The Party Uses Its Fist and Loses Its Grip

Even if units of the People’s Liberation Army subdue Beijing with military force, the Communist Party may not be able to restore control over Chinese society. The party appears to be falling apart, and its threats of repression are no longer credible. If it cannot clamp down on dissent by punishing protesters or discouraging future protesters with the threat of sanctions, then its leaders won’t be able to thwart popular resistance as the Hungarians did in 1956 or the Czechs did in 1968.

The Chinese Communist Party, like all ruling communist parties, was once a powerful organizational weapon of control. Under the rules of democratic centralism, the decisions of party leaders in the Politburo were followed automatically by millions of party officials and members. The party gave orders to the government, dictating policy at the local as well as the national level. It also effectively directed the economy, dominating both factory management and work units.

In the past, no one would dare flout party orders. While it resorted less to overt terror (in comparison to the Soviet party), its control over economic planning, school admissions, job assignment and promotion, housing and allocation of consumer goods guaranteed it a compliant population.

Today, Communist Party leaders can no longer be sure that their orders will be followed. It took them weeks to get the army to crush the demonstration in Tian An Men Square. Even before the recent protests began, the commands of the Beijing leaders were being ignored by lower-level officials. Faced with widespread insubordination, the top party leaders began an ideological campaign to stress the importance of Communist discipline, reminding all party members to follow the Politburo, not their own narrow interests. Yet when Beijing ordered provincial party secretaries to halt construction projects, the provincial officials connived strategies for continuing the projects. When Beijing instructed factory managers to put limits on worker bonuses, managers ignored the restrictions.

If local officials refused to implement such relatively innocuous policies to reduce economic overheating and inflation, will they enforce repression against an already dispirited population?

The Chinese Communist Party also has been enfeebled by division and indecision at the top. A popular jingle going around Beijing jokes that any party policy set on the first of the month is bound to change by the fifteenth. During the space of a few months in 1988, Deng Xiaoping pushed Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang into proposing price reforms, then retracted the policy and blamed Zhao when prices skyrocketed as a result.

The protest in Tian An Men Square provided the most dramatic evidence to date of open conflict at the highest levels of the party. When Premier Li Peng decided to stop the protest by imposing martial law, a group of influential retired military leaders questioned his decision in a letter that was made public. When Li summoned the provincial party secretaries to Beijing to endorse both martial law and the ouster of reformist leader Zhao, the provincial officials apparently refused to rally ‘round Li’s decisions and returned home without holding a formal meeting.

Most revealing of disarray at the top is the fact that no national leader appeared to take responsibility for the army’s invasion of Tian An Men Square.

The top leaders of the Communist Party are not only divided by policy disagreements and the contest for leadership succession; they are immobilized by their own self-doubts as well.

Most of the party elite have traveled abroad and been shamed by the evidence of China’s relative material backwardness. Their children and grandchildren have challenged their long-held assumptions with startling new political ideas brought back from experiences of study abroad. Some of the boldest student protesters were from the families of party leaders.

The sight of hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens--workers as well as students--openly resisting the government must have shaken the elite’s self-confidence even more.

Lower-level party officials will be less manageable after seeing the confused, divided, vacillating response of their leaders to the demonstrations. And to achieve economic goals, local leaders have to maintain cooperation with local citizens. In the absence of a clear, unified, confident voice from Beijing, they will be loathe to enforce repression against their own people. They may publicly pledge loyalty to the Communist Party, but in practice they won’t wield the party’s weapons of control against the people.

In fact, it may be that too many people in China have already moved beyond effective party control. Economic reform has eroded control by party monopoly. Millions of rural peasants have defied government restrictions and moved to the cities--2 1/2 million in Shanghai alone. People can find jobs with individual or collective enterprises. Almost anything can be purchased on the open market. Society will no longer be easily governed by the old methods.

Having lost party discipline, their own self-confidence and their leverage over society, the top leaders who ordered army forces into Beijing are dangerously isolated. If they cannot muster the organizational weapon of the Communist Party to follow the tanks and crush the spirit as well as the body of popular resistance, these leaders will be unable to survive.