This article addresses the broad historical
 amnesia being promoted by the press
concerning Tiananmen and Maoism. For its part,
 MIM has denounced Deng from the
beginning of MIM's existence in 1983.
 While Deng was popular in both phony
communist and Western capitalist
 circles, MIM saw him for what he was--a
bourgeois dictator. Yet, some people
 fooled by the bourgeois media think Deng is
a Maoist or that we Maoists are responsible
 for the Beijing massacre. They taunt
us with the Beijing massacre or tell
 us to move to China or other
state-capitalist societies. Actually it
 is the critics of Maoism responsible for
the massacre in Beijing. No truly Maoist
 people's army would have massacred its
people. This article is to clear up the
 record.--July 27, 1992

>From MIM Notes 38, 1989
by mc5

On the weekend of June 3rd-4th, the Beijing
regime shot down hundreds of student-led
demonstrators opposed to government
corruption and dubbed as pro-democracy by the
Western press.

The figures for the death tolls are estimates.
According to USA Today, the figure was at
least 500 deaths. (USA Today, 6/5/89, 1)  In
the following days there were crackdowns in
other cities as well. Estimates of people killed
in the whole crackdown in China ranged into
the thousands. (New York Times, 10/19/89, 5)
In the ensuing struggle the students retaliated
with violence. AP published the photo of a
military vehicle driver killed by students after
he rammed into them with his vehicle. (USA
Today, 6/5/89, 6a)

Apparently, the urban areas largely supported
the students while the countryside was silent.
"In Beijing a poll indicated that 93.3 percent of
the residents believed that the student
demonstrators' goals were reasonable, compared
with 1.5 percent who thought they were
unreasonable. The rest had no opinion." (NYT,
8/5/89, 2)

The massacre has reportedly created a small,
perhaps permanent armed resistance. Two or
three times a week, soldiers in Beijing are
attacked by snipers according to diplomats. The
so-called guerrillas may be relatives of those
massacred. (NYT, 8/2/89, 7)

Citizens seized 1,000 guns from soldiers
during the Tiananmen uprising that have not
been turned in. (Ibid.)

Demonstrations of thousands occurred across
the world in protest of the massacre. The
largest demonstrations were in Hong Kong.
Under pressure the U.S. government
supposedly halted in $685 million in arms
shipments. It did not cut off diplomatic ties or
impose economic sanctions. (The Plain Dealer,
6/6/89, 1) It did cut high-level non-diplomatic
exchanges and got the World Bank and Asian
Development Bank to postpone loans to
China. (New York Times, 9/30/89, 5)

The reason that the U.S. government did not
do more is that the U.S. imperialists obtain
electronic intelligence information from China
in the kind of alliance against the Soviet bloc
that the U.S. seeks to preserve at any cost.

Background to massacre
Students started their demonstrations this
year in Beijing with a commemoration of
former party leader Hu Yaobang, who died. Hu
had lost his job for being soft on the student
movement in the past.

Toward the end of April, the CCP ordered
the students to stop their disturbances in the
streets, but hundreds of thousands ignored the
CCP and continued their demonstrations. They
maintained an occupation of Tiananmen Square
for weeks and started a hunger strike which
garnered widespread sympathy. By May 20th,
one million people helped occupy the square.
The government had reason to fear the
movementUs attacks on government corruption.
The children of government leaders in particular
were seen becoming wealthy and travelling
abroad because of their special privileges. Out
of 28 people with wealth exceeding 10 million
Chinese dollars, 26 were found to be children
of top officials in one investigation.
One scholar found that a majority of those
participants in the Cultural Revolution (1966-
1976) were ready for another campaign against
government corruption. (Forward Motion,
September 1989, 33)

One common poster in the demonstrations
said that "Mao's son died in Korea." This
referred to the fact that Mao gave his son no
particular privilege. He died fighting for the
communists in North Korea when China aided
Korea in fighting the Western imperialist
invasion.

Something of a Mao revival occurred with
demonstrators carrying posters of Mao,
especially outside Beijing. This is not to say
that all the demonstrators sang the communist
song "Internationale," which some did. There
was also an important section of the movement
dedicated to copying the West as the mock
Statue of Liberty brought to Tiananmen
proved.

CCP power struggle
Deng Xiaoping is the most powerful leader
in China.  Deng, Yang Shangkun and Li Peng
appear to be mainly responsible for the
massacre.

The wake of the Tiananmen massacre left an
apparent power struggle in the Chinese
Communist Party heirarchy. Jiang Zemin, a
member of the Standing Committee of the
Politburo --the highest committee in the
Communist Party --who is little known to
Western China-watchers emerged as the new
Communist Party leader called General
Secretary to replace Zhao Ziyang, who received
blame as a "splittest" in the party who broke
party discipline and bore responsibility for
China's economic problems. Like Hu before
him, Zhao appeared soft on the student
demonstrators and met with students in the
square when his purge was already imminent.
After taking over ZhaoUs job, Jiang issued
the formal opinion of the CCP that the
Tiananmen rebellion was a
" counterrevolutionary rebellion aimed at
negating the leadership of the Communist
Party of China and overthrowing the socialist
system."  (AP in Ann Arbor News, 9/26/89, 1)
Scaring Westerners even more, Jiang said
China was having  "a serious class struggle."
(New York Times, 9/30/89, 5)  He said the
rebellions  "aimed at overthrowing the Chinese
Communist Party's leadership and subverting
the socialist system, at (sic.) turning China
into a bourgeois republic and reducing it once
again to a dependency of the Western capitalist
powers."  (Ibid.) This is the most radical
rhetoric out of the CCP in over ten years. It
does not mean much in terms of the economy
though; it's just a new type of justification for
repression.

Jiang also admitted some problems have
become worse in recent years including  "abuse
of power for personal gains, corruption and
degeneration, which result in alienation from
the masses of people."  (Ibid.)  Despite the
tough talk, Jiang is one of the parents of
children studying in the United States.  70,000
have taken the privilege and failed to return to
China. (Ibid.)

For being replaced by Jiang, Zhao receives a
higher salary and better treatment than Jiang
Zemin. (Ibid., 7) Such is admittedly crude
evidence, but it supports the theory that Jiang,
Zhao, Li and Deng are all part of the same state
capitalist class. They don't imprison or kill
each other for their disagreements, just
students.

Imperialist media tarnish Mao
The New York Times started its editorial on
the Tiananmen massacre with the following:
"Mao Zedong taught Chinese Communists that
political power grows out of the barrel of a
gun. Deng Xiaoping believes it." (New York
Times, 6/5/89, 16)

No where in the editorial does the New York
Times explain that Deng Xiaoping came under
attack by Mao for his repression of students
and that in fact Mao purged Deng just before
his death in 1976.

When Deng did things the capitalist media
liked, it proclaimed him a hero. When the same
man massacred the students, they blamed Mao.
ItUs no-lose politics for the capitalists.
Even the slogan "political power grows out
of the barrel of a gun" is taken out of context.
It omits that Mao had to liberate China from
imperialists who oppressed China with guns. It
omits that the United States sent millions in
military aid to Mao's opponents. If Mao
thought that power grows out of the barrel of a
gun, so did Roosevelt and Truman. So did the
New York Times when it supported that
military aid.

Mao certainly instructed that the army
should not attack its own people. "In recent
weeks of the standoff between China's army
and democracy-seeking students, soldiers had
told the crowds, 'We will never kill Chinese,'
  just as spiritual leader Mao Tse-tung
commanded." (USA Today, 6/5/89, 2a)

Media confuse issue
Perhaps the most important story of summer
1989 was the massacre of student
demonstrators in Beijing, China. As a story it
is most instructive in how the U.S. media
consistently misleads public opinion.
The same corporate press that effusively
praised Chinese Communist Party leader Deng
Xiaoping for his pragmatism in moving China
into capitalist-style economic organization
turned right around and started denouncing
"hard-liners" and "conservatives," who only
weeks before were described as "reformers" and
Rpragmatists.S It is the nature of the corporate
media that its use of blitz style publicity,
photos and headlines and repeated cliches makes
it easy to have historical amnesia.

Time magazine had named Deng Xiaoping
Man of the Year twice in congratulatory tones.
Blatant capitalist propaganda sang the praises
of Deng Xiaoping. Named "Success Story of
the Year for 1985" by Success magazine editor-
in-chief Scott DeGarmo, Deng Xiaoping was
said to make "a Horatio Alger hero look like a
piker."

__________________________________________
_________________________

Why does Time magazine contradict itself on Deng
Xiaoping?
a.  It doesn't know what it is talking about.
b.  It has no consistent theory, only the consistent
task of glorifying capitalism.
c.   It has a total of two people in China covering the
whole country.
d.   All of the above.
__________________________________________
__________________________

Whenever there were problems in China, the
media could refer to "conservative" bureaucrats
who opposed Deng XiaopingUs program of
decollectivizing agriculture and running
industry on a profit/loss basis. It were as if
China were only poor because it was stuck on
socialism and did not adopt Western business
practices.

Then, Deng Xiaoping orders the crackdown
on students and suddenly he becomes described
as a "hard-liner" himself. No one ever
suggested that the very people who advocated
free markets, unemployment and private or
quasi-private property in agriculture were also
the same people in favor of repression of
political movements in China.

The hidden ideological agenda in virtually all
media coverage --and there are only a handful
of Western reporters generating all coverage of
China, a maximum of two per agency like the
Associated Press, United Press International
and the New York Times-- is that the good
guys are the ones advocating capitalism. The
theory goes that if China gets capitalism,
democracy and freedom from repression will
surely follow.

It's a tired refrain that South Africa should
have disproved long ago. Black South Africans
can attest to the fact that free markets and
capitalism do not bring about political
freedom, never mind an escape from the
pervasive political violence, starvation and
disease afflicted on the majority of the worldUs
population exploited by the capitalist system.
________________________________________________________________
"To protect or to suppress the broad masses of the
people --that is the fundamental distinction between
the Communist Party and the Guomindang, between
the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, and between the
dictatorship of the proletariat and the dictatorship of
the bourgeoisie." Mao Zedong, June 1968
______________________________________________________________
Endless space in the papers is spent hand-
wringing over whether Deng Xiaoping and
other aging Communist Party leaders will see
the light and install Western-style democracy or
at least another so-called thaw. A little history
on Deng Xiaoping and the other leaders of the
government would have gone a long way to
answer the question.

In 1966 China had a student movement. It
too focussed on corruption of bureaucrats and
used posters freely to criticize authorities. The
ideological slant of the student movement of
the Cultural Revolution (1966-1969) was
different than the one today, but the response of
Deng Xiaoping was the same: repress it.
It was the action of Deng Xiaoping and his
cohort of Communist Party leaders that led
Mao Zedong in 1966 (now described by the
media universally as hard-liner of hard-liners,
fanatic of fanatics etc.) to declare that "it is
anti-Marxist for communists to fear the student
movement. . . . The Central Committee of the
Youth League should stand on the side of the
student movement. But instead it stands on the
side of suppression of the student movement." (2)
______________________________________________________________
"It is anti-Marxist for communists to fear the student
movement."
Mao Zedong commenting on Deng Xiaoping's
efforts to repress the students in the 1960s.
______________________________________________________________
By this Mao referred to the efforts of party
leaders who personally went to campuses and
ordered student activists locked up in cafeterias
and cut off from the outside world for putting
up posters critical of certain party leaders.
Indeed, the suppression of the student
movement by a faction of party leaders, the
second in rank being Deng Xiaoping, became
one of the central issues in the Cultural
Revolution. On the one hand was Mao and his
followers who said it was impossible to have
socialism without the mobilization of the
people in both economic and political affairs.
On the other hand were people like Deng
Xiaoping and Chen Yun, who declared that
"cadres decide everything." (3)

In their self-criticisms in 1966 Deng
Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi admitted that their
anti-corruption and anti-student campaigns
repressed the masses of people and oppposed
Mao. (4) For these and other non-Marxist
practices Liu Shaoqi lost his power as second
to Mao in China and Deng Xiaoping lost his
party and government posts.

The current number two de facto power in
China behind Deng Xiaoping is Yang
Shangkun. He and his relatives in the military
were the ones ordering the troops to massacre
the demonstrators. He was also one of the
targets of the Cultural Revolution attacked by
the Maoists. It is therefore grossly ignorant of
history to associate Yang with Mao.
The Western media and governments always
opposed the Cultural Revolution, the student
movement that started it and the purge of Liu
and Deng during the Cultural Revolution. That
movement was too radical for the West, so it
supported its repression by Deng and Liu.
During the Cultural Revolution, Mao and
his much villified followers the Gang of Four
succeeded and ousted Deng Xiaoping from his
top government posts only to return him to his
posts after an attempted military coup and oust
him again just before Mao's death. After the
death of Mao in 1976, however, leaders more
to the liking of the Western media came to
power --including Deng Xiaoping again.
One of the first actions taken by the new
leader Hua Guofeng was to change the
constitution of China to take out the right to
strike and to put up political posters. People
who put up posters received prison sentences.
Then across the board, various groups in
society were told to stop making political
demands in the name of advancing ChinaUs
modernization. Propaganda came out saying
that the most admirable quality of the working
class was its discipline in following orders. For
women, the most cherished role became that of
raising children for the "socialist motherland."
The new regime indirectly supported the
fascist slogan of keeping "the trains on time."
In this new authoritarian atmosphere, it also
opposed the old slogan that dockworkers
"should not be slaves to cargo tonnage." In
other words, the dockworkers should get to
work and show results in the number of tons of
cargo they put out and shouldn't organize
production by any other criteria.
The West is concerned about its ideas about
democracy, but it did not care that Deng
implemented anti-democracy in the workplace
and womenUs roles. Maoists on the other hand
support democracy for the working classes--
the proletariat and peasantry in both politics
and economic matters. It is especially
hypocritical to associate Mao with Deng when
Mao purged Deng and the West supported Deng
all along until the massacre.

Notes:

(1) E.L. Wheelwright and Bruce McFarlane, The Chinese Road to Socialism:
Economics of the Cultural Revolution (New York: Monthly Review, 1970), pp. 235-6.
(2) Stuart Schram ed., Chairman Mao Talks to the People (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1974), p. 253.
(3) This slogan repeated by Chen in Beijing Review, no. 13, 1984, p. 16.
(4) Hong Yung Lee, The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: A Case Study
Berkeley:University of California Press, 1978), pp. 36-41.