THE GREAT REVERSAL The Privatization of China, 1978-1989 ...

This essence was known to many in China and to some abroad long before the lightningstruck in June 1989, but most members of the Western media and academic world were toomesmerized by China's reform rhetoric and market progress to apprehend the reality of theevents unfolding before their eyes. Since privatization matched their prejudices and aconsumption boom confirmed its validity, they preferred not to look too closely at theunderlying currents of economic dislocation, infrastructural decay, environmentaldegradation, social disintegration, cultural malaise, and rising class antagonisms thatthreatened to unravel the fabric of Chinese society.Mao Zedong was far more astute. More than twenty years ago during the CulturalRevolution, he exposed Deng Xiaoping, Yang Shangkun, and most of their "hard line"colleagues as capitalist roaders. He accurately predicted that if such persons ever came topower they would transform the Communist Party into a revisionist party and finally into afascist party and then the whole of China would change color.The surprising thing is not how accurate Mao's prediction turned out to be, but rather howquickly it materialized in history. The Thirdpage 8Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee, dominated by Deng, set out to "reform"China only eleven years ago. Big changes, such as family contracts for farmers and theexploitation of wage labor by private entrepreneurs, large and small, surfaced in a major wayonly five years ago. Yet in this short span unforeseen afflictions have so alienated theChinese people, especially the urban dwellers most favored by reform, that in May and June1989 they filled the streets with protesters from one end of China to the other.Deng responded with guns and tanks that churned up the pavement of Changan Avenue,leaving thousands of dead and wounded in their wake. The moral bankruptcy of thisferocious military repression coupled with a revengeful nationwide hunt for culpritsdemonstrated to all who cared to see what the color of the reform really was and had been allalong.Make no mistake. The leaders in Beijing are not motivated by communist ideals; they arenot revolutionary planners or socialist builders. They are newly constituted bureaucraticcapitalists, busy carving the economy into gigantic family fiefs, ready, in true compradorstyle, to sell China out to the highest bidder. Their armed assault on the square was not anaberration but rather the culmination of a process that began when they first assumed leadingposts after the death of Mao. They set out then to dismantle whatever socialist institutions,culture, customs, and habits the Chinese people had so painstakingly built up in the courseof postliberation reconstruction. In doing so they put in motion a chain of events that ledinexorably to confrontation with the whole Chinese people.How, in so short a span of time, did Deng go from the status of admired hero, defiant yetirrepressible victim of the hated gang of four, to that of corrupt autocrat and bloodstained