1978-81 Democracy Movement: A precursor to today's protests
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By Over six years ago, Solidarnosc announced its formation in Poland. At the same time, in the People's Republic of China, the National Association of Unofficial Publications of China (NAUPC), a coalition of 21 unofficial publications, announced its formation.
The following article traces the development of the Chinese Democracy Movement, which lasted from 1978 to 1981. The article was first published in the August 1985 edition of October Review, a revolutionary Marxist journal published in Hong Kong. It has been abridged and edited for space.
The Democracy Movement of 197881, usually referred to as the Beijing Spring Movement, developed from the 1976 Tien An Men Square Riot in which. over 100,000 people spontaneously gathered at the square in the capital to express their indignation at the ruling regime. Similar riots took place in other cities such as Nanjing and Zhengzhou.
The historical significance of the 1976 riots is that they were spontaneous mass mobilizations directed against the entire structure of bureaucratic rule, unlike the mass mobilizations during the Cultural Revolution, which were controlled by different factions of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
By the end of 1978, the Deng Xiaoping faction of the CCP had gained control of the top party leadership.
The Deng Xiaoping faction attempted to garner a certain amount of mass support to consolidate its power in the top party leadership. A series of rehabili -tations took place. The Tien An Men Square Riot was officially recognized as a revolutionary, spontaneous mass action.
Meanwhile, the people made use of this opportunity to voice their grievances and put forward their demands.
Wall posters began to appear on the Xidan Wall in Beijing. Mass politicaldiscussion meetings took place (some with thousands of people participating), and unofficial publications began to appear.
By the beginning 1979, tens of unofficial publications had surfaced all over China. By April 1981, the number was over 120. These publications survived until April 1981, when a national wave of arrests of the editors and chief contributors put an end to their semi-legal existence. The movement was forced to go underground from then onwards.
Beijing Spring The Beijing Spring Democracy Move -ment was in the beginning rather atomized. The organizational division stemmed mainly from the different ideological trends of the publications.
In Beijing, Exploration, with its chief editor Wei Jingsheng, was the most radical of all for it advocated democratic election of all leaders and democratic selfmanagement by the producers.
[Another publication, People's Voice, edited by Wang Xizhe, asserted that "only the dictatorship of the proletariat could present an alternative to the ruling party bureaucracy."—The Editors] Exploration was very critical of the "liberal" stance of Deng Xiaoping, while other publications saw his faction to be reformist and an advance over Mao Zedong's faction.
The differences in assessment of the Deng faction led to organizational divisions and a lack of cooperation among the various opposition currents.
In March 1979, Deng Xiaoping changed his stance on the Democracy Wall. A few months before, he had said that the Democracy Wall was useful and that it could let the people voice their grievances. However, in March, he said that the Democracy Wall was a source of instability.
Wei Jingsheng at once reacted by posting up a wall poster titled "Democracy or New Dictatorship" in which he called for the people to beware of Deng becoming a new dictator. Wei was promptly arrested. Before Wei, several others had been arrested, including two members of the Human Rights Alliance. Wang Xizhe was sentenced to 14 years imprisonment.
In December 1979, the trial of Wei Jingsheng took place. Though his radical ideas were not popular, his right to freedom of thought and expression was supported by the activists. Wei Jingsheng, for his dissidence, was given a sentence of 15 years in jail.
Liu Qing, editor of April 5 Forum, was arrested for distributing a transcript of the "open" trial. His arrest helped bring more activists together. In August 1980, 16 publications joined together to form a National Committee to Rescue Liu Qing. This then grew into the National Association of Unofficial Publications of China (NAUPC).
The formation of the NAUPC was a significant breakthrough. It took less than two years from the emergence of unofficial publications to arrive at their nationwide coalition. When the Deng Xiaoping faction began repressing the people's democratic rights, discontent quickly grew.
Certain illusions in the reforming faction broke down. Repression of the Democracy Movement forced the divided publications to draw together for more approvingly.
For the Chinese leadership to base economic expansion and the accumulation of capital upon tying Chinese development to the world capitalist economy is a recipe for disaster.
As Ralph Schoenman pointed out in a recent article in Critique magazine:
"The current effort [of the Chinese government] to emulate the Yugoslav use of the market mechanism will run against socialist