Deng Xiaoping's 1989 speech to party elders: 'We cannot tolerate turmoil'

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I CONCLUDE today my column on the decisive role that Chinese paramount leader Deng Xiaoping played in forging the Chinese state’s policy on the 1989 Tiananmen student protests, the violent repression of dissent, and the shaping of the nation’s course forward.

Following is the full text of Deng’s speech in the fateful June 1, 1989 meeting of China’s party elders, two days before the Tiananmen crackdown, reproduced by journalist Max Fisher in his article in vox.com (July 2014), sourced from Deng’s personal papers and collected in the 2002 primary source history, “The Tiananmen Papers.”

Deng Xiaoping’s 1989 speech to party elders: ‘We cannot tolerate turmoil’

Li Peng, China’s premier, spoke first at the meeting. He presented the June 1 report in detail, especially its arguments that the protesters were foreign-backed agents seeking to sow chaos and overturn the Communist Party. Two others spoke concurring with Li. One of them, former president and party elder Li Xiannian, linked the protests to economic liberalization, arguing that both are the same enemy that must be destroyed.

Deng spoke after them as follows:

“Comrade Xiannian is correct. The causes of this incident have to do with the global context. The Western world, especially the United States, has thrown its entire propaganda machine into agitation work and has given a lot of encouragement and assistance to the so-called democrats or opposition in China — people who are in fact are the scum of the Chinese nation. This is the root of the chaotic situation we face today.

When the West stirs up turmoil in other countries, in fact, it is playing power politics — hegemonism — and is only trying to control those other countries, to pull into its power sphere countries that were previously beyond its control. Once we’re clear on this point, it’s easier to see the essential nature of this issue and to sum up certain lessons. This turmoil has taught us a lesson the hard way, but at least we now understand better than before that the sovereignty and security of the state must always be the top priority. Some Western countries use things like ‘human rights,’ or like saying the socialist system is irrational or illegal, to criticize us, but what they’re really after is our sovereignty. …

Two conditions are indispensable for our development goals: a stable environment at home and a peaceful environment abroad. We don’t care what others say about us. The only thing we really care about is a good environment for developing ourselves. So long as history eventually proves the superiority of the Chinese socialist system, that’s enough. We can’t bother about the social systems of other countries.

Imagine for a moment what could happen if China falls into turmoil. If it happens now, it’d be far worse than the Cultural Revolution. Back then the prestige of leaders like Chairman Mao and Premier Zhou [Enlai] still loomed. We talked about ‘full-scale civil war,’ but actually, no large-scale fighting took place; no true civil war ever happened.

Now it’s different, though. If the turmoil keeps going, it could continue until party and state authority are worn away. Then there would be civil war, one faction controlling parts of the army and another faction controlling others. If the so-called democracy fighters were in power, they’d fight among themselves. Once civil war got started, blood would flow like a river, and where would human rights be then? …

On the topic of mistakes, we indeed have made them. I said two years ago that our biggest mistake was in education. We haven’t educated our kids and students enough. A lot of thought work has been neglected, and a lot of things have not been made clear. Some people, like [former Chinese premier who visited the protests] Zhao Ziyang, have even joined the side of the turmoil, which makes it even more our own fault that people misunderstood.

We must cast a sober and critical eye upon ourselves, review the past while looking to the future, and try to learn from experience as we examine current problems. If we do this, it’s possible a bad thing could turn into a good one. We could benefit from this incident.

A majority of the people will sober up, too. After we put down the turmoil, we’ll have to work hard to make up all those missed lessons in education, and this won’t be easy. It’ll take years, not months, for the people who demonstrated and petitioned to change their minds. We can’t blame the people who joined the hunger strike, demonstrated, or petitioned. We should target only those who had bad intentions or who took the lead in breaking the law. Education should be our main approach to the students, including the students who joined the hunger strike.

This principle must not change. We should set the majority of the students free from worry. We should be forgiving toward all the students who joined marches, demonstrations, or petitions and not hold them responsible. We will mete out precise and necessary punishments only to the minority of adventurers who attempted to subvert the People’s Republic of China.

We cannot tolerate turmoil. We will impose martial law again if turmoil appears again. Our purpose is to maintain stability so that we can work on construction, and our logic is simple: with so many people and so few resources, China can accomplish nothing without peace and units in politics and a stable social order. Stability must take precedence over everything. …

No one can keep China’s reform and opening from going forward. Why is that? It’s simple: without reform and opening, our development stops, and our economy slides downhill. Living standards decline if we turn back. The momentum of reform cannot be stopped. We must insist on this point at all times.

Some people say we allow only economic reform and not political reform, but that’s not true. We do allow political reform, but one condition: that the Four Basic Principles [of Marxist ideology and Communist Party rule] are upheld.

We can’t handle chaos while we’re busy with contradiction. If today we have a big demonstration and tomorrow we have a great airing of views and a bunch of wall posts, we won’t have any energy left to get anything done. That’s why we have to insist on clearing the square.”

Deng closed the meeting by asking President Yang Shankun to order the military to declare martial law that night and to “finish it within two days.” The meeting ended, and within 48 hours, the military had killed an estimated 2,600 of China’s citizens in emptying Tiananmen of the protests once and for all.

Writing of that meeting, Max Fisher considered that Deng’s speech is one of the best documents for understanding how China became what it is today and how the Tiananmen crackdown that followed two days later shaped the country’s course for at least the next 25 years. He wrote:

“Deng was politically bruised and weakened from the internal fight, though, particularly among hardliners. It was not until three years later, when anti-reform party elder Li Xiannian died, that Deng was able to cultivate the case for economic reforms he had so carefully built into the decision to crack down. He made his famous ‘southern tour’ that fall, in cities such as Shenzhen and Shanghai, which he argued should be made into special, economically liberalized zones.

“Deng got his economic opening, first in the south and then elsewhere, greatly enriching China’s economy in ways that have transformed it. But, true to his June 2 speech intertwining economic reforms with harshly enforced public order, China never surrendering its tight-fisted controls on public discourse and assembly and dissent that defined China on June 4, 1989, and that still define it today.”

Snub of Chinese leaders

It is striking that most publishers in the West who put out collections or selections of the world’s allegedly greatest speeches uniformly fail to include in their volumes the texts of the equally noteworthy and memorable statements of Chinese leaders and statesmen. Figures as historic and important as Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai do not speak in these volumes.

Yet we find in these collections characters as notorious as Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin orating with abandon.

Only one significant volume, the impressive 980-page “Chambers Book of Speeches” (Chambers Harrap Publishers, Edinburgh, 2006), features a speech by a famous Chinese leader, Sun Yat-sen, the first provisional president of the Republic of China. Chambers features a lecture by Sun on March 2, 1924, in Guangzhou, wherein he tackled the theme, “How can we restore the standing of our nation?”

I will venture the opinion that Deng Xiaoping’s speech to Communist Party elders in June 1989 eminently qualifies as a great speech in its own right. The speech may not feature the usual flourishes of style that rhetoricians and elocutionists usually look for. What it indisputably shows is its impact on events and the course of Chinese history. Nothing that the present Chinese leader Xi Jinping has said in his speeches remotely compares to Deng’s historic 1989 speech.

Xi may be the dictator today, but Deng is fondly remembered far and wide as “the architect of modern China.”

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