482 { China’s Quest
“long-term protracted political struggle” against “Western spiritual and ide-
ological infiltration.” Part of that struggle is the maintenance of the image of
the United States as a power hostile to China.The Post 6-4 Debate Over Regime Survival and Pullback
from “Opening”The bloody events of 6-4 produced deep divisions within the CCP regarding
opening, reform, and the survival of China’s proletarian state.^32 It seemed to
many within the CCP elite that China’s post-1978 opening had made pos-
sible the linkup between domestic and international counterrevolution.
Marketization of the economy had produced inflation, growing unemploy-
ment, the disintegration of the social welfare net, growing economic insecu-
rity, and the juxtaposition of new and sometimes great wealth and continuing
poverty. Foreign investment and loss of control over foreign activities inside
China had facilitated the spread of bourgeois ideas. The growth of market
forces and withering of state control over the economy had also made avail-
able to dissidents such resources as photocopiers, fax machines and paper,
public address equipment, camping tents—the latter made available for use
by students on hunger strike in Tiananmen Square as a gift of people in Hong
Kong. To protect China’s proletarian state, influential voices within the PRC
said, the CCP should reinstitute a modified command, planned economy.
Market-based businesses were a sector in which “peaceful evolution” placed
great hopes, and should therefore be closely watched and limited. In terms of
opening, China should pull away from the global economy—not completely,
perhaps, but to the degree necessary to prevent Western ideological subver-
sion and party loss of control. Contacts between China and advanced capital-
ist economies needed to be more tightly controlled, more closely supervised,
and used in ways that did not undermine the CCP center’s ability to direct
the overall economy. Westerners in China and Chinese studying in the West
should be tightly vetted and carefully watched, CCP rightists said. Chinese
access to Western media and Western media access to China should be tightly
limited and controlled. Foreign capital should be excluded from essential sec-
tors, and the state should maintain control over the essential sectors of the
economy. Some rightists went even further. Deng Liqun, for example, main-
tained that the policies being implemented during the 1980s amounted to
“the restoration of capitalism,” which Mao had warned and struggled against.
If this were the case, renewed class struggle to prevent the restoration of capi-
talism might be in order.
Paramount leader Deng Xiaoping believed that retreat from marketiz-
ing reform and deepening integration with the world economy was tanta-
mount to the suicide of China’s CCP state. Conservative policies would lead