On Chinese Democracy

...It did not mean that lower or higher officials could abuse their power for private gain...

...Probably it had been opened and inspected before it left China...

...for a few days the food was somewhat edible, but then the private parties resumed and the quality again declined...

...They are not even remotely anticommunist, although they may be aconununist...

...Many of them had what were called "bourgeois backgrounds"• their parents were intellectuals —usually college or high school teachers, sometimes doctors or officials, almost always Communist party members...

...They are the catalysts and conscience of the nation, but at the same time are easily tarnished by the temptation of careers and by the conformity enforced by power...

...Many were already assistant professors in history or political science, others were junior officers in the People's Liberation Army (PLA), a few were journalists...

...A break came two months later, when I decided to argue in a comparative history class that the Chinese revolution of 1949 had been more successful than the Russian because the Communist party in China had established firm ties to the peasants during the antiJapanese war...

...Did it mean competitive elections...

...Finally, did democracy mean abolishing the Communist party...

...Intellectuals, they knew, could never act alone: To build new states required the active cooperation of what my students called "the broad masses...

...My students told me that Huang had been on the wrong side during the Cultural Revolution, that he had, in effect, been the snitch who had seen to it that his Nanjing University colleagues were sent to the countryside in the bad years...

...Very few people, even in the party, took Communist ideology to heart...

...It was not dishonest or hypocritical...

...Some of the indignity is economic: Chinese students live on tiny incomes in cramped dorm rooms, are 426 • DISSENT served poor food, and often cannot even afford to purchase books...

...They have had the historic duty of sounding the alarm when dynasties begin to crumble...

...my post office stamped "arrived unsealed at 10562...

...First in private conversations, then in the classroom and later in crowded but by-invitation-only sessions in a Nanjing University dormitory, I learned that the song of student democracy in China was at once various, fearful, hopeful, and not a little confused...

...There were titters, nods, and giggles...

...The major public event of my year in Nanjing was a courageous strike against the manager of our Center's shitang, or cafeteria...

...The pens stopped...

...I am writing five days after the massacre in Beijing...

...He was right, it was different than 1986, the last time the student movement was repressed, but in tragic ways that hardly anyone anticipated...

...What they admired about America was neither its culture, its politics, nor even its economy...

...Note: The names and homes of the Chinese students mentioned in this article have been changed...

...The times have changed, which is very different from 1986...

...Then why are you a Communist party member...

...As with most of the tiny number of graduate students in China, most are older because they had suffered through the ravages of the Cultural Revolution...

...In the shadow of the Gulou there is a little patch where old men come with carefully crafted, cloth-draped wooden bird cages...

...For them, I was a bizarre, probably incomprehensible but doubtless trustworthy teacher—I seemed to criticize my own society as well as China's...

...But they could do nothing, since each student in China has a file, controlled by the administration of his or her work unit, that follows him or her through life...

...While the Chinese director of the Hopkins Center was a kind man sympathetic with student concerns, his assistant, Huang Yu, seemed to have the real power...

...the manager seemed to be diverting supplies and workers for private parties for people with "connections" at Nanjing University...

...There were possibly malign consequences for all who participated in this little event...

...The letter arrived ripped open...

...Preferable to the Guomindang (Nationalists) and to the Qing (hated by everyone as a foreign dynasty because it had invaded from outside the Great Wall to conquer Beijing), Chinese Communism was just the latest and not the worst manifestation of dynastic politics, with its own natural cycle of birth, maturity, and death...

...Yet someday the covers will once again come off their cages, and they will sing again...

...Even less are they workable recipes for a future state...

...And this, most of my students kept saying, was what the Communist party had largely become in the afterwash of the Cultural Revolution...

...I had at least gotten their attention...

...My students must be as surprised as I am that a year later private conversations have turned into what is a repressed but unstoppable democratic movement...

...My student wrote, "Chinese have never been so united as one...

...They hang the cages in the few sycamore trees near the bell tower and then uncover them...

...It especially did not mean the franchise for peasants, because they were too easily duped...

...In recent years this could be tolerated because no one else did much better...

...Not only was the food bad and prices high...

...The Chinese Revolution, I said, was at least democratic in the sense that the Communist party, through the "mass line," had to test its ideas with the people...

...What disgusted my students was not the power of the government and the party but being ruled by corrupt and sycophantic idiots with no moral or political claims to govern...

...When I first arrived in China, many of my students seemed unlikely dissenters, much less revolutionaries...

...They are, of course, files students may never see...

...perhaps not...

...A year later, they were apparently an inspiration to millions...

...It was sweet, gentle, efficient, humorous, and tolerant...

...The West was an unattainable and in any case un-Chinese concept, not a reality to be studied or imitated...

...No other social class, including workers and definitely peasants, could penetrate the mysteries of the central state and at the same time know that the time had come to build a new one...

...The life of a Chinese student or intellectual is not so much carefully controlled by ideological strictures as it is subject to daily indignities by authority...

...One, Zhang Xiliu, a member of a non-Han "national minority group" from Hainan Island off the coast of Vietnam, was already a high party cadre and had attended the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Beijing...

...How naked and alone the regime must feel to have destroyed the flower of its youth and ultimately its only legitimate claim to rule...

...I asked...

...Today, I received a letter from a former student postmarked June 2 in Shenyang, China, two days before the massacre...

...The free market is necessary to achieve the Four Modernizations...

...The birds inside, sensing that they are at home in the branches, sing their calls, and for a moment the din of traffic is lessened...

...Many of my students were old enough to have been Red Guards, only to be sent to the countryside by Chairman Mao when he no longer saw them as useful...

...Did democracy mean capitalism...

...Cai Ruiwen would never have written this way a year ago...

...A surprising number had been raised by older siblings or simply by people in their neighborhood, as their parents, sent to the countryside in 1966, had stayed there until after Mao's death...

...The fact that they had been admitted to the then one-year-old Johns Hopkins Center in Nanjing bespoke a successful future, with the possibility of travel or study abroad and a government career...

...They probably wear the sullen faces that serve as testimony to the regime's new definition of public virtue...

...One Beijinger, now in the United States, claimed that he had not left his apartment in two years to avoid Red Guards and certain exile...

...I wish I could say that the conversations in which I participated revealed a firm, Chinese conception of democracy...

...Were workers potential democrats...

...Some may be in jail, others in hiding, still others traumatized by the sacrifice of an entire generation and the needless slaughter of their comrades...

...They are not remarkable for their clarity, but are for their simplicity, honesty, and even good-humored naivet...

...Yet they, too, were caught in the web: to marry, to travel, to work in one's own city, to work in the same city as one's spouse—all of these were subject to the permission of higher-ups, who had climbed the ladder of sycophancy only to demand it from their new subordinates...

...Students worried that Huang would get back at them in ways they would understand only later...

...No, or at least not now...

...Nor would any of the thirty-five other graduate students to whom I taught Western political theory at the Hopkins Center in Nanjing...

...But it was the intellectuals that remained paramount...

...Today, the bell tower still stands, but is little more than a traffic island...

...They were the future elite...

...In a country where education is a precious commodity, intellectuals, my students believed, had a leading role...

...Real political discussions had to take place after bonds of trust between the students and me and among the students themselves had been forged...

...To the regime, they are subversive enough to warrant the Tiananmen death sentence for thousands and probable imprisonment for thousands more...

...No, it meant transforming it somehow, not because the record of communism had been so great, but because it was the only national institution worth talking about...

...My Chinese students did not seek to emulate "the West," really...

...Definitely yes, because they had been exposed to the diversity of the city, as well as to the same petty controls as intellectuals...

...In public the students who complained about him were especially polite to his face...

...As good citizens they were expected to suffer a thousand petty judgments graciously, but such standards did not apply to the little and big tyrants in every workplace and in provincial and national government...

...It was not pompous or closed-minded...

...Far from wanting to dismantle centralized authority, my students hoped against hope that it could be rebuilt with the incorruptible...

...They didn't—democracy was defined more by what it was not...

...FALL • 1989 • 425 The first thing one learns in China is that while everything is politically charged, people seldom talk spontaneously about politics at all...

...Now he was the unofficial snitch with arbitrary power over the students...

...When I finished, a single hand went up: "Mass line is mass blind," a young party member, Yang Bo, said...

...Nobody believes that there ever was a mass line...

...These ideas are hardly sophisticated ones, with systematic theories about when, how and why political life is going to change...

...My friends in China would not dare write to me...

...In limited quantities, yes, in the sense of petty entrepreneurship, but getting rich should not be at the expense of others...

...q Ed...

...That tolerance is now gone, for there has been too much hypocrisy...

...The strike did nothing...

...They admired America for its luck and what they saw as our freedom from history, a freedom not possible for them because they bore the burden of over 2,000 years as a nation-state...

...Unlike every intellectual over thirty-five that I had met in China, Huang had indeed spent his time in Nanjing and not in the countryside during the Cultural Revolution...

...A typical response from a student in the PLA was this: "Eugene Debs was a sincere socialist, but it is Milton Friedman who is correct because he knows that the development of the forces of production is a prelude to the development of socialism...

...My father is, and it may help me to get a job...

...Now those relationships are temporarily broken...

...Women students told me he had tried to molest them, something they said was very rare in China...

...It was, I thought, going to be a long year...

...The square returns to normal as if the birds had never existed...

...I had given them excerpts from Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom to read, and then asked them to compare these to Eugene V. Debs's speeches and Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail...

...The old men imitate their birds' songs, but soon the birds fall silent and the old men cover them up and go their way...

...We mourn the deaths of two distinguished contemporaries: Sidney Hook I. F. Stone FALL • 1989 • 427...

...People need each other in practical ways in China...

...The attempt to "modernize agriculture" was just the latest example of the party's ability to "concretize the ideas of the masses," I argued rhetorically...

...But I soon learned that these formulaic responses were what they thought I wanted and what they thought they could safely give me...

...After that, I began to learn about how Chinese intellectuals see themselves, the government and party, the West, and "democracy...

...This should not be understood as fatalism, for the role of intellectuals in this tradition is potentially heroic...

...These were advanced students, yet in our first sessions I became despondent about what I thought were their analytical lapses...

...on the surface, unlikely rebels against the "reformer," Deng Xiaoping, himself exiled in the same way during the ugly years...

...A thousand petty grievances mix with a sense of historical mission to form my students' perceptions of democracy and what was then their contained outrage...

...This time, I believe, Chinese people will win the battle for democracy and freedom...

...Communism, the four modernizations, Mao, Deng, and the Cultural Revolution were considered only as the most recent and not particularly distinctive manifestations of the age-old, inevitable games of emperors and officials...

...Teacher Seidelman, have you attended some kind of party school or are you joking...

...Those trapped in the countryside had straggled back into the cities as porters or construction laborers, taken the examination to enter the university, completed their college degrees, and entered graduate school...