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Juggling Liberalization and Repression
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21915 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
Date : |
6 / 1993 |
2,744 Words |
| Author
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June Teufel Dreyer
June Teufel Dreyer is professor of political science at the
University of Miami. Her latest book, China's Political
System: Modernization and Tradition, was published by Paragon
House in 1993. |
Haunted by the nightmare that the millions who took part in protest demonstrations in Beijing and elsewhere in China in the spring of 1989 would plunge the country into chaos and end their daring developmental experiment, Deng Xiaoping and his supporters increased their efforts at economics reform while refusing to yield to demands for greater personal freedoms.
Whereas the Chinese students hailed Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev as a hero during his May 1989 visit to Beijing, the hard-line Chinese leadership had real doubts about where his glasnost and perestroika would lead the USSR. Beijing's nearly audible sigh of relief on hearing of the 1991 military coup in Moscow was quickly replaced with dismay as the Soviet Union crumbled and an even less politically acceptable leader, Boris Yeltsin, emerged to preside over a deteriorating economic and social situation. For China's elderly patriarchs, here was a graphic example of what could happen in their country without firm guidance from the center.
The demise of the USSR posed other problems for the Chinese leadership. Skillful practitioners of triangular politics, they had for nearly two decades played the Soviet Union against the United States to obtain maximum benefits for the People's Republic of China (PRC). Now that option was gone. The American media, proclaiming that the dominoes of communism were quickly falling, openly speculated on how long it would be before the PRC followed the trend.
Chinese concern grew that the United States was bent on an evolutionary subversion of China's socialist system and its leaders. These fears seemed confirmed by America's assertive role in the 1991 Gulf War. The United States, no longer restrained by the Soviet Union, was seen by Beijing as bent on bullying the rest of the world. Moreover, the passing of the USSR had left a power vacuum in Asia. Voices in a rapidly democratizing Taiwan began to demand formal recognition of what had already existed for more than four decades: independence from the mainland.
A growing military
Deng's solution was to dramatically increase the strength of the military. For the first time since a once-only increase to cover the costs of China's attack on Vietnam in 1979, the budget of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) began to rise faster then inflation. Somewhat improbably, given the absence of an external threat to the PRC and the country's many pressing domestic problems, the military budget doubled between
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