Hail the 20th anniversary of the crushing of the Chinese counter-revolution!
Coming 3-4 June marks the 20th anniversary of the crushing of
the counter-revolutionary rebellion in Beijing by the People’s Liberation
Army. Just as the original events, doubtless this anniversary will be another
occasion for the imperialist propaganda machine to go into overdrive in an
effort to whip up anti-Chinese and anti-socialist hysteria. The Chinese
people, the Chinese government and the Communist Party of China (CPC), will
treat this hysteria with the contempt it deserves. Those, who have killed more
than 1.5 million Iraqis, tens of thousands of Afghans, and who sanction Zionist
mass murders in Palestine are in no position to teach the Chinese people, their
government and the CPC, lessons on humanitarianism.
Going
against the stream of propaganda unleashed by imperialism and its ‘left’-wing
flunkeys, we greeted with joy the crushing of the attempted counter-revolution
in China. Events have proved us right, for had this attempt succeeded, the
Chinese people would have been thrust back to the utter lairs of destitution.
During the last 20 years at least 200 million Chinese people have been lifted
out of poverty, while China has made great economic progress and its economy is
the third largest in the world.
To be
convinced of this, one has only to compare the conditions of existence of the
peoples in the former Soviet Union with that of the Chinese people. The
restoration of capitalism in the erstwhile USSR has claimed the lives of over a
million people and the life expectancy has fallen precipitately by five years
over such a short period, while the Soviet people’s wealth has been stolen by a
couple of dozen thieves known as the oligarchy.
It is for this reason that we are reprinting, without any alteration, in
this issue of Lalkar, the article we wrote 20 years ago entitled
‘Chinese Counter-Revolution Crushed’. Once again we take the opportunity to
greet the Chinese people, their government and the CPC on this their great
victory and send them our best wishes in safeguarding the socialist system.
All friends of China have a bounden duty to defend the
gains of the Chinese Revolution which, after the October Revolution, is the
most important event in the history of the international proletariat and the
whole of progressive humanity. They have a duty to tell the imperialist
blood-suckers: Hands Off China!
Editor
_________________________
Chinese
Counter-Revolution Crushed
LALKAR August/September 1989
It is just over a month since the dramatic events
of 3-4 June in Tienanmen Square, Beijing. The gigantic power of the print and
electronic media of all the imperialist countries, in particular those of the
United States, has been mobilised to misrepresent these events as a “massacre”
and a “bloodbath” of the innocent students demanding little more than “democracy”
and an end to corruption. Not only have the propaganda machines of the junior
partners of US Imperialism fallen into line, but also the various
petty-bourgeois ‘socialists’, from Euro-communists to various Trotskyist
outfits, ever ready to malign and maliciously slander the achievements of
socialism, have swallowed the misrepresentation of these events hook, line and
sinker. The liberal Trotskyite, Mr Tariq Ali, long ago discarded by the
working-class movement, has even turned to poetry and joined the chorus of
imperialist lackeys engaged in the falsification of the happenings in Beijing.
What is surprising, however, is that even a section of those organisations and
individuals who describe themselves as Marxist-Leninists have fallen for this
distorted version. In view of this it is extremely important to look at these
events closely so that a clear picture of what actually happened may emerge.
The student demonstrations, which culminated in the
events of 3-4 June in Tienanmen Square, actually started in April following the
death of Hu Yao Bang, the former General Secretary of the Communist Party of
China (CPC). The pretext for these demonstrations was to cherish and honour the
memory of the departed Hu. At the same time the demonstrators levelled
accusations of “corruption” and “profiteering” at the leadership,
demanding more democracy.
Neither the CPC nor the Chinese Government tried to
interfere with these demonstrations since some of the slogans initially raised
by the demonstrators expressed also the legitimate concern of the Party, which
has been trying to eliminate corruption and profiteering – of which a minority
of Party members are undoubtedly guilty. In fact the Government conducted
several negotiations with the students and conceded some of their demands
immediately, while promising to look into others. But the students were not
satisfied. Each concession by the Chinese Government only had the effect of the
demonstrators demanding further concessions. In the end it became clear that
the demonstrators were not out to reform the socialist system in China with a
view to eliminating corruption and promoting socialist democracy; what they
wanted was to overthrow the Chinese Government and replace socialism by
capitalism, socialist democracy by bourgeois democracy of the American type.
They asserted that China should be completely Westernised, that
Marxism-Leninism had no relevance to China, and that the Chinese Government should
step down. Nothing could symbolise the real aims and demands of the
demonstrators more than the raising of the Statue of Liberty, to an
accompaniment of delirious joy on the part of those who have been longing and
plotting for quite a number of years for the restoration of capitalism in China, with its market of 1.2 billion people. The putting up of this so-called Goddess of
Liberty, this symbol of US imperialist plunder and exploitation of weaker
nations, right opposite the portrait of China’s greatest proletarian
revolutionary Mao Zedong, was nothing short of a provocation.
As time went on, alien elements, irreconcilably
hostile to socialism, were setting the agenda, trying to use the students for
their own purposes, encouraging them to boycott classes, organise huge illegal
demonstrations and go on hunger strike, thus creating turmoil in Beijing and
some other cities as well. Those students who wanted to leave Tienanmen Square were forcibly prevented from doing so by hostile and alien elements, who more
and more came to control this movement. In the twenty days leading up to the
events of 3-4 June, the situation in Beijing went from bad to worse. While the
Chinese Government, exercising the greatest restraint in the face of extreme
provocation, tried to resolve the problem by peaceful means, the anti-socialist
diehards in control of the movement, egged on and encouraged by the presence of
hundreds of bourgeois journalists from several imperialist countries, providing
an instant service for broadcasting their views and programme, became more and
more brazen. They even dared to besiege the Party and Government headquarters
in an effort to paralyse and overthrow the Chinese Government, get rid of the
socialist system and replace it with capitalism.
The Chinese Government could not take a kindly
attitude towards such attempts. Its patience exhausted, through the person of
Premier Li Peng, it declared martial law on May 20 and demanded that the
demonstrators leave the Square, but to no effect. As a matter of fact the
demonstrators set up barricades and soldiers brought into Beijing on trucks
were stopped.
At last the Chinese Government gave a warning that
it took a serious view of the continuing turmoil, that people should “protect
their lives” and go home. On June 3, the Government sent troops into Tienanmen Square. Far from taking the Government’s warning seriously, the response of the
demonstrators was derision and violent attacks on the soldiers. Some thugs set
fire to army vehicles and beat up soldiers. Even the bourgeois media, biased as
it is, provides unequivocal evidence in the form of newsreel and eyewitness
accounts, to the effect that the soldiers hit back only after having been
viciously attacked. Newsreels reveal army trucks and armoured personnel
carriers ablaze, their crews incinerated. There is photographic evidence of the
bodies of the soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) who had been
lynched and burned. There are pictures too of students flaunting weapons they
captured early on Saturday before the troops fought back. Even the New York
Times of June 6 felt obliged to report a broadcast of a videotape by
Chinese television showing a “a crowd of young men throwing rocks at an army
truck whose engine had stalled. They hurled rocks through the windshield,
apparently killing two soldiers inside”.
The news programme reported that thugs and criminal
elements had killed several dozen soldiers, beaten up more, set fire to
vehicles and indulged in indiscriminate looting and burning. Long before the
army used their weapons, the soldiers of the PLA had tried extremely hard to
clear the Square of the violent and riotous mob by use of persuasion, tear gas
and by firing their weapons into the air. The reluctance of the PLA to use its
weapons was taken by the criminal elements and their imperialist backers as a
sign of the army’s weakness and ascribed to divisions within the army rather
than being recognised for what it really was, namely, the ingrained respect for
human life that every PLA soldier, not to speak of the socialist Chinese
Government, has. The soldiers had strict orders to use every peaceful means to
disperse the crowds. Only this explains the scale and magnitude of injuries
suffered by the soldiers. In Beijing alone 5,000 soldiers were injured, as
opposed to 2,000 students receiving injuries. Only when hundreds of guns had
been stolen from the army, dozens of soldiers killed and hundreds beaten up,
did the army take resolute action. Earlier there was no violence. Western media
have run scare stories about deaths among the allegedly peaceful innocent
students demanding “democracy” and an end to corruption. The facts are
that in Beijing not all the guns were fired by the soldiers. In Tienanmen Square the army negotiated with the students and a majority of the latter decided
to leave of their own accord. But the criminal counter-revolutionary elements,
who were in charge and bent upon overthrowing the socialist system, were by no
means agreeable to such an outcome. They tried forcibly to prevent ordinary
students from leaving. They instigated and indulged in wanton violence against
the soldiery.
When it became absolutely clear that this criminal
coterie would accept no other resolution of the problem than the complete
overthrow of the socialist system and its replacement by capitalism, that to
achieve this nefarious end the conspirators were prepared to kill, burn and
loot, to practise thuggery and intimidation, the Chinese Government and the
army decided to take resolute action. It would have been a criminal dereliction
of duty in such grave circumstance for the Government and the army not to have
resorted to the use of force. In fact, should we not accuse the Chinese
Government and the army of not having acted resolutely early enough? Should we
not accuse them of showing patience for far too long? Should we not accuse the
Chinese authorities of tolerating the presence in Beijing and elsewhere of
hundreds of bourgeois journalists, who acted as cheerleaders for the criminal
conspirators in Beijing in flagrant disregard of Chinese law?
The Chinese people achieved their liberation from
imperialism in 1949 after a long and arduous struggle. During the course of
this struggle millions of Chinese people perished and many more suffered
extreme hardship. After liberation they completed the democratic tasks of the
revolution and under the leadership of the CPC, the vanguard of the Chinese
working class, they went on to begin the construction of socialism. They have
made untold sacrifices and suffered much in order to reach the present stage of
affairs when no Chinese dies of hunger, there is no illiteracy, there is basic
health care available to everyone, and last but not least, China is no longer a pushover for imperialism. It is no longer possible for the imperialist
powers to wage opium wars against China or to sack Nanking or Beijing. Having
reached this state of affairs, the Chinese people, with their long
revolutionary traditions, the history of their struggle and sacrifice, are not
lightly going to let a few thousand criminal elements, albeit with strong
connections with international imperialism, overthrow the socialist system. The
People’s Liberation Army is a guarantee of that: it is the cutting edge of the
dictatorship of the proletariat in China and if this causes outrage among
imperialist circles, their hired hacks and their ideologues, the Chinese people
can afford to treat it with the contempt such outrage deserves. If the resolute
actions of the Chinese Government and the PLA sent petty-bourgeois ‘socialists’
– the Trotskyists and the Euros and even some would-be Marxist Leninists – into
a state of paroxysm, this only goes to show that at every critical juncture in
the development of the revolutionary movement the world over, during every
major crisis, our petty bourgeois socialists are as unfailingly bound to
support the imperialist bourgeoisie as they are to stab the working-class and
the national liberation movements in the back.
Once the PLA had taken the resolute action and used
its force, something it had tried hard to avoid, the imperialist media launched
a frenzied campaign of lies with the aim not only of discrediting socialist China, but also of creating confusion, and instigating civil war within China. It put out wild
rumours of thousands of students having been shot dead, that Premier Li Peng
had been shot at and injured in an attempt on his life, that Deng Xiaoping had
died, that one section of the PLA was converging on Peking to fight another.
These rumours, reported as gospel truth in the imperialist media, were beamed
hourly into China as “news” by the Voice of America and a vast
communications network of fax machines and phone calls which have been
enthusiastically paid for by US corporations. Chinese students in the Boston suburb of Newton, Massachusetts, who feed information from China to the Voice of America, have been given free space and phone lines since May 24 by
an outfit called the Walker Centre for Ecumenical Exchange.
The Voice of America, the US Government’s
propaganda arm, was even more blatantly interventionist than the rest of the US media. The New York Times of June 9 carried the report that during the height of the
crisis “the Voice of America had begun sending television signals to China, the first time that the agency had taken such a step. These television signals were
going directly to about 2,000 satellite dishes in China, operated mostly by the
People’s Liberation Army”. The New York Times went on to say that “the
broadcast of news to military units is significant because of reports that
units backing the pro-democracy demonstrators may have exchanged fire” with
units supporting the socialist government of China. In short, the imperialist
media were busy broadcasting a continuous stream of rumours, lies and disinformation
in order to foment civil war within the PLA with the hope of helping the
counter-revolutionary forces.
With the passage of time the rumours and lies put
out by the imperialist media turned out to be untrue and an expression of
wishful thinking on their part. Sections of the media changed their tune in an
attempt to correct their earlier lies. These corrections, however, came not in
the form of banner headlines but buried in the obscurity of inside pages. The Washington
Post of June 12 carried the following important admission:
“The [Chinese] government is
depicting the [Tienanmen Square] operation as a textbook case of
restraint in the face of wild provocation and the casualties almost entirely on
its side.
“The government’s case is bolstered by
the fact that, in some areas, demonstrators did attack troops who did not
respond, and these incidents were captured on videotape.
“On television every night now, images
are broadcast of protesters stoning troops, beating them with poles and, in
some particularly dramatic photos, firebombing trucks, buses and even armored
personnel carriers. In some cases, soldiers were still inside at the time.
“On one avenue in western Beijing, demonstrators torched an entire military convoy of more than 100 trucks and
armored vehicles. Aerial pictures of the conflagration and columns of smoke
have powerfully bolstered the government’s argument that the troops were
victims, not executioners. Other scenes show soldiers’ corpses and
demonstrators stripping automatic rifles off unresisting soldiers”.
On June 12, the New York Times reproduced an
‘eyewitness’ account of the alleged Tienanmen Square massacre by an “unnamed
20-year old student” from the Hong Kong newspaper Wen Wei Po. This account
was full of horrific details, blood, beatings and shootings of students,
battles at the Heroes’ Monument in Tienanmen Square, machine guns on the roof
of the Revolutionary Museum, etc. This “eyewitness” report was
fabricated to such an extent that it threatened to discredit the New York
Times. As a result Nicholas Kristoff, who had been covering the events for
the New York Times, was obliged to dissociate himself completely from
this version and to confirm the correctness of the claim by the Chinese
Government that there was no ‘massacre’ at Tienanmen Square.
“The central scene in the [June 12]
article is of troops beating and machine-gunning unarmed students clustered
around the Monument to the People’s Heroes in the middle of Tienanmen Square”,
says Kristoff of the report. “Several other witnesses, both Chinese and
foreign, say this did not happen …
“There is also no evidence of
machine-gun emplacements on the roof of the history museum … witnesses say
that armored vehicles did not surround the monument”. In fact, witnesses
say that “students and a pop singer, Hou Dejian, were negotiating with the
troops and decided to leave at dawn, between 5 and 6 am. The students all filed
out together.”
Kristoff concludes, “The Wen Wei Po article, reprinted as gospel by the ‘New York Times’, has the clashes unfolding in the
wrong places.”
To get truth from the bourgeois media one has
almost to indulge in archaeological excavations. If one has the stamina to do
that, one finds even in this media the corroboration of the accounts put out by
the Chinese Government. One finds, for instance, that the Chinese Government
figures of 300 people killed is much nearer to the truth than the baseless and
wildly exaggerated figures put out by the media in the imperialist countries.
Furthermore, of the 300 killed, half were soldiers beaten to death, set on fire
or killed by bullets. Of the remaining dead only 30 were students and the rest
were simply onlookers who became victims in the chaos prevailing in the streets
at the time.
The more deeply we go into these events, the more
we become convinced that the protest in Tienanmen Square was a counter-
revolutionary rebellion. This is not to say that quite a few innocent and
gullible students did not join the protest. What is important, however, is that
the programme of those who led the protest and their foreign backers was to
overthrow the socialist government and the socialist system in China. It is precisely this that explains the violent reaction of the US and other imperialist governments to the suppression of this counter- revolutionary rebellion by
the PLA, and not any concern for any alleged violation of human rights by the
Chinese government. The ruling circles and governments of the imperialist
countries do not give a fig for human rights. The only “human” right they
defend most resolutely is the right of capital to exploit labour and the right
of imperialism to oppress, exploit, subjugate and plunder weak nations. It is
in pursuit of the attainment of this “human” right that they happily arm
counter-revolutionary bandits in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Mozambique and Angola;
it is in the pursuit of this self-same “human” right that they give full
backing to such fascist regimes as those of South Africa, Israel and El
Salvador; it is for the same reason that they greeted with undisguised glee the
murder of over one million people by the fascist Suharto military dictatorship
that overthrew in the late 1960s the Indonesian government of the late Dr
Sukarno. These gentry have very little to teach us about respect for human rights
and human life.
In his polemic against Kautsky (who opposed the
October Revolution in the name of “democracy”), Lenin said:
“It is natural for a
liberal to speak of democracy in general; but a Marxist will never forget to
ask ‘for what class?’” Continues Lenin: “If we are not to mock at
common sense and history, it is obvious that we cannot speak of ‘pure
democracy’ so long as different classes exist; we can only speak of class
democracy … ‘Pure democracy’ is the mendacious phrase of a liberal who wants
to fool the workers.”
With equal justification we can say that the cry
for human rights in the abstract, divorced from class reality, is the “mendacious
phrase” of a flunkey and a stooge of imperialism who wants to fool the
workers. In this category of flunkeys and stooges fall not just the ordinary
bourgeois hacks and ideologues but also the Trotskyites and revisionists of
various hues. Like all other crises, the crisis in China has had the effect of
revealing all too clearly the reactionary features of these flunkeys who in
normal times are able to hide their reactionary nature under the cover of
‘left’, even Marxist, phrase-mongering.
One thing is certain, i.e., if the
counter-revolutionary rebellion in China had succeeded, it would have been
followed by an unprecedented massacre that would have been considered by
imperialism and its hangers-on as a small price to pay for the restoration of “democracy”
– i.e., the overthrow of socialism and the reinstatement of the basic “human”
right, i.e., the exploitation of man by man – capitalism – in China.
It is for this reason, and being guided solely by
the interests of the proletariat, that we unhesitatingly support the
suppression by the PLA of the counter-revolutionary rebellion in Tienanmen Square. It is for this reason that we denounce and oppose the sanctions and
pressure being sought to be put on the Chinese government by US Imperialism and
its junior partners.
One last question that we must raise is: how could
this counter- revolutionary rebellion have arisen in the first place? In their
effort to modernise China, the Chinese leadership has been trying for nearly a
decade to break into the monopoly over technology held by Western and Japanese
imperialism, by offering them special economic zones and joint ventures. This,
accompanied by the loosening of the centralised economic planning, the
dissolution of the communes, wider pay differentials between the masses and
managers and intellectuals, have disrupted the socialist economy and led to
inflation, unemployment and dislocation of vast numbers of workers and
peasants. These economic factors have been accompanied by an ideological
relaxation and a lessening of emphasis on the teachings of Marxism-Leninism at
a time when an increasing number of Chinese students studying in America and other Western countries were not simply acquiring technical and scientific
expertise, but also having their heads stuffed with bourgeois ideology. (At
present there are 73,000 Chinese students in America and another 250,000 visitors).
The CPC must take a hard look at
these economic and ideological factors, which together contributed much to
produce the counter-revolutionary rebellion. It must learn the necessary
lessons and put an end to those practices – economic and ideological – which
led to the present crisis. We wish the Chinese working class every success in
tackling these problems.