Eyewitness in China
The events in Tiananmen Square, May-June 1989
by Steve Jolly
half a million people
We pushed our way to the front, to the Monument of People's Heroes. From there it was a sight to behold really.
You could just see half a million people in front of you, desperate for ideas, desperate for organisation, desperate for guidance as to the way forward to win their struggle. It was a tremendous sight to see: half a million people who have thrown off the shackles of everyday life where you just think about making a couple of bob to get by to feed the family, just sitting there with politics as their first and foremost interest. It was pitch dark. Somebody would take a flash photograph. Someone else would light a cigarette. Little lights would flare up. It really made you feel humble, that here was the power of the working class, or at least the latent power of the working class, there right in front of you. And to know that if this movement could be married with Marxist ideas, no power on earth could stop it.
Before the meeting started, various people came along to express solidarity: a Buddhist monk, a local pop star... Most interestingly, a 98-year-old woman, very very infirm, came along who had been on the Long March, and who knew Mao. This was really sticking her neck out, at that age, especially when it was getting clearer there was going to be some form of clampdown (though nobody expected it to be as bloody as it was). I was given a rough translation. She said she had given her life for the 1949 Revolution, and that it didn't give her any pleasure to have to stand up here, 40 years later, and still have to fight. But she had to do it. She said she was given encouragement by the students, and she felt she was with them, and though she was going to die soon, the struggle must carry on. And I can say quite honestly that it brought tears to my eyes to see something like that. She was given absolutely rapturous applause.
At around 10 o'clock the meeting proper started. I just want to give a little background here. All over Beijing, especially in the centre, the government have big loudspeakers attached to all the telegraph poles. And all the day, constantly, especially since the movement started, they blared out constant 'news' commentary, muck like the movie 1984. In mocking tones they would talk about "the dregs of society", "chaos", "counter-revolutionaries" - at the same time you could see, right in front of you, the cream of the world's youth, of the proletariat of China, fighting for genuine socialism. But in the Square itself the students had their own network of loudspeakers, and they would blare out still louder the Internationale. In was directly as if to say: "Those are lies, we're not counter-revolutionaries, rather we are the ones who stand in the best traditions of the international working-class movement."
The Launch of the Union
So at about 10 o'clock the union leader got up and read out to the assembled crowd the demands of the union, why it was set up, the preamble and so on. I was the second speaker. I got up and expressed solidarity for the union on behalf of the workers and students everywhere whose imagination had been captured by the movement which had taken place in Beijing and other cities of China over previous weeks. And then I outlined the programme which in some ways the students had taken on unconsciously: the need for the election and right of immediate recall of all officials, for all officials to be on the wage of a worker, and so on. I went on to the question of the Communist government. I said that any "communist", or any "Communist" government that arrested workers, that stood against workers' democratic rights, was not a real communist. I said that the only real communists in China - those following the traditions of Marx, Engels and Lenin - were those who supported this movement. And I can tell you that this statement went down very, very well indeed. That was what people wanted to hear. I spoke for about 10-15 minutes. It went down very well. After me, there were two more speakers.
People didn't want to hear: "You've got to take the road of the West", or "We've got great democratic rights in the West, that's the way you've got to go." As one student put it to me: "Look, if we went capitalist, it would be like India. It wouldn't be like Japan. We've got a billion people here. If the capitalists came to China, they would rip us to shreds economically. We're not under any illusions."
The capitalist journalists made a lot of the so-called "Statue of Liberty" that the students put up in the Square. But to the students that wasn't a symbol of support for US imperialism, or of wanting a return to capitalism. It signified support for democratic rights. And a lot of students were doubtful about having it there. "If we were in South America", they would say to me, "we don't think this would go down so well." Along with this statue being there, the Internationale was being played all the time. There was no question of wanting to return to capitalism.
This is because of all the benefits of the planned economy - such as the health service - are there for everybody to see. To take a small example, to go for the whole day to the Beijing Zoo, which is probably the best zoo in the world, costs the equivalent of 1 Australian cent. Subways, buses, rent, and so on - are cheap, almost free. There is a charge, but it is a very low percentage of your wage. It's the inflation affecting food and clothes that is the big problem for workers.
One student said to me: "When we look at the West, we're not stupid. We know that only a minority of people in the West live in countries like Japan, Australia, Britain. And even then we know that the blacks suffer in America. We know there are a lot of people unemployed in America. We know most people in the so-called West, the capitalist world, live in Africa, South and Central America and so on". The people knew what was going on. They wanted to maintain the benefits of the revolution of 1949, in other words the nationalised and planned economy, and the other cultural, social, and economic benefits. But they believed that these benefits were being limited, that the great latent initiative inherent in one billion was being stifled by bureaucratic rule.
The bourgeois press sees Chinese workers as "lazy", because there's a lot of what looks like overstaffing. I mean if a time-and-motion study man came from MacDonald's Hamburgers to China he would have a field-day! But it's not "over-staffing" as such, or that Chinese people are "born lazy". The fact that everybody has a job is precisely one of the benefits of the planned economy - though of course the so-called "market socialists" in the bureaucracy are trying to put an end to that. But why should you work harder when you know that no matter what you do, you are not going to get any more benefit, and when you feel that you've got no say in the running the government that's supposed to be your own government? It's little different from working for a capitalist firm. Here, if you work harder, and finish your work at 2pm when you're only supposed to go home at 5pm, you're not going to be allowed to leave three hours early by the boss. You will be given three extra hours of work. Unfortunately it's almost the same in these so-called "socialist" countries. This is the reason that the enthusiasm in the workplace to increase production is not the same as in the initial years after 1949. It's because of the bureaucracy, not because of the people. And they are quite aware of that.
Even in the government press prior to the clampdown there were articles pointing out how investing was coming in from overseas, but being held back by bureaucratic mismanagement and corruption. A company would come in, but in trying to get raw materials, moving goods from one province to the next, it is almost like feudalism. Unifying the nation was one of the historic tasks of the bourgeois revolution. But on the basis of Stalinism, the Chinese revolution has not even achieved this. To move something from Canton to Beijing you have to go through several provinces with different tax systems. You have to fill in forms, everything in triplicate. If you want to buy a box of matches in Beijing you get a receipt ... in triplicate, not even in duplicate. It is absolutely mad bureaucracy. Even in the colonial world it is nothing like that.
"Socialism in one country" is strangling the economy. You had a letter in paper from a scientist in Shanghai. Look at Siberia, he wrote. It needs to be developed. There is a shortage of Soviet workers willing to go to Siberia; they've got to be paid three or four times the average wage. We have got an excess of people in north-east China, in Beijing. They would love to go to Siberia, because even at half what the Soviet workers are getting, they would earn more than they do now in China. Surely since we are both countries, surely now that Gorbachev has come to visit, we can sort something out? That's what he proposed. But, of course, on the basis of bureaucratic rule that's impossible.