnev, he would've been deposed by somebody else.
Yes, the West erred judging Khruschev's character as a "typical communist," but it was not wrong in judging the innate characteristics of a social construct like a communist party.
For single party system, electing somebody like Brezhnev or Xi is pretty much like for a thermodynamic system to reach its equilibrium state. For a communist party not doing that will mean to stop being a communist party.
The goal of such system is a pursuit of an ultimate status quo and rejection of all change — a good analogy here will also be thermodynamics: the heat death of the universe.
The principal point on which Brezhnev or Xi were put in power was the need for "reliable men to keep things as they are"
Some people ask me when I state that point "How this stands when Xi totally decimating the same establishment that brought him in while doing so?" I say that it is perfectly consistent with the stated goal: Xi purged people who rocked the boat, risking bringing "the dreaded change."
It is a collective interest of party members to preserve CCP's power, as it is needed for preserving their own personal power, but preservation of individual party member's power is not necessarily a part of that overarching collective interest.
Thought some people who wanted that were purged along the way, in overall, the CCP as a political institute benefited.
China would have disintegrated like the Soviet Union ( or like the china of the 1800s after the opium war ) rather than democratized like South Korea. You can't compare an ethnically and linguistically united country like South Korea ( buttressed by the US ) with a large multiethnic nation like China. Especially considering foreign powers, especially britain, europe and the US, have a vested interest in destabilizing china.
If china "democraticized" in 1989, we'd probably see a replay of post opium war china. A country that large and diverse, with a weakened central authority, would have been dismembered and picked apart, like in China in the 1800s and the Soviet Union/Russia in the 1990s.
Looking at what the soviet union and russia in particular went through in the 90s to even today and what china went through in the 90s to today, I doubt any chinese citizen is upset at the crackdown. But it is an interesting "what if".
Tibetans and Uygurs may beg the differ.
— Or maybe you already discounted them from being Chinese? I’m fine with that definition too ;)
Tibet and Xinjiang ( and to a limited degree hong kong ) are interesting because europe in particular wants to use them to break china. And interestingly enough, the both tibet and xinjiang were invaded by foreign powers ( britain and soviet union ) in order to destabilize china. Both times, most tibetans and uyghurs sided with china.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Xinjiang
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_expedition_to_Tibet
My point is that most people just care about their well being. As long as they are getting wealthier, they don't care. If china's economic situation worsens dramatically, then I suspect things might be different. But I doubt any chinese citizens of any ethnicity wants their family to experience 90s russia or 1800s china. Just like no one here wants to go through a great depression ( which was mild compared to what 90s russia and 1800s china experienced ).
Many Chinese were 'upset' at the 1989 crackdown...
You cannot generalise feelings regarding (violent) political events.
It's difficult to see this actually happening though. China is pretty prosperous and can probably weather even a severe economic crisis. The Soviet Union was far more ethnically and regionally diverse. It also had the Eastern Bloc countries under a loose enough control that it was possible for them to slip out of it's fingers, which started a domino effect that China isn't really vulnerable to in that way.
There are some powerful members of the ruling Chinese elite that 'belong to minorities', but the threshold for that is having one ethnic minority grandparent, who themselves might have had only one ethnic minority grandparent. Oh, and ethnic minority groups get some educational advantages, so it's an advantage to get the classification. This means the ranks of minorities get heavily packed with people who are in practice indistinguishable genetically and culturally from the average Han, but have the right to represent and speak for their minority group.
Thus in theory minorities are very well represented, get various advantages and have a voice in politics and society. In practice the people who get to do so are hand picked by the party and have the most tenuous links imaginable to the minority they supposedly represent.
I'm not convinced that simply a leadership change would be enough to change the fact that the CCP first and foremost wishes to preserve its own power, ideology or anything else is secondary.
https://www.amazon.com/New-Authoritarianism-Populism-Tyranny... "The New Authoritarianism: Trump, Populism, and the Tyranny of Experts"
"In this provocative and highly original book, Salvatore Babones argues that democracy has been undermined by a quiet but devastating power grab conducted by a class of liberal experts. They have advanced a global rights-based agenda which has tilted the balance away from the lively and vibrant unpredictability of democratic decision-making toward the creeping technocratic authority of liberal consensus. Populism represents, contends Babones, an imperfect but reinvigorating political flood that has the potential to sweep away decades of institutional detritus and rejuvenate democracy across the West."
Also, The National Interest has some notoriety for having published https://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-bear-the-elephant-1..., by Maria Butina, the convicted Russian agent.
Just for context.
edit: even more curiously, he has also recently written https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00X668R0K "Sixteen for '16: A progressive agenda for a better America":
"The progressive movement is on the march in America and this accessible book points toward a destination. Sixteen for '16 offers a new agenda for the 2016 US election crafted around sixteen core principles that all progressives can believe in, from securing jobs to saving the Earth. Decades of destructive social, economic, and political policies have devastated poor, working, and even middle class American communities. It is now clear to everyone that the emperor has no clothes, that harsh austerity does not bring prosperity, and that the wealthy have no intention to see their wealth trickle down. Each generation is no longer better off than the ones that came before. America now needs jobs, infrastructure, a rededication to public education, universal healthcare, higher taxes on higher incomes, a more secure Social Security, an end to the rule of the bankers, stronger unions, a living minimum wage, better working conditions, an end to the prison state, secure reproductive rights, voter equality, a more moral foreign policy, a more sane environmental policy, and action on global warming. Sixteen for '16 is a manifesto which makes the argument for each of these positions, clearly, concisely, and supported by hard data. As ambitious as these policies are, they represent a beginning, not an end. The progressive agenda laid out in Sixteen for '16 charts a realistic path toward a better tomorrow."
What the heck is this Babones guy? This is inadvertently a much more interesting submission than it seemed, for very different reasons than intended.
EDIT: it's actually a lot stranger on a second read
Not sure if there is anything new discussed in this short essay.
A lot people exaggerate their role. Even back then, very few Chinese ever heard of them.
> What if the students in Tiananmen Square had peacefully dispersed, but continued to work quietly for democratic reform throughout the 1990s?
Then they would've been quietly hunted down to the last one without making much of a bang. People entertaining themselves with such scenarios have little understanding of the way the mindset of totalitarian regime leaders work: in 1989, the CCP was scared to death. Loss of power in any form for such people invariably means either a trip to Hague, or to their own secret jails.
Peaceful political change don't happen when the power holders are ready to do anything to keep their power. In such cases, only violence works.
I truly despise people who call for "peaceful resistance" in time when people are being showered with bullets. Such people bear as much responsibility for loss of human life as one who do the killing.
That's pure conjecture, of course.
One thing to keep in mind is that the events of Tiananmen (and beyond, actually, as they did not involve only Beijing and only the students) scared the government, as you mention.
That's why the reaction was so harsh and the backlash so durable.
The government might have taken a softer stance if the events had been less threatening.