How China Forgot Its Decade of Experimentation

The sovereign, as George Orwell once observed, has an inveterate
habit: He exerts control over not just the present but the past. Books are
burned. Dissenters are purged. Official records are written—and then rewritten.
The signal revelation of Orwell’s dystopian classic, 1984, is that the past is mutable and therefore vulnerable; it
survives in fleeting, unguarded snippets like papers and memories. Today,
Anglo-American life is riven by deep contests over history as it relates to its
founding myths. But these trials are predicated on a liberal luxury: In many
autocratic societies, there is no debate at all. History is what the sovereign says
it is, and naysayers dwell in a dark, discursive void.

This blotting out of the past finds a capable practitioner in the
Chinese Communist Party. Fang Lizhi, a well-known Chinese dissident, once
estimated that the Party’s internal power struggles meant the shape of history
was erased from Chinese society “about once each decade.” Near the end of the
millennium, there was mounting hope that the Party’s technique of “forgetting history” would crumble amid an informatized,
interconnected world. The internet would become an eternal store of memory. Twenty-four-hour news spawned a global public hungry for news of coups and cover-ups. A
year after the Party faced one of its greatest political tests, at the carnage
of Tiananmen in 1989, Fang, in a preview of the post–Cold War consensus to
come, rang the Party’s death knell. “No longer will the Chinese Communists be
able to hide beyond the reach of world opinion,” he wrote. “The real history of
last year’s events cannot possibly be forgotten.”

Could it not? So much has changed in the ensuing decades. While most
readers recall the bloody events of June 4, 1989, they no longer grasp their meaning. For those who came of age during a rising China, Tiananmen is often one
interlude in the 40-year saga of Chinese economic ascendance. Readers today
will likely recall the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and his fabled 1978 policy
of “reform and opening up.” They will be hard pressed to remember someone like
Hu Yaobang, who spearheaded those reforms and whose political exile and death
would trigger a cascade of events culminating in the June massacre. What the
stories of these purged officials indicate is a fate-altering decade rife with
contradiction and galvanizing force, but the memory of China’s 1980s today is
largely that of a single, contextless day.

These distortions are no accident. Although the Party had failed to
excise memories of the crackdowns, it succeeded in obfuscating the very forces
that begot them: the multiple paths to modernity that China’s leaders once
entertained. Contrary to the teleological faith in the “China model”—the unique
blend of statist control and market economics that the Party favors today—the 1980s
were one of the most indeterminate periods in modern Chinese history. It was
this uncertainty that spawned a decade of daring experimentation and
imagination. Now that President Xi Jinping has secured a precedent-breaking
third term, dragging the country into an ever-narrowing view of national
greatness, the 1980s stand as a critical inflection point: the moment when many
possible futures collapsed into one.  

Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden
History of the 1980s is a delectable rehabilitation of a momentous decade. Julian Gewirtz,
the director for China at the National Security Council and former lecturer at
Harvard University, reveals just how many different futures China’s leaders
countenanced in the dawning post-Mao years. The Party’s fundamental task was to
decide what “reform” meant for China, and this did not lend itself to clear
answers. The devil was often buried in details over price reforms, technology
policy, and political liberalization. So leaders often equivocated, their
positions shifting as the decade progressed. Today, China touts its brand of
state capitalism as though it were an item plucked—with supreme foresight and
wisdom—from the menu of modernity. Gewirtz debunks this myth and shows us how
China came to convince the world of it.

Part of the myth-busting involves a reassessment of Deng Xiaoping’s
role in China’s reforms. After the Cultural Revolution, the stout Chinese
leader, who had emerged victorious from his own power struggles, led the moral
reckoning that sent China down its market-driven course. But he did not know
how to navigate. That task was often left to his designated successors: Hu
Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang. Through trial and error policies—and at great personal
and political risk—these figures filled in what Deng had only conceived in
broad outlines. Contrary to mainstream opinion, Gewirtz portrays Deng as a
geriatric ruler prone to self-contradiction. Throughout the decade, it was
often Deng’s protégés who would “fill in Deng’s gestures.” 

Born in 1919, Zhao Ziyang was China’s third premier and the Communist
Party’s highest-ranking official from 1987 until his ouster in 1989. In
Gewirtz’s telling, Zhao appears as one of the unsung architects of China’s
reforms. He laid the conceptual ballast for the fabled “world’s factory,” the
idea that China’s competitive advantage in global markets would come from its
cheap labor supply and raw material imports. He helped China rejoin the
World Bank, which opened new sources of investment and economic expertise. At a
time when China’s leaders were eager to send students abroad, Zhao personally
asked Margaret Thatcher to lower the fees of Chinese students. With patience
and intellectual humility, Zhao engaged face to face with a number of Western
thinkers, from the acerbic Chicago economist Milton Friedman to the futurist
writer Alvin Toffler. Until the late 1980s, Zhao was set to be an
unforgettable figure for any history of modern Chinese reforms.

The fall of 1987, Gewirtz writes, was the “high watermark” of Zhao’s
power. That year, Zhao ascended to the post of CCP general secretary, the
position occupied currently by President Xi Jinping. At the thirteenth Party
Congress, he would ratify an ambitious work report that cemented the market’s
place in the Chinese economy, while outlining steps toward bold political
reforms, including separating the party and state. Zhao also introduced a new
term for China’s political system, one that resolved incongruities between
Marxist scripture and capitalist systems. China, in Zhao’s new conception, was
in the “initial stage of socialism.” These ideas were so compelling that they
have been reincorporated into Xi Jinping Thought.

Throughout the 1980s, the forces of reform and conservatism raged,
often within the same person. (Deng had offered mixed signals throughout
the decade and clearly held both impulses.) That Zhao ascended to the top post
just years before the Tiananmen crackdowns epitomized the protean nature of
Chinese elite politics. But some popular ideas persisted. Among them was the
belief that market reforms were inextricably linked to political change. “The
success of all our other reforms depends on the success of the political
reform,” Deng wrote in 1986. Wang Huning, who is now the highest-ranking
propagandist in Xi’s inner circle, argued a year later that China must adopt a
“highly democratic political system,” if it were to establish itself as a
modernized country. Strikingly, some of the most conservative Party leaders
exhibited liberal leanings in the 1980s.

But if Zhao sat comfortably within China’s Overton window in 1987, the
consensus was quickly unraveling. In 1988, a botched price liberalization
campaign triggered an inflation spike that threatened the legitimacy of Deng
and Zhao. The spread of revolutionary fervor across Eastern Europe emboldened
Deng’s self-preserving instincts. The release of a viral documentary called River Elegy, which cast Zhao as the
budding leader of a spiritual democracy movement, threw more suspicion onto the
Party’s reformists. Hu Yaobang’s untimely death in April 1989 set off a protest
in Tiananmen Square, which expanded to broader calls for democracy and an end
to elite corruption. As the crisis escalated, Zhao made a fateful blunder: He traveled
on an official trip to North Korea, entrusting the handling of the
demonstrations to the Party’s hard-line faction. By May 1989, the conflict had
become intractable. Deng, together with a conservative majority, declared
martial law. On May 19, a broken, teary-eyed Zhao popped up at the square for
the last time. He urged the students to leave and delivered a now famous message:
“Students, we came too late.” For Zhao, it was a matter of timing.

After the crackdowns, the Party moved to reorder reality. Thousands of
officials were purged. Patriotic education campaigns flourished. Zhao was put under
house arrest, his contributions to the decade reassessed in light of the
bloodied victors. The pre-Tiananmen impulse for reform at all costs would give
way to the post-Tiananmen orthodoxy of stability above all else. In this
surgery of the past, the Party would credit Deng with being the “chief
architect” of the reform era, and Zhao—who had collaborated closely with Deng
throughout the decade—would be cast as its “distorter and destroyer.” Zhao was effectively
erased from the historical record, his death, in 2005, announced on the fourth
page of the People’s Daily under an
article related to post-tsunami inspections.

The centrality of Zhao in Gewirtz’s picture of the 1980s is
double-edged. Over the years, new source material, including a collection of Zhao’s writings released clandestinely by his associates and
family members in Hong Kong, has opened up new avenues for Chinese scholars. Yet
the availability of these sources may mean an overemphasis on Zhao over other
figures. A better balance of the decade’s movers and shakers would require a
larger space for Zhao’s predecessor Hu Yaobang, another worthy candidate for the “architect” title.

But this may all be beside the point. Regardless of who is the true
architect of China’s reforms, what Gewirtz argues convincingly is that this
very attribution is a political choice. The Party doesn’t think primarily in
empirical terms (“who did what?”) but in ideological ones (“who should we say
did what?”). In China, politics precedes truth. Deng became the hallowed
architect not by virtue of fact but because the Party’s mechanism of
self-preservation required it. The Party imposed its own reality.

In this next chapter of Xi Jinping rule, cemented over the weekend at an important political session, a new reality is emerging. Deng, the “chief architect of reform
and opening,” has been supplanted by a new protagonist of modern China: Xi
Jinping. What is the purpose of studying this history if, as Fang Lizhi once
observed, it is “erased about once every decade”? 

The truth, for one thing, is intrinsically valuable, but Gewirtz’s
book offers two other answers. The first stems from the simple fact that
China’s future is unwritten. The 1980s, in this view, remains a “usable past”—a
repository for the Chinese imaginary and potential source material for a new
future. (It is also, I might add, a “usable past” for emerging countries wishing
to cut through the false dichotomy between a China model and an American one.)

The second is that reality has a way of biting back. After Xi abolished term limits in 2017, China’s social
media buzzed with messages quoting Deng’s 1980 speech on political reform, warning
against the “overconcentration of power.” It was a potent example of how a despot’s
historical erasure is never without cost—a buried past becomes a threatening
one. 

More recently, there has been a fantasy, prevalent in Xi’s China, that
there lies, beneath the layers of Western influence, an autochthonous Chinese nation-state
gloriously waiting to emerge. Gewirtz deconstructs this framing: China’s
relationship to the West was never “one of ‘infiltration’ or ‘rejection,’” he
writes. It was a “full spectrum of partnering dynamics—picking and choosing,
reformulating, occluding, and disguising influence.” Chinese identity can no
sooner survive without its Western connections than American identity can survive
without its links to the rest of the world. To conduct such a surgery is to invite
absurdities and contradictions. (China’s persistent refusal to accept Western-made
mRNA vaccines, for example, has thoroughly undermined its claim to have the
most competent response to the Covid-19 pandemic.)

The title of Gewirtz’s book is fitting. Once uttered by Deng
Xiaoping, “Never turn back” is an effective motto for mobilization but
not for reflection and recalibration. There is little daylight between China’s messianic
drive for socialist modernity and the triumphalist narratives at the end of the
Cold War: Both present history as destiny, a predetermined course inimical to alternatives.
Connecting world history, development economics, and political theory with a
lyrical style, Gewirtz has written an exceptionally wide-ranging book for a new
generation. The reformists of the 1980s will be remembered for their fearless
experiments with modernity, and when the triumphalists are disproven, their stories
will be told anew.