It was not surprising that China’s students
were in the forefront of protest and demonstra-
tions. They lived in bad conditions and were
rigidly controlled by their elders. Their future
usually lay in the hands of the state or party
machine, which would assign them to a job some-
where in China – possibly in the wildest, most
remote regions. Added to the instinctive desire of
youth to be free of the restrictions imposed by an
older generation, to find new solutions to long-
lasting problems, was a growing impatience with
party politicising, with corruption and with
repression. The old certainties enshrined within
Mao’s infallibility had been replaced by a jumble
of ideas. The rapid pace of economic change and
contact with foreigners, with foreign literature
and with some of their teachers, who bravely
spoke their minds, all created a ferment of unrest.
In the winter of 1986 the students took to the
streets and gathered in Tiananmen Square.
Economic reforms were not enough – they
wanted control over their own lives. The demand
was for ‘democracy’, symbolised on their banners
by the Statue of Liberty. It was a spontaneous
expression of feeling; but the students had no
notion of how a transition to democracy might
be managed in the prevailing conditions of China.
They were brave and impetuous, and rejected
Deng’s cautious approach to greater freedoms
and prosperity which was then producing more
dislocation than progress. The student protest
was contained and dispersed without undue vio-
lence. The hardliners in the Politburo may well
have regarded this as misplaced tolerance.
Deng’s economic reforms, which encouraged
more choice and freedom in the lives of the
Chinese, were blamed for these dangerous
demands for political freedoms, which challenged
the role of the party and its leaders. Deng could
not stop halfway on the road of economic reform,
but he agreed with the conservatives that liberty of
expression could not be allowed at this critical
stage to affect the leadership’s firm control of pol-
icy decisions. The man he was thought to have
chosen as his successor, the pragmatic reformist
Hu Yaobang, was removed from the leadership of
the party but not from the Politburo. In the
course of 1987 Deng managed to readjust the bal-
ance between reformers and conservatives while
pressing ahead with economic modernisation and
encouraging Western capitalism to invest in
China. Hu Yaobang’s position was taken by Zhao
Ziyang, whose administrative skills were intended
to help reform the party and to rid it of corrup-
tion. A younger Politburo member, Li Peng, a
colourless Moscow-educated technocrat, was
placed at the head of the state administration. In a
wily masterstroke Deng retired from his posts and
thereby persuaded many of the ageing conserva-
tive members of the Politburo to retire with him.
But a secret party agreement acknowledged that
he would continue to take major party decisions.
Rapid change caused increasing economic
problems in 1988 and 1989. Price inflation
reached 30 per cent; with the new economic free-
doms, some did well, but the army, the hundreds
of thousands of party and state officials and all
who derived their income from state salaries were
left behind. The disadvantaged began to see
Chinese society as increasingly unjust; food
queues in Beijing were painful evidence of agricul-
tural shortfalls and corruption. It was the example
of Gorbachev’s bold policy of glasnostand his
impending visit to Beijing that enthused the stu-
dents in the spring of 1989 to demonstrate and to
demand political reform. Countless banners in
Tiananmen Square celebrated the ‘Pioneer of
Glasnost’ and hailed the Soviet leader as an
‘Emissary of Democracy’. Gorbachev’s arrival in
May was, in itself, a turning point in China’s inter-
national relations. At the end of a chaotic four-day
visit, Deng and Gorbachev announced that after
thirty years of hostility the relations between
China and the Soviet Union had been normalised.
But no very specific evidence of collaboration
emerged. The visit was in any case overshadowed
by the dramatic events outside the Great Hall of
the People in Tiananmen Square. Such turmoil
had not been seen in China since the Cultural
Revolution twenty years earlier.
The students, who had been demonstrating
since April, occupied the square throughout May
and attracted growing attention. China’s advances
in technology – television and satellite links –
vividly conveyed this mass protest, with its
demand for democracy and an end to the exclu-