growing despite birth-control campaigns – it had
increased from 540 million in 1949 to 1,300
million by the year 2000 – the need to increase
production through modernisation was indis-
pensable. China was poised between free enter-
prise and socialist planning, between some fragile
individual freedoms and party control, governed
by a small band of political leaders locked in
strife with each other. Despite the progress made
since 1949, it still faced a very difficult future.
Thousands of the best-educated Chinese had been
alienated into secret opposition, yet they were the
very young men and women most needed to make
modernisation possible. The brutal use of the
People’s Army against the people had opened up
a breach that would take time to heal.
The issue of whether economic reform and
modernisation had to precede fundamental polit-
ical change, as Deng believed, or whether eco-
nomic reforms had reached the stage where they
could be carried no further without political
reform, had been decided. What China’s leaders
believed was that to have given way to demands
for ‘democracy’ would have plunged China into
chaos and disruption, and quite probably blood-
shed on a large scale. Control and discipline would
be needed as the precondition of material
progress. They saw no reason why one-party con-
trol could not sit comfortably with the expansion
of what has come to be called the socialist market
economy. The economic progress achieved since
1989 has proved many a pessimistic Western the-
orist wrong. Politically, the events of 1989 dis-
pelled much facile optimism in the West. For
some months the West cut off relations with
China. In Hong Kong there was greater anxiety
about what the Anglo-Chinese settlement held in
store. But China was too important a vast country
with prospects for profitable business, a player
in Asian international relations also hopefully
able to restrain North Korea, its vote on the
Security Council too crucial, for the West to main-
tain the ostracism. So, despite everything, realism
demanded a gradual normalisation of Western
dealings with China in 1990. The Chinese leader-
ship was careful to avoid further offence and
demonstrated goodwill towards the West by back-
ing the Security Council resolutions against Iraq
after the August 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The
Chinese leadership managed to insulate their
country from the upheavals that had swept com-
munist Eastern Europe and brought enormous
changes to the Soviet Union. In China the pace of
reform is set from above.
In China’s vast interior, trials of dissidents,
sentences of execution and incarceration were
meted out as a harsh lesson after June 1989.
Obedience to party and leadership were not to be
challenged. China would continue to be ruled
politically by the Communist Party and its leaders
as before. The leaders would decide on the limits
of debate and intellectual freedom. There has
been liberalisation since the 1990s; visitors were
welcomed and students continue to study abroad.624 TWO FACES OF ASIA: AFTER 1949
China, 1968–84
Indices of gross industrial and agricultural output value
at constant prices (1952 = 100)
Agriculture Light industry Heavy industry Population (millions)
1968 147.5 348.7 630.1 785
1976 207.1 766.4 2,104.3 937
1978 229.6 970.6 2,780.4 963
1980 259.1 1,259.5 3,036.4 987
1980 259.1 1,259.5 3,036.4 987
1984 393.7 1,880.7 4,078.4 1,035
Source: Liu Suinian and Wu Qungan (eds), China’s Socialist Economy: An Outline History, 1949–1984(Beijing
Review, 1986) pp. 477, 479.