Read Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang Online
Authors: Adi Ignatius
Not only was he opposed to establishing any checks and balances in the political system, he found extremely annoying the use of street demonstrations, petitions, and protests as a way for people to express their views. In fact, he believed in drawing up laws to prohibit people from conducting such activities. Whenever these kinds of incidents occurred, he advocated “using a sharp knife to cut through knotted hemp,” in other words, deploying coercive measures to suppress them. In Deng’s political reform, dictatorship was the one thing that was not allowed to be changed.
Given the serious lessons drawn from Stalin and Mao Zedong’s later years, and from Deng’s personal experiences during the Cultural Revolution, Deng was not unaware of the shortcomings of the political system of socialist countries. For that reason, he often mentioned expanding democracy within the Party and the society, abolishing the patriarchal system, and cleansing out Soviet influences.
However, in order to fully resolve these problems, there had to be a change in the overconcentration of power in the political system. Deng’s creed was not only that the ruling status of the Communist Party should never be challenged; he also adored the high concentration of power and dictatorship and believed they should be retained.
Therefore, the democracy that he talked about, the removal of special status for the leadership and the cleansing of feudal influences, could never be realized. They were no more than empty words.
Hu’s View on Political Reform
Zhao next turns to an analysis of the views of his predecessor as Party General Secretary, Hu Yaobang. Zhao surmises that if Hu had not been ousted from power in 1987, he would have guided China more quickly toward democracy.
[H
u] Yaobang was accused many times by Deng of indulging in bourgeois liberalization, and in the end he was forced to step down because of that. People generally viewed Hu as part of the reform-minded and democratic faction. What exactly was Hu’s view of political reform? What had he proposed?
Yaobang was a quite generous and tolerant man. He advocated implementing a more tolerant social policy, especially with intellectuals, toward whom he had always been empathetic and tolerant. In past decades, when class struggle and constant political campaigns dominated the scene, he rarely took any extreme actions.
After the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee, when he was Director of the Organization Department as well as General Secretary of the Central Committee, he actively overturned cases of condemned rightists, removed the branding of “landlords” and “rich peasants,” and reinstated many of the wrongly convicted. Against opposition and resistance, he insisted on overturning all such cases regardless of when they had occurred. When he was General Secretary, whenever social problems emerged, including demonstrations, he always advocated the principle of reducing tensions and opposed heavy-handed measures. Even for cases related to hooliganism and petty crimes, he promoted the use of multiple approaches to dealing with them. He opposed the “strike hard” campaigns that rounded up and detained large numbers of people. He was very much against the frequent use of dictatorial means.
Even though he did not specifically or clearly express his views or his plans for political reform, the ideal he sought was more democracy and freedom in China’s socialism—to enable people to live in a democratic and free environment with a spirit of enthusiasm. Just before he stepped down, he was personally in charge of drafting the “Resolution on the Building of a Socialist Spiritual Civilization,” which included this paragraph:
In the history of mankind, in the struggle of the newly emerged bourgeoisie and the working class against feudal dictatorship, the formation of the ideas of democracy, freedom, equality, and fraternity greatly liberated the human spirit. The most important [negative] lessons learned during the development of socialism were: first, neglecting development of the economy, and second, failing to build real democratic politics. After the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee, our Party has stressed that without democracy there can be no socialist modernization and it is ready to really promote the democratization of Party and state political affairs. Recently the Central Committee emphasized the issue of political reform, the goal of which is to expand socialist democracy and to perfect the socialist legal system.
From the above, it can be seen that Yaobang undoubtedly sought democracy. Even though he had not yet come up with a specific structure or model for the socialist democracy he had defined, I believe that if he had continued as leader of the Party and state—as situations emerged in our country and abroad, and given the worldwide democratic trend—he would have pushed China’s political reform forward along the path of modernizing the political system and democratization.
How Zhao’s View Evolved
Zhao concedes that political reform was not on his mind when he first came to power. But as he realized that China’s political system was blocking the pace of economic change, his thinking began to shift. He began to advocate for “rule of law,” instead of “rule by men.”
A
fter the Third Plenum of the 11th Central Committee [in 1978], I focused all of my attention for a time on reforming the economic system, ignoring the issue of political reform. Even though as early as when I was in Sichuan, as I had begun experimenting with expanding the autonomy of enterprises, I never thought about how to conduct political reform.
I also felt that history had taught us some lessons and that we needed to overturn the policies that had brought about abnormal events in our Party and society after 1957 and throughout the Cultural Revolution. However, I didn’t think we needed major changes to our fundamental political system.
A worker in Shaanxi once wrote me a letter saying that he had read many of my speeches and believed that on economic issues I was a reformer, but that on political issues I was a conservative. This was indeed an accurate description of my thinking at that time and into the mid-1980s. Therefore, Deng Xiaoping’s famous 1980 speech on reforming the Party and state leadership did not even catch my attention; even less did it change my attitude. It was not until 1985 or 1986 that my understanding started to change. My attention was aroused somewhat by events in the broader international environment and problems that had emerged in the Eastern Bloc. Yet the main reason for the change was that I had come to see a need for political reform from the perspective of economic reform.
Until then, I’d believed that political reform in China should neither be exceedingly progressive, nor lag far behind economic reform. As economic reform deepened, the resistance from conservative forces within the Party grew more intense. Yet without political reform it would have been difficult to sustain economic reform. And without reforms in the political arena, the forces of reform would find it difficult to reach their full potential. Besides, social problems had emerged in the process of reform that would be difficult to address properly without political reform. For example, the development of a market economy created problems involving exchanges of power for money and the exploitation of power for personal gain.
After 1987, I became Acting General Secretary and later General Secretary [of the Chinese Communist Party]. As I became increasingly involved with political issues, I developed a strong belief that tensions in the relationship between the Party and the intelligentsia needed to be resolved. Yet without political participation by intellectuals, it was impossible to improve the relationship in a fundamental way.
Of course, the political reform I had in mind for China at the time, up until 1989, was not an adaptation of a multiparty system or the implementation of a Western-style parliamentary system. Nor did I think that the Communist Party’s ruling position should change.
My idea was that the Party’s ruling status need not be changed, but the way it governed had to be changed. Moreover, in order to realize “rule of law,” the existing situation of “rule by men” needed to be changed. Socialist nations should also be nations with rule of law.
I have heard but not read for myself that Gorbachev’s memoir states that in our talk during his 1989 visit to China, I hinted that China would proceed toward a multiparty and parliamentary system. I didn’t mean to convey any such thing in my comments. I made two points to him: one was that the Communist Party’s status as the ruling party would not change, but that its method of governing had to change; the other was that socialist countries should be governed not by “rule by men” but by “rule of law.” I intentionally used the word “rule” instead of “system.” These ideas accurately summed up my position on political reform at the time, a position I had developed over the prior two years.
We had to change the way we governed, but how were we to make these changes? I had gradually developed some ideas on how to accomplish this.
Given that the Communist Party was the ruling party, how should it govern? My idea was to modernize how it governed, so that it could become more modern, civilized, enlightened, and open. I didn’t sense it then, but when I think about things now I realize that my general inclination was to change the methods as well as the system of the long-standing “proletarian dictatorship.” The idea included the following:
First, we needed to increase the transparency of Party and state decision making. Gorbachev called this “openness” [glasnost] and we called it “transparency.” The major activities and decisions of the Party and the state needed to be made public. This would have changed the long-standing “black-box operation,” where the public is only given the final result of a decision. As soon as the government announced a decision, it moved on to implementation, but people were not privy to the process by which the decision had been made. This is very important. People have the right to know.
Next, we needed to establish multiple channels for dialogue—with various social factions, forces, and interests. Decisions on major issues should be made with ongoing consultation and dialogue with various social groups, not just within the Communist Party, and not only after merely consulting once with key figures of other political parties.
Of course, we had to permit social groups to exist; otherwise, how could dialogue be conducted? Most important, we needed to change the situation in which all social groups—including workers’ unions, youth organizations, women’s organizations, chambers of commerce, and others—were all in monotonous unity with the Communist Party. They should not be treated like the Party’s royal instruments. They have to be able to truly represent the people they are meant to represent.
Only dialogue conducted with groups of this kind would carry any real meaning. In other words, their function as intermediate organizations should be fully developed. The Communist Party should not take control of everything or interfere so much in their affairs, and should give them room for independent activities. Under such conditions, the Communist Party should hold dialogues and consult with various social groups, enabling these groups to have real political participation.
We also needed to address changes to our election system: expanding the scope of democratic elections and of “differential quota elections.”
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At the time, we were contemplating submitting multiple candidates for the leadership of the National People’s Congress; the final choice would be made by a vote of NPC representatives, after the Communist Party had proposed its candidates. At the time, differential quota elections were only available for deputy positions, not for high-level posts in the central leadership. Even though we could not all at once adopt the methods of Western-style elections, the Communist Party could at least increase the number of proposed candidates, including for positions such as the Chairman of the NPC or the Premier of the State Council. With more candidates, people would have a real choice.
Moreover, the ruling party must respect the separation of Party and state. The Party’s leadership should be essentially political and not interfere in so many other domains. More tolerance should be shown especially in the realm of culture and the arts; the Party should not be so controlling or so severe.
We also needed to enrich the level of cooperation with other political parties and let other parties enjoy true political participation with functions of dialogue and mutual checks and balances. I also contemplated allowing other political parties to conduct their own activities while the NPC was in session, and to establish their own leading groups. Furthermore, we needed to protect citizens’ rights in concrete terms. This was extremely important. Our constitution was a good one, but there were no laws in place to support its implementation. That is why many of the citizens’ rights defined in the constitution could not be realized.
I talked about this with Gorbachev. I said, “There are many things that are defined in the constitution but cannot be realized in concrete terms. Therefore, we must establish laws that guarantee the protection of specific aspects, for example, freedom of association, assembly, demonstrations, petitions, and strikes. All these should be protected by specific laws.”
We also needed to allow greater press freedom, though under management and leadership. In 1989, I talked to [chief editor of the
People’s Daily
] Hu Jiwei about whether we ought to allow independent newspapers. Currently, all news media are monopolized by the Party and the state: this is not right. At that time, I had not considered permitting a completely free press, but wanted to allow a controlled process of opening up. At the very least, material that Party-and state-controlled media were not willing to run could be published by other media. Even in Chiang Kai-shek’s era [before the Communist Party took power], independent newspapers existed. Even if we did not allow full press freedom, we should allow the airing of public opinions.
At that time, I was thinking about how to allow more political participation—under the Communist Party’s continued ruling position—from various social groups and interest groups, and especially by intellectuals. Even without a multiparty system, we should have expanded various forces of political participation as much as possible.
Some of these thoughts had been included in documents and talks that were written into the Political Report of the 13th Party Congress. Of course, in these texts, some of the ideas could not be expressed as explicitly, and some could not be included at all.
These are the ideas that gradually formed in my mind from 1986 to 1989. The Party’s ruling position would not change, but the way it governed had to. That is to say, under the basic framework of the Communist Party’s leadership, we would allow more political participation from various social groups; “rule of law” would gradually replace “rule by men”; and many of the wonderful things defined in the constitution would be realized, one by one.