Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s

428 Pages·2022·15.486 MB·English

by  Julian Gewirtz

NEVER TURN BACK

N E V E R T U R N B A C K
CHINA AND THE FORBIDDEN HISTORY OF THE 1980s
◇
JULIAN GEWIRTZ
THE BELKNAP PRESS OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Cambridge, Mas sac hu setts | London, England
2022
Copyright © 2022 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of Amer i ca
First printing
Jacket design: Brianna Harden
Jacket photograph (bottom): Chip Hires | Getty Images/AFP
9780674287389 (EPUB)
9780674287372 (PDF)
Th e L i br ary of Congr e s s h as cata loged th e pr i nted
edition as fol lows:
Names: Gewirtz, Julian B., 1989– author.
Title: Never turn back : China and the forbidden history of
the 1980s / Julian Gewirtz.
Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022001879 | ISBN 9780674241848 (cloth)
Subjects: LCSH: Historiography—China—20th century. | Political
culture—China. | China—Politics and government—1976–2002. |
China—History—1976–2002. | China—History—Tiananmen Square
Incident, 1989. | China—Economic policy—1976–2000.
Classification: LCC DS779.26 .G49 2022 |
DDC 951.05/8—dc23/eng/20220427
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022001879
CONTENTS
Introduction ◇ Forbidden History 1
1 Reassessing History, Recasting Modernization 13
PART I ◆ I DEOLOGY AND PROPAGANDA 31
2 Spiritual Pollutions and Sugar- Coated Bullets 37
3 The Scourge of Bourgeois Liberalization 52
PART II ◆ THE ECONOMY 65
4 Liberating the Productive Forces 71
5 The Powers of the Market 87
PART III ◆ TECHNOLOGY 107
6 Responding to the New Technological Revolution 113
7 A Matter of the Life and Death of the Nation 132
vi Contents
PART IV ◆ PO LITI CAL MODERNIZATION 143
8 Masters of the Country 149
9 Explore without Fear 160
PART V ◆ BEFORE TIAN ANMEN 177
10 Two Rounds of Applause 179
11 A Great Flood 191
12 We Came Too Late 214
PART VI ◆ TIAN ANMEN AND AFTER 235
13 Po liti cal Crackdown and Narrative Crisis 237
14 Recasting Reform and Opening 257
15 The Socialist Survivor in a Cap i tal ist World 273
Conclusion ◇ A New Era 297
Abbreviations 305
Notes 309
Acknowl edgments 395
Index 399
Illustrations follow page 176.
Introduction
Forbidden History
On January 18, 2005, tucked away on page four of the official People’s
Daily, just below an article on post- tsunami inspections and above a
weather report, a three- line notice reported the death of an eighty- five-
year- old man: “Comrade Zhao Ziyang suffered from long- term diseases
of the respiratory system and the cardiovascular system and had been
hospitalized multiple times, and following the recent deterioration of his
condition, he was unable to be rescued and died on January 17 in Beijing
at the age of 85.”1
A casual reader of the newspaper would certainly be forgiven for not
noticing the item. The obituary was notable mainly for its brevity and
omissions: it did not mention that Zhao had held China’s top two lead-
ership posts as premier of the State Council and then as general secre-
tary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Nor did it acknowledge
that he had made any contributions to China’s “reform and opening,”
the agenda of economic development and openness to the world China
pursued soon a fter the death of Mao Zedong. “Reform and opening” re-
mained as a centerpiece of official policy, mentioned nearly a dozen
times in that day’s newspaper, but Zhao’s central role in shaping it had
2 Introduction
already been systematically erased from official accounts of the history
of this period. Indeed, well before Zhao’s death, the CCP had rewritten
the entire history of China’s 1980s— a tumultuous, transformational
decade— and subjected it to far- reaching distortion, even though it was
one of the most consequential periods in the country’s history.
In popu lar accounts around the world—as well as in the official nar-
rative told by China’s rulers— the 1980s in China are typically treated as
a time of linear change, moving smoothly from Deng Xiaoping’s rise to
power in 1978 and the leap into “reform and opening” to new heights of
wealth and modernization. In this telling, the de cade whizzes by; the
crackdown on the 1989 Tian anmen protests is at most a harsh interrup-
tion before the linear narrative begins again in 1992 with Deng pushing
for faster reform on his “Southern Tour.”
This story is a myth. It exists in large part because the CCP has sup-
pressed sources and created a power ful and widely repeated official nar-
rative about China in the 1980s that erases key figures, blots out policies
and debates, covers up acts of vio lence, and forbids public discussion of
alternative paths. In contrast to that narrative, the 1980s in China w ere
a period of extraordinary open- ended debate, contestation, and imagi-
nation. Chinese elites argued fiercely about the f uture, and official ide-
ology, economic policy, technological transformation, and po liti cal re-
forms all expanded in bold new directions.
These years of tumult, searching, and strug gle transformed China, but
by the time protesters filled Tian anmen Square in the spring of 1989, the
leadership had not reached agreement on how China ought to modernize.
Following the crackdown— which included both the massacre of civilians
and the purge of top officials— a new consensus emerged, and China’s re-
maining leaders offered a newly consolidated vision of the Chinese system
as well as a refashioning of the events of the 1980s designed to serve this
post- Tiananmen agenda. Among many other changes, they built up the
cult of Deng Xiaoping while erasing Zhao Ziyang and fellow top leader Hu
Yaobang, reinterpreted the pursuit of rapid economic growth, and argued
for the absolute necessity of fusing the party and the state. They abandoned
or left unfinished many of the po liti cal reforms pursued during the 1980s.
Before even replacing the tank- scarred stones of Tian anmen Square, they
had pushed out their new narrative and staked the party’s fortunes on it.2
Introduction 3
What is t oday called the “China model”— extraordinarily rapid eco-
nomic growth paired with enduring authoritarian po liti cal control— was
not the only vision of the future China’s leaders pursued in the de cades
following Mao Zedong’s death in 1976. They i magined and experimented
with many pos si ble “China models” in the 1980s. Yet China’s rulers have
worked hard to conceal this fuller story and the pivotal choices that de-
termined China’s development. Bringing this forbidden history back
into focus is vital. One of the most momentous transformations of the
twentieth century has been the subject of im mense historical distortion
to bolster the legitimacy of the Communist Party’s chosen path.
◇
The fundamental question of the 1980s was one that had motivated Chi-
nese officials and intellectuals for a c entury: how can China become
modern? Deng Xiaoping declared in January 1980 that “modernization”
was “the essential condition for solving both our domestic and our ex-
ternal prob lems,” and the 1980s would be “a de cade of great importance—
indeed, a crucial decade—to China’s development.”3
For Chinese officials and intellectuals, the challenge was to find a
“Chinese” path to modernization that did not copy or import wholesale
a foreign conception of modernity. To be sure, some thinkers embraced
the West with few reservations, praising “Americanization” and “West-
ernization.” 4 But t hose views w ere unusual. The more impor tant predica-
ment was how to define modernization anew in China— drawing on
ideas and innovations from around the world but on Chinese terms.
To Deng Xiaoping, economic development was the essential ele ment
of modernization, and to achieve this goal, he was willing to permit
markets to multiply and international trade to expand. But becoming
richer on its own was not enough. Deng and other se nior officials devoted
significant attention to other domains that constituted China’s mod-
ernization, including official ideology, advanced technology for both eco-
nomic and military purposes, and the po liti cal system. They projected
confidence, despite daunting challenges. On a hike up Luosanmei hill
in Guangdong Province in January 1984, Deng Xiaoping was warned
that the path ahead was steep and treacherous— and in a moment made
4 Introduction
for propaganda, Deng replied sportingly, “Never turn back.” The line
soon was widely publicized as a man tra for the leadership’s resolve to
forge ahead with reforms no m atter the difficulty, though it belied the
fierce contestation raging over China’s future.5
The Chinese leadership in the 1970s had embraced a set of objectives,
proposed by Zhou Enlai, known as the Four Modernizations—
developing “modern agriculture, industry, national defense, and sci-
ence and technology (S&T).” However, the Four Modernizations were
only one piece of a much larger agenda.6 Dissidents called for democ-
ratization, which activist Wei Jingsheng called the “fifth modernization,”
and others sought to modernize Marxism- Leninism for a new era of eco-
nomic and technological transformation. Theoretician Su Shaozhi said
in 1986, “In China, we usually speak of the ‘Four Modernizations’ but
in my opinion, this is not sufficient. . . . In my view modernization should
be comprehensive, which means not only economic but also po liti cal and
ideological.”7
This book highlights both these debates about modernization and the
CCP’s repression of this history. After setting the scene at the dawning
of the 1980s, it examines four realms of contestation: ideology, the
economy, technology, and the political system. It is deliberately selective,
revealing how top officials, their policy advisers, and their wider networks
grappled with challenges and changes in these domains. Its focus is on
domestic policy, though it often references China’s intellectual, diplomatic,
and economic opening to the world. Then the book shows how the polit-
ical crises culminating in the Tiananmen crackdown of 1989 led to a
systematic rewriting of the history of the 1980s in ways that profoundly
shaped China’s ongoing transformation.
In many accounts, the 1980s is seen as “the era of Deng Xiaoping,”
and indeed Deng plays a central role in this story.8 But one of the objec-
tives of this book is to correct widespread perceptions that Deng Xiaoping
was personally responsible for the policies of the 1980s, particularly the
economic policies of the “reform and opening.” Deng has been the ben-
eficiary of hagiographical treatment. In fact, Deng was not regularly and
actively engaged in policymaking throughout the 1980s. He was ex-
tremely active in 1978–1980, when he outmaneuvered Mao’s designated
successor, Hua Guofeng, to take power, and again at certain moments
in the subsequent de cade, most crucially during the 1989 protest move-