By Richard Baum, Ph.D., University of California, Los Angeles
In latter half of 1980s, urban distress was clearly rising, and China’s college students were growing increasingly restless. Throughout most of 1986, there was little overall consistency or rationality to the students’ grievances. But that changed rather dramatically in the autumn of 1986, when campus discontent began to coalesce around a single common theme: the demand for student empowerment.
Two developments served to drive the coalescence around the demand for student empowerment.
The first was a revival of Deng Xiaoping’s ill-fated 1980 proposals for systemic political reform. In mid-1986, on Deng’s instructions, Zhao Ziyang appointed an advisory commission, made up largely of liberal-leaning party intellectuals, to address anew the question of political reform, which had been muted since 1980. And he instructed its members to draw up a set of concrete proposals for presentation to the next National Party Congress.
When news of Zhao’s instructions reached college campuses around the country, expectations of political change were understandably raised.
The second development that helped to catalyze political activism among college students in the latter half of 1986 was a wildly popular, multi-campus speaking tour undertaken by a free-thinking, free-speaking university professor named Fang Lizhi.
Learn more about Deng’s early regime.
Fang Lizhi: The Crowd Puller
Fang Lizhi was an astrophysicist, and he was also the vice president of the Chinese University of Science and Technology in Anhui Province.
During the Mao era, Professor Fang had been repeatedly criticized and persecuted for his political views, first during the 1957 anti-rightist movement and again later during the Cultural Revolution.
A lifelong liberal, Fang gave voice to the feelings of powerlessness and frustration experienced by large numbers of Chinese students. In a series of campus lectures given in November and December of 1986, Fang Lizhi boldly criticized by name a number of party leaders who had been charged with corruption. And he heaped scorn upon party officials who denied the people their constitutional right to free expression.
Challenging Chinese students to “break all barriers” that served to impede open intellectual inquiry and creativity, he urged young people to boldly take their future into their own hands.
Wherever the charismatic Fang Lizhi spoke, he drew large crowds of enthusiastic young admirers. In the wake of his speeches at half a dozen college campuses in Hefei, Shanghai, and Beijing, tens of thousands of students poured out of their classrooms and dormitories and into the streets.
This is a transcript from the video series The Fall and Rise of China. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Students’ Demonstrations in 1986
In the month of December 1986, 75,000 students from 150 colleges in 17 Chinese cities took part in prodemocracy rallies and demonstrations.
Not surprisingly, party leaders were divided over how to view these events. Liberal politicians, like the liberal-leaning mayor of Tianjin, Li Ruihuan, appealed for calm, urging the citizens of his city not to be unduly alarmed by student demonstrations. In a similar vein, Hu Yaobang, the politically permissive general secretary, adopted a very relaxed attitude toward the protesting students.
Others were less tolerant, however, including Beijing’s conservative municipal government.
The Prodemocracy Rally in Tiananmen Square
When more than 20,000 students in Beijing turned out for a prodemocracy rally in Tiananmen Square on New Year’s eve, the official newspaper, Beijing Daily, responded with an editorial accusing them of stirring up “turmoil” and it questioned their patriotism. In a show of angry defiance, the students built a bonfire in the Square in which they burned several hundred purloined copies of the offending newspaper.
With that, the Communist Party’s elderly hard-liners, already visibly upset with the students for their display of bourgeois liberalism, began to fume. The students had impudently thumbed their noses at authority, and what is worse, they had gotten away with it.
Learn more about the social and political tensions in China.
Deng Supports the Hard-line Position
Even the usually mild-mannered Deng Xiaoping was furious. Blaming Fang Lizhi for inflaming student passions, Deng now demanded Fang’s expulsion from the CCP.
But party conservatives weren’t content to stop there. Sensing that the momentum had shifted in their favor, they now demanded a firm response to the outrageous conduct of the students in Tiananmen Square, and they demanded that Hu Yaobang should be held personally responsible for encouraging the students’ show of defiance.
Buffeted by conflicting advice and opinion, Deng initially hedged and waffled. But the burning of the newspapers in Tiananmen Square convinced him that a stand had to be taken. And on the eve of the New Year, he came around to support the hard-line position.
Though Deng clearly preferred not to use force, he was convinced that a dangerous precedent would be set if the party gave in to student demands.
Putting an End to the Tiananmen Protests
Under these circumstances, putting an end to the Tiananmen protests became an important test of wills for Deng, a test that he was determined to win. On the last day of December, he made his feelings known to his inner circle of party elders.
“We cannot,” he said, “allow people who turn right and wrong around… to do as they please.”
Though Deng was clearly prepared to take firm action, the situation fortuitously resolved itself without resort to mass violence. On the first day of the New Year, January 1, 1987, municipal police arrested 30 student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square. Sobered by this show of governmental determination, and chilled to the bone by Beijing’s bitterly cold winter winds, the students decided to end their protest in a face-saving manner. At one final, spirited mass rally in Tiananmen Square, they sang revolutionary songs and quietly dispersed, returning to their campuses to resume their studies and prepare for the Lunar New Year holidays ahead.
With that, the crisis went into remission, and Deng’s dark side was once more hidden from view.
Common Questions about the Demand for Student Empowerment: Demonstrations and Prodemocracy Rallies in China
Fang Lizhi was a lifelong liberal who gave voice to the feelings of powerlessness and frustration experienced by large numbers of Chinese students. He challenged Chinese students to “break all barriers” that served to impede open intellectual inquiry and creativity.
In the month of December 1986, 75,000 students from 150 colleges in 17 Chinese cities took part in prodemocracy rallies and demonstrations.
More than 20,000 students in Beijing turned out for a prodemocracy rally in Tiananmen Square on New Year’s eve in 1986.
