Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [98]
The fourth of June 1989 had little direct connection, however, to He Dongsheng and his generation of Communist Party and national leaders. They had all risen into the government’s inner circles of power after 1995, and were not tainted by the “original sin” of June 4, 1989. After the events of 2009 had passed, He Dongsheng believed that that year had been alarming but not dangerous, certainly not as fraught with danger as 2008. A couple of years later, the external situation suddenly changed again, when the world economy entered a new period of crisis that was certain to unleash long-suppressed internal contradictions. Added to that was the party-state’s imminent change of leadership in 2012, and that was the period when the Communist Party’s mettle was most severely tested.
From 2008 onward, a whole series of incidents took place: a riot in Wan-an in Guizhou Province of over ten thousand people accusing the police of covering up the death of a young girl; the July 2009 riot of over ten thousand Tonghua Iron and Steel workers in Jilin Province, against a takeover by a privately owned company; the June 2009 Shishou City riot in Hubei Province due to the suspicious death of Tu Yuangao, a chef at the Yonglong Hotel, and to widespread anger at alleged drug trafficking and official corruption. Government-reported “large-scale collective public security incidents” of over five hundred people had risen to over a hundred thousand a year. All these incidents made He Dongsheng realize that local governments were very weak in the face of collective protest riots. In Wan-an, the government and police simply threw down their weapons and ran away; and in Tonghua, if the central-government machine had gone into action, it would have had to suppress industrial workers. If the Communist Party suppressed industrial workers, what would become of its legitimacy?
After these incidents, He Dongsheng was assigned to a top-secret small group in the central government tasked with drawing up contingency plans for any future large-scale disturbance. They came up with a number of proposals. At the same time, Party Central held a series of joint planning meetings with the military, the Public Security police, and the special armed police, a force organized in the wake of the Tiananmen Incident. They also brought several thousand county-level Party secretaries and leading Public Security Bureau cadres to Beijing to undergo intensive training.
In 2009, He Dongsheng was already clearly aware that the world economy was going to experience another crisis even greater than the one before. If the Chinese government handled it properly, though, it might actually present just the right set of circumstances for China to find a solution to its long-unresolved internal problems, and turn a danger into an opportunity. He Dongsheng even believed that whether or not China could enter an era of ascendancy earlier than expected depended on only two things: the international situation, and the appearance of some stroke of luck in China’s internal situation that would allow the government to take full advantage of the opportunity to bring order out of chaos, and complete all the unfinished business of the last thirty-plus years of “Reform and Opening.” What he meant by a stroke of luck was, to put it frankly, a major crisis. Only a major crisis could induce the ordinary Chinese people to accept willingly a huge government dictatorship.
There were two major reasons that could induce the Chinese people to accept the Chinese model of one-party rule: it would promote social stability, and it would concentrate resources to accomplish “big things.” That is to say, the preservation