Words&Dirt

“Orville Schell, a China scholar and journalist, summarized Deng Xiaoping’s choice: ‘After the massacre of 1989, he in effect said we will not stop economic reform; we will in effect halt political reform.’

For Deng and the rest of the Politburo, the free-market possibilities were now limitless.  Just as Pinochet’s terror had cleared the streets for revolutionary change, so Tiananmen paved the way for a radical transformation free from fear of rebellion.  If life grew harder for peasants and workers, they would either have to accept it quietly or face the wrath of the army and the secret police.  And so, with the public in a state of raw terror, Deng rammed through his most sweeping reforms yet.

Before Tiananmen, he had been forced to ease off some of the more painful measures; three months after the massacre, he brought them back, and he implemented several of Friedman’s other recommendations, including price deregulation.  For Wang Hui, there is an obvious reason why ‘market reforms that had failed to be implemented in the late 1980s just happened to have been completed in the post-1989 environment’; the reason, he writes, ‘is that the violence of 1989 served to check the social upheaval brought about by this process, and the new pricing system finally took shape.’  The shock of massacre, in other words, made shock therapy possible.

In the three years immediately following the bloodbath, China was cracked open to foreign investment, with special export zones constructed throughout the country.  As he announced these new initiatives, Deng reminded the country that ‘if necessary, every possible means will be adopted to eliminate any turmoil in the future as soon as it has appeared.  Martial law, or even more severe methods, may be introduced.’

It was this wave of reforms that turned China into the sweatshop of the world, the preferred location for contract factories for virtually every multinational on the planet.  No country offered more lucrative conditions than China: low taxes and tariffs, corruptible officials and, most of all, a plentiful low-wage workforce that, for many years, would be unwilling to risk demanding decent salaries or the most basic workplace protections for fear of the most violent reprisals.

For foreign investors and the party, it has been a win-win arrangement.  According to a 2006 study, 90 percent of China’s billionaires (calculated in Chinese yuan) are the children of Communist Party officials.  Roughly twenty-nine hundred of these party scions––known as ‘the princelings’––control $260 billion.  It is a mirror of the corporatist state first pioneered in Chile under Pinochet: a revolving door between corporate and political elites who combine their power to eliminate workers as an organized political force.  Today, this collaborative arrangement can be seen in the way that foreign multinational media and technology companies help the Chinese state to spy on its citizens, and to make sure that when students do Web searches on phrases like “Tiananmen Square Massacre,’ or even ‘democracy,’ no documents turn up.  ‘The creation of today’s market society was not the result of a sequence of spontaneous events,’ writes Wang Hui, ‘but rather of state interference and violence.’

One of the truths revealed by Tiananmen was the stark similarity between the tactics of authoritarian Communism and Chicago School capitalism––a shared willingness to disappear opponents, to blank the slate of all resistance and begin anew.”

––The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, by Naomi Klein, pg. 138-40

“All manner of people are here, standing, sitting, crouching on their heels, and from time to time a squall of conversation breaks out, only to die down almost at once, for we are all weary.  Somewhere behind me is a man whom I faced down last night over nothing, that is to say, over who should first pass through a door.  It seems I am grown so thin-skinned I can scarce endure to be crossed; or it may be, I am looking for the one will put a knife in me at last.”

––As Meat Loves Salt, by Maria McCann, pg. 563