Westerners are used to explaining the massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989 as being a battle between the Communist state and those who wanted greater democracy in China, and this is to some extent true. But the students and intellectuals who were demanding political reform were not the only people who participated in this popular movement; they were joined by workers and even some members of the old elites who were finding their world profoundly shaken by the period of economic reform that the Chinese state had embarked on. In this respect, the Tiananmen Square protests were both pro-democratic and anti-capitalist in character.
Because we're used to seeing democracy and capitalism as two sides of the same coin, it is easy to forget that China by 1989 essentially had one and not the other, at least in Beijing. The fact that it is still the Communist Party that rules China masks the fact that this party has embarked on the most extensive programme of neo-liberal economic reform in the history of mankind; the Communist Party has become the vanguard of capitalism. Ever since China started moving towards a market economy in 1979, the Chinese state has deployed violence and repression in a way familiar to students of Communist states, but for a completely original goal: to bring about a capitalist revolution in the economy.
This meant that those moved to demonstrate in Tiananmen Square were not just people who wanted to see the state become democratic, but also those who had become disillusioned with the social promises of this Communist Party. The Chinese Communists moved from a system of centralized production and social guarantees such as pensions, the "iron rice bowl" (lifelong employment) and healthcare to a system that was based around the idea of transition – the idea that the market economy would eventually make everyone rich, but in the meanwhile some people had to be allowed to get rich first while others saw their social guarantees dismantled. By 1989, there was a stark contrast between the Communist Party's ideology of equality and its practice of inequality.
Western market economies took centuries to develop and saw plenty of social upheaval and poverty while they did so. But they usually developed out of the socio-economic sphere itself rather than seeing the widesperad reordering of social and economic life by state violence; this sort of shock therapy is a practice peculiar to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In Britain, the bourgeoisie developed first and captured the state later - in China, the state has taken it upon itself to create a bourgeoisie from scratch, necessarily dismantling socialism in the process.
In China the market is being brought into existence through state violence and by huge redistributive policies. When a country is transitioning from socialism to capitalism, the question necessarily arises as to who benefits from the privatization of state enterprises and rural land – and a new elite is created out of those who are gifted these lucrative assets. This may create the conditions for long-term economic growth that will eventually benefit everyone, but in the short-term it creates a fundamentally political and social problem. This problem is easily dismissed by right-wing westerners until they remember that they themselves hardly live with brutal, unfettered capitalism, but enjoy a range of social guarantees.
China's process of privatization and its moves towards capitalism had already by 1989 polarized the rich and the poor, destroyed the system of state social welfare that used to exist in Chinese cities, and created a huge new impoverished urban underclass. These people went to Tiananmen with concrete social and economic demands, beseeching the state for the protection that its Communist ideology was supposed to oblige it to supply. They did not want to tear down the state or even necessarily want democracy; they saw themselves as part of a patriotic movement simply expressing the needs of the people to the state.
But the Chinese state was not going to listen. A fear of populism and grassroots movements is one of the defining characteristics of the Communist Party's ideology, as it equates it with the disastrous period of the Cultural Revolution under Mao Zedong, when Communists in the localities went nuts and killed millions of people. One reason that democracy is such a scary concept to Chinese rulers is that they equate it with this sort of anarchy; they believe the people need to be controlled and directed sensibly by a process that will gradually, yet inexorably, lead the people to a better place without unleashing chaos.
And so, as we know, the protests in Tiananmen ended in massacre – not just of the intellectuals and the students who wanted democracy and political openness, but a massacre of the workers who the Communist Party was, in its own official ideology, supposed to be the representatives of. To many left-wing intellectuals in China, this came as a profound shock and laid bare to them the intimate marriage between the Communist Party's dictatorship, violence, and the implementation of a market economy. This Communist Party had committed violence that any western nation would have baulked at, and in the name of capitalism as well as its own control; and finally it was clear that these two things were identical.
Whatever the promises of economic growth in the future and despite the claims at the most recent Party Congress that there would be a newfound focus on ameliorating the shocks that attended the transition, it is with this mixture of political oppression and economic insecurity that the average Chinese citizen continues to struggle with today.