Eyewitness in China
The events in Tiananmen Square, May-June 1989
by Steve Jolly
dinosaur style government
Other letters in the press complained about the level of pollution, which is absolutely desperate, particularly in Beijing, because it is inland.
They put the blame on the bureaucracy, and that is important. All these things indicate the frustration, particularly expressed by the intellectuals and students, but reflecting a deeper more widespread unconscious mood. Everything was moving and opening up, with movement around the country allowed, ability to study overseas - but they were still being dominated politically by the same bureaucratic elite, in much the same fashion as at the time of the Cultural Revolution. Combined and uneven development all the time, archaic political structures side by side with very advanced technology. In Beijing and especially Shanghai, you could be walking in London. There are nightclubs, restaurants, like any Western city centre. But there is a dinosaur-style government at the top, living in the past, talking about "a million people being expendable", or "the new generation have forgotten the morals of the Long March. They never liberated the country, we did."
There is a total contradiction between the economic and the political and that had a big effect on the intellectuals. When such people saw the political opening up in the Soviet Union, Poland, Hungary and so on they said - well, we want that! It wasn't a movement from below against economic degradation, it was an intellectual movement to start off with. And that is why it took some time before the workers began to see it as important for them to involve themselves in the struggle.
But it had massive support among all sections of society. Not only among workers, but more widely - amongst big layers of the bureaucracy itself. On the day I arrived, for example, one of the delegations on the march was from the official People's Daily, which is the most widely-read paper on the planet. This paper would report daily what was going on. To try to dodge the censors, the journalists would start: "In Tiananmen Square today some very bad things happened." Then they would outline in great detail exactly what happened. And after that they would say "Premier Li Peng said it was outrageous."! They got a fantastic response from the people on the march. The developments were even reported in muted form on government TV. In this way people in other cities, and even in the countryside, were able to follow what was going on. But the most effective way that news was spread was the "bush telegraph", as we call it in Australia. There are very few restrictions of movement as far as urban dwellers are concerned. The trains were packed full of students traveling to and fro from Shanghai, etc.
But for all this, the working class had not come to the forefront of the movement, or even stamped its mark on it in the form of strikes. At the peak of the struggle, before I arrived, workers would come off their sites, their factories, and come on the demonstrations. But even this wasn't like an organised strike. On the day after the massacre, when a general strike was called, there was a total stoppage of transport. Hotel workers came out. But the building industry, for example, still worked. As far as the workers were concerned there was a fear that if they intervened in this movement, with no guarantee of victory, they would just lose their job. That was the problem that the union leaders raised when I was discussing with them.
Workers' Mood
The fear in the factory was that this movement could come to an dend, that the demands were still very vague. "We agree with the students' demand for democratic rights, but they are not actually talking about power. And we are not confident that if we come out we won't end up with the same bastards directing us in our work, or in society as a whole" i.e. the Communist Party bureaucracy. This was the kind of thing workers were thinking. Until they were confident that there would be some change workers were even very hesitant about getting into the independent trade union itself.
As a matter of fact, the economic reforms of the last ten years have had contradictory effects. Some workers have benefited. For example, there is no shortage of consumer goods, at least in Beijing or Shanghai, from cars down to foreign cigarettes. It is not like Poland. Moreover, while there is a system by which the bureaucracy and foreigners have special money, different from the money that ordinary people have, that system is breaking down, again and again. If you take a taxi ride, you have to pay in foreign currency, with which they can buy consumer goods.
At the same time, it was from among these better-off workers that the active support for the movement was coming. The founders of the independent union, for example, were mostly in relatively highly-paid jobs. Probably they felt more confident because of this - and at the same time their gains were being eroded away by the inflation. There is no way that these layers of workers want to go back to the strict centralisation of the past, to the repression associated with the Cultural Revolution. Like the students in a way, they are saying, we've had "economic reform", now what about democracy to go with it, democracy on the basis of a planned economy.
If the independent union had been formed a month or even two weeks earlier, it would have grown very fast. The students had given confidence to the workers. But it was formed with the student movement already ebbing. The mass of workers, those feeling they had the most to lose, were not confident enough to become actively involved in it. But next time there is a movement, when it bursts out again, there is no doubt that an independent trade union will arise at its beginning.