Eyewitness in China
The events in Tiananmen Square, May-June 1989
by Steve Jolly
party cards torn up
The Communist Party, of course, has 47 million members - 5% of the population. A lot of the students in the movement were members of the Communist Party, especially its youth wing. Some of the workers involved were Communist Party members too. I saw two workers tear up their party cards in front of me the day after the repression. They said "We are not going to be identified with the government, after what it did last night."
The Chinese Communist Party is not yet the same as the ruling party in, say, Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union. There were still many people in the Chinese Communist Party, prior to the massacre at least, who still thought of it as a revolutionary organisation taking society forward. The bureaucracy in China economically speaking is still only a relative fetter on production. There wasn't yet that total hatred towards the bureaucracy as you would see in Eastern Europe. If you were a member of the Communist Party you were not necessarily a hardened bureaucrat, or a scab. But today that situation has changes. I could not see any student or worker with knowledge of the events of the last weeks now joining the Communist Party with revolutionary illusions in it.
The rise of this movement meant the emptying out of the Communist Party. It has its cells in the factories and the local areas, and with the rise of the movement these cells took the official line against the movement. But, as many of the rank-and-file Party members gravitated to the movement, the Party became defunct at local level. In this sense it was like the collapse of the Communist Party when Solidarity arose in 1980-81. Now it will be difficult to re-establish the Party at local level in the same way. It will be a "Communist Party" purely of scabs and spies.
Of course we couldn't say that all illusions n the CP have now collapsed forever. If a reformer like Xhao took over in the next period he might get some honeymoon period. But anyone identified with this repression - there are absolutely no illusions whatsoever in them. Things can never go back to where they were before the 4th of June. It is a major turning point in the Chinese revolution. The whole experience has been like China's 1905.
For a considerable time street battles continued. The city was a battle zone. There were burnt-out trucks, burnt-out tanks, bodies, blood everywhere. Calls for a general strike on Monday appeared written in blood on the walls.
The courage of the people was unbelievable. As they were standing in the streets facing tear-gas, they wanted to know what I thought. Anyone who says that "theory is for the intellectuals" would have seen that that is an absolute load of rubbish. Especially at times of revolution people want theory.
But increasingly the counter-revolution got the upper hand. It became more and more risky for the workers, students, and even myself in the course of that time. It is a rather depressing story of killings, of increasingly one-sided battles. I won't go into that.
The lesson for everywhere is the need to build the labour movement on Marxist ideas prior to the big explosions. Theory is the greatest weapon for the revolution. It has to come first. The question of arms, of tactics, strategy, organisation is second to theory. Of course the gun is the most lethal weapon in the working-class armoury. But it cannot be effectively used without the right ideas, without political guidance, just the same as anything else.
Some capitalist journalists at this time were suggesting that there would be a confrontation between sections of the army - with the 38th Army (of the Beijing region) moving in against the 27th Army. I think that was exaggerated a lot. It is true that the 38th Army was supposed to be identified with Zhao, with the reformist wing of the bureaucracy. And, with the movement crushed, sections of the masses too began to hope for "liberators": they were hoping the 38th Army would come in and "liberate" the city.
The 38th army was deployed at the south of the city, and near the airport near the east of the city. But I think that this was in case the 27th Army had had to face a more successful fight-back from the workers, and in case the workers had exploded in Shanghai, which is the largest city in China, igniting an even higher degree of struggle. Then I think the 38th Army would have moved into Beijing, perceived as "liberators", displacing the 27th Army, in order to restore order and maintain the rule of the bureaucracy. Under those conditions, Li Peng and Deng might have had to be replaced, as scapegoats.
But, given that the 27th Army had successfully crushed the movement, why would the 38th Army bother moving in? Their commanders ar just as much part of the bureaucracy, and just as much identified with the repression in Tibet and other areas. They flexed their muscles only to say to the 27th Army, "OK, you've done the job, but don't think now that you are the totally dominant part of the bureaucracy, and we are biding our time. If we had moved against you, we would have had the support of the people and you could have been lynched."
Now Deng has succeeded in stabilising the situation. He will do everything necessary to try to eradicate this movement, and preserve the rule of the bureaucracy. There will be many many more arrests and killings. It is quite difficult for the students now to sustain themselves underground, because they are so well identified. The bureaucracy are showing pictures of the students on the TV, and then arresting them within days. There must be a certain layer even of the proletariat, who at the peak of the movement might have thought, well it might win, I might support it, or at least be neutral, who now will support the regime, and will inform on people around them. While 99% of society would have supported the movement at its height, it is a different situation now. The government is not totally isolated.
If necessary, the "Bamboo Curtain" will go up again. Deng is reported to have said "What's the point of foreign investment if we are all strung up from lampposts." Though they don't necessarily want to cut themselves off from foreign investments etc. unless they have to. They may have to turn back to strict centralisation of the economy. Together with the repression, they may try to make some economic concessions to workers and peasants.
At the same time, perhaps there will have to be scapegoats eventually. Li Peng is very unpopular, even within the bureaucracy. It is strongly rumoured that he was shot twice on the leg on that Sunday, after the massacre, by one of his own guards. There is no way that even a successful counter-revolution can rule a billion people through the most hated figure in the country indefinitely. It wouldn't be in their interest to get rid of him in the short-term, but at some stage I think he will be pushed aside.
I am sure that the heart and soul of every ective worker and student around the world has gone out to those in China who have given the ultimate sacrifice over the past few weeks. And the greatest disrespect that we could ever pay to those martyrs of the world revolution is to allow them to die in vain - to allow them to die without drawing out the lessons for the next battle.
If Deng thinks that with the help of the 27th Army - the most hated group of soldiers it must be on this planet at this moment - that he can keep down a quarter of the world's population, a billion people, he is making the greatest mistake. There is no way this movement will not rise again. It might take some time, but it will rise again.
The job of Marxists internationally is to ensure that the lessons are drawn out and that, the next time the battle erupts, the ideas of Marxism are present to arm this movement in the most populous country in the world. Then we can say that those comrades did not die in vain, and that 1989 was really the first step, the 1905, of what will be a successful political revolution in China in the next years.
13 June 1989