From Tiananmen to Today: The State of Chinese Activism

On June 4, 1989, the People’s Liberation Army stormed into Tiananmen Square in Beijing. For two months, tens of thousands of protesters had gathered there to call on China’s ruling Communist Party to enact political reforms. Within a day, these hopes lay crushed under the treads of the army’s tanks.

Yet however improbably, in the decades that followed, new forms of activism grew. By turns contentious and cooperative, activists won important victories for individuals and communities across China. Now, at a time of deepening repression under President Xi Jinping, we must have faith that they will continue to do so.

1989 was a watershed year for Chinese politics. The brutal massacre of hundreds – perhaps thousands – of unarmed protestors in June and the passage of the restrictive Law on Assemblies, Processions, and Demonstrations that October revealed the sharp limits of post-Mao reforms. Social controls were lifted and market forces unleashed, but in the realm of politics, no concessions could be made. Since then, no movement has approached the scale and audacity of the 1989 Tiananmen protests. Only the Falun Gong religious sect sought to build a national following outside of the Communist Party’s control. Their brutal repression following protests outside of government headquarters at Zhongnanhai in 1999 reminded the world that the Party would brook no challenge to its power. Many brave individuals continued to speak openly of human rights and democracy, among them Nobel Laureate Liu Xiaobo, rights lawyer Chen Guangcheng, and artist Ai Weiwei. The party rewarded them with imprisonment or exile.

Yet even in post-Tiananmen China, not all activism was met with such a heavy-handed response. Under the administration of President Hu Jintao and Premier Wen Jiabao (2003-2013), space was pried open for local activists and state-civil society partnerships. The Party had good reason to grant this space. In the age of market reform, China had grown too complex for the Party to govern alone. Layoffs swept state-owned enterprises, throwing millions out of work; peasant migrants poured into the factories of China’s eastern coast, creating a new urban underclass; social spending was slashed; inequality rose. The resulting problems of industrial pollution, crumbling rural education, and increasing labor unrest were mammoth. To tackle them, the Party sought partners in civil society. Groups that local authorities had once shunned or suppressed were now invited to help manage these complex issues.

These state-civil society partnerships spawned experimental activism, much of it grassroots. Unlike China’s internationally celebrated dissidents, these activists were often unknown beyond their communities. Yet in their multitude, they captured the diversity of China: migrant workers, peasants, journalists, and lawyers. As Beijing sought to shore up its legitimacy in the face of growing social discord, these activists’ desire for reform was encouraged, albeit inconsistently, by the Party itself. And while they often avoided the language of politics, they believed deeply in the potential for change. Migrant workers demanded China’s labor laws be upheld; peasants agitated against illegal land seizures; journalists investigated local corruption. Their work was often contentious. But even amid sporadic harassment and police crackdowns, they persisted and won small yet important victories for their causes.

Sharing in their passion was China’s growing legal community. By the early 2000s, hundreds of activist lawyers were taking to the courts to defend the rights of ordinary citizens and the country’s most vulnerable. Their cases reflected the complexity of modern China: worker compensation, police violence, the rights of the disabled. Some lawyers were graduates of top law schools, others self-trained. Like their peers in local community organizations, these lawyers were both pragmatic and principled. They challenged China’s political boundaries with increasing boldness, but used the language of the Party’s laws and China’s constitution. If the protests of 1989 had failed to soften the rule of the Communist Party, perhaps a more just society could be built from within the confines of China’s socialist legal system.

Here too Party policies emboldened activists. By the late 1990s, systemic economic reforms had led to growing social unrest. Strikes, protests, and riots erupted with increasing frequency across China’s cities and villages, and the threat of state violence was no longer enough to keep them at bay. In the eyes of the Party, lawyers could help direct these disputes out of the streets and into the courts. Lawyers welcomed this invitation and law practices mushroomed across the country. Despite the persistent political bias of the courts, some gained notoriety for their daring legal work. Chief among them were the lawyers of Beijing’s Feng Rui law firm, which took on sensitive cases for victims of tainted milk products, Falun Gong practitioners, and even activists like Ai Weiwei.

The bargain struck by community and legal activists tilted heavily in the Party’s favor. In exchange for government support, there could be no calls for broader political reform. Activists were confined to working in a single policy area or locality. Lawyers were routinely harassed by local thugs. Police surveillance was constant. But if these activists didn’t openly rail against authoritarian rule, they were hardly content with the status quo. Change could be imagined, if not beyond the existing system, then within it. The Party could be nudged toward progress. It may not have been the full flowering of civil society dreamt of by the protestors in Tiananmen, but it was a start.

Yet if Hu and Wen embraced a cautious liberalism, their administration was not free of repression. The 10 years of their rule was marked by violence in Tibet and Xinjiang, the arrest of Nobel Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, increased online censorship, and the aborted Jasmine Revolution. China remained an authoritarian state. But looking back from the vantage of Xi Jinping’s China, one detects the faint promise of a more open society that never came to pass. During those 10 years, local activists and lawyers were willing to test the limits of authoritarian rule. Partnering with authorities to address local grievances, or appearing in court to defend the rights of the marginalized, the gains activists made were often modest. By a process of accretion, it was hoped these small victories might lay the groundwork for a more liberal China.

That ground is now eroding. Under President Xi Jinping, who assumed office in 2013, China is marching toward an increasingly authoritarian future. Xi shares none of his predecessors’ limited tolerance for reform and the advances made by civil society under Hu and Wen are now being reversed. Unlike in 1989, when protesters in Tiananmen Square hoped – mistakenly – that moderates like Zhao Ziyang could balance out hardliners like Li Peng, Chinese activists now face a government more unified against their interests than at any time since the death of Mao.

Lawyers were among the first to feel the full effect of the new administration. Beginning on July 9, 2015, hundreds of China’s most prominent rights-defending lawyers and legal activists were detained in what came to be known as the “709 crackdown.” Some, like Wang Yu, were forced to make staged confessions on state TV. Others, like Wang Quanzhang, remain in prison, accused of attempting to subvert state power. More often than not Chinese authorities have simply stripped lawyers of their right to work on sensitive cases, disbarred them or closed their practices. Among those practices closed: the Feng Rui law firm.

Community activists have also felt Xi’s tightening grip – even those who have long worked with the state find their partnerships tilting increasingly in the state’s favor. For years, civil society organizations relied on financial assistance from international donors to support work the Chinese government was unwilling to fund. New legislation has made such funding increasingly scarce. Under the 2016 NGO Law, only foreign NGOs registered with the Ministry of Public Security can operate in China. Predictably, overseas support for rights-based activism has plummeted. Other measures ensure community groups work in lockstep with the state. Party members are increasing their role within NGOs and providing greater “political guidance” to even those organizations not reliant on foreign support. Civil society may not be wholly suppressed, but under Xi, it is effectively impossible for community organizations to operate outside state control.

Some have pushed back. As the field for rights lawyers and community organizations shrinks, new activist alliances – bold as they are small – have emerged. Yet even in their modest numbers, they represent a latent threat to authoritarian rule. To the Communist Party, the protesters of 1989 were dangerous not only in their numbers, but in their diversity. Students, workers, state employees, and ordinary citizens turned out that spring to assail the leadership in Beijing. The Party drew from this a blunt lesson: Stamp out any hint of cross-class unity.

Recent events have shown how dangerous such unity continues to be. In July 2018 student Marxists from Peking University offered their support to workers attempting to unionize at a Jasic Technology welding machinery plant in Shenzhen. Unlike China’s officially sanctioned university Marxist organizations, these students took seriously Karl Marx’s analysis of capitalism. In the Jasic workers’ complaints of low pay, long hours, and poor working conditions, they found the very features of harsh class exploitation Marx described. Joining them were feminists like Yue Xin, a leader in China’s #MeToo movement who had confronted Peking University leaders over their handling of campus sexual assaults.

The response of the authorities was swift. By late August, some 50 student activists had gone missing, presumed detained by the police for their support of the workers. Yue Xin and others were forced to record staged confessions, repudiating their work. Since then, the suppression of the movement has continued. Beginning in January of this year, labor activists writing for prominent workers’ rights websites have gone missing in Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. In May, the head of the Peking University Marxist Society, Qiu Zhanxuan, was detained by police after announcing on WeChat plans to spend Labor Day at a job market for migrant workers in the outer boroughs of Beijing.

In a way, we are fortunate to even know the fates of Yue Xin and Qiu Zhanxuan. In the future, news of local activists may be harder to find. The iconic image of the Tank Man is so etched into memory that we forget how fortuitous it was that the 1989 protests were documented at all. A meeting between Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Gorbachev signaling a thaw in Sino-Soviet relations had brought the world’s press to Beijing. This coterie of reporters, there only by chance, were also able to capture the unfolding demonstrations and subsequent massacre in Tiananmen. Since then, foreign correspondents have travelled farther into the hinterlands of China than ever before. And from these travels, they have brought the voices of local activists to a global audience.

Can we trust that their stories will continue to be heard? Media censorship, long pervasive, has deepened under Xi and the effects have been felt by foreign and domestic reporters alike. A survey conducted by the Foreign Correspondents Club of China reveals growing pessimism about the effect of government interference on their work. Harsher still are the restrictions placed on Chinese media, which Xi has demanded serve the interests of the Party. But worst affected of all have been China’s local activists and rights lawyers, who long relied on social media to spread news of their work. Under Hu and Wen, their postings on Weibo and WeChat were routinely scrubbed by China’s army of online censors. Yet so long as they did not attempt to organize mass opposition to the state, they were relatively free to fume against social injustices and acquire followers in the tens and hundreds of thousands. No longer. Under new rules, people can be held legally accountable not only for what they say on WeChat but for what others in chat groups they manage say as well.

In such times, pessimism comes easily. Yet predicting China’s future is a fool’s errand. On New Year’s Day 1989, few foresaw the protests that would erupt that April in Beijing. Only in retrospect do the demonstrations seem an inevitable outpouring of popular frustration at a sclerotic political class. Nor did many believe that a decade after the protests had been silenced, new activists would begin to work with the state in pursuit of modest but meaningful change.

This year, the Communist Party marks 70 years in power. What shape their 71st year will take is unclear. But we must believe that China’s activists, though weakened, will not cease in their efforts to goad their country toward just and lasting change.