The Chinese student demonstrations

Monthly Review, Sept, 1987 by Richard Levy

In short, without a deeper analysis of present Chinese society and its various classes and strata, without an analysis of how it developed to this stage and how it is linked to the rest of the world, the student movement will lack the capacity to foster a democratic movement with achievable objectives for the majority of the Chinese people. Rather, the consequences of the student democracy movement, despite the basic validity of many of its concerns, could be extremely destructive to the accomplishments of the revolution.

Links to China's Past

In many of its demands, the democracy movement is challenging the CCP either to give up or modify its role as the vanguard party which stands above all others. Some in the movement even assert that the CCP would not win national elections were they held now, although it is unclear that those who were around before Liberation would be as quick to abandon the Party as some in the movement think.

The notion of a vanguard party itself is and has been controversial since its inception. Is a vanguard needed? If so, would it be a single party or a coalition? How would vanguard status be determined in practice? Should it be constantly won in practice or administratively secured? What should its role be? Is a vanguard group on one issue necessarily a vanguard on others? Is there a single science/philosophy of revolution/ social transformation that guarantees its inherent leadership of such movements? Are the needs for a vanguard and unity different during periods of above- and underground armed struggle and after military victory? Although these issues continue to be struggled over elsewhere, they seem to be dealt with only implicitly by the Chinese student movement.

In looking at this movement, it is important again to analyze the context in which it has arisen. For one thing, while the movement at least implicitly calls on the Party to give up its vanguard role, the Party itself, by reducing its own role in the economy and by attempting to develop an apolitical, technical intelligentsia which would administer the political and economic apparatus, has in fact created the very conditions in the economic base which threaten its political hegemony. In this sense, the movement occurs in a new situation which is different from its predecessors.

The Legacy of the Cultural Revolution

In another sense, although both the Party and the student movement disavow any positive aspects of the Cultural Revolution (CR), the movement cannot but have been influenced by it.

The present criticisms of special privilege, bureaucratism, corruption, etc., levelled at the Party, which is now led by some of the same people who led it at the inception of the CR, were also present at the beginning of the CR. The CR was first movement in post-Liberation China which, at least in the name of greater mass participation and democracy, encouraged open, mass criticism of the Party and challenged its monopoly of truth. Now, after the Party's post-CR 180-degree line reversal, the student movement has once again challenged the Party's monopoly of truth. But this time the students are challenging the Party and calling for democracy without the self-defeating contradiction that undermined the CR's initial call for democracy, namely, the reliance on Mao's absolute infallibility to challenge the Party's alleged infallibility.