EPISODE 353： THE CHINA FILES - THE PEOPLE'S DYNASTY OF HORROR
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
136.00055
Summary
Deng Xiaoping was a Chinese communist revolutionary who served as the second Chinese leader under Mao Zedong. He is best known for his role in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, but also for introducing market reforms and opening up China to the West.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome aboard. Thank you for joining us. Today is part three of
00:00:15.660
The China Files. Today's title, Kongbu de Renmin Wangchao, The People's Dynasty of Horror.
00:00:25.300
Where we last left off in our tale, Chairman Mao had just passed away. It was the height of the
00:00:32.340
Cultural Revolution. Purges were happening all over the party and all over the country.
00:00:38.080
Millions of people were dying. The pressure was on that if you weren't considered a true Maoist,
00:00:42.820
you could be killed, be persecuted to the point where you might even want to commit suicide
00:00:48.860
before they came for you and your family. In the midst of all of this, Chairman Mao himself,
00:00:55.020
the great helmsman, passes away. His body is later put on display at the mausoleum.
00:01:02.520
A new leader emerges to become the paramount supreme leader of the party, the supreme leader of China,
00:01:09.580
even though he never takes the title himself officially. That man is the minuscule Deng Xiaoping.
00:01:17.500
Now, Deng Xiaoping, he had been around in the CCP from the early days. He was a member of that long
00:01:25.660
march. He fought with the Red Army. But one thing that was different between Deng Xiaoping and Mao,
00:01:32.400
as there were many differences between Deng Xiaoping and Mao, was that Deng Xiaoping had had foreign
00:01:39.480
experiences as a young man. Chairman Mao only ever left China once that we know of in order to go to
00:01:47.560
Moscow to attend a meeting with Joseph Stalin in the 1940s. Deng Xiaoping, on the other hand,
00:01:53.620
had spent time overseas. Deng Xiaoping, in his very early years, had an opportunity to travel to
00:02:01.140
France as an overseas worker. In fact, many Chinese traveled overseas as workers in the late 1800s,
00:02:06.660
of course, famously building the railroad in the United States, the Transcontinental Railroad.
00:02:12.680
And then in other chances, he had, he worked in France. And so at 16 years old, Deng Xiaoping
00:02:18.060
traveled steerage class on a working ship to France as an overseas worker, where he worked
00:02:24.460
in a steel factory, an iron factory. He was given a job as a fitter. And actually years later, during the
00:02:31.060
Cultural Revolution, when he himself was purged by Mao and by the party, he was sent to a factory.
00:02:37.400
This is 50 years later. He's sent to a factory to work yet again as a fitter. And it turns out that
00:02:44.020
he still knew trade. He was still a master of the craft. So Deng Xiaoping has this European background.
00:02:52.520
He studied in France for a little bit, at least in middle school that we know of.
00:02:57.560
And then he then comes in. He's one of the people that during the Great Leap Forward,
00:03:03.220
the party looked to, and he had risen through the ranks. And they looked to him to establish some
00:03:08.520
kind of economic reform, to find some kind of way to peel back from the hardline communism and hardline
00:03:15.900
commune policies of Chairman Mao that led to the mass starvation. So Deng Xiaoping began injecting market
00:03:22.880
reforms and introducing market reforms, both after the Great Leap Forward and then later when Mao died
00:03:30.800
and Deng Xiaoping became really his successor. That's when he introduced a new policy into China.
00:03:38.260
He called it Gaige Kaifang, reform and opening up. And essentially what he did, now keep in mind,
00:03:44.800
this is after the meeting with Nixon, after the meeting with Kissinger, Zhou Enlai is still around.
00:03:49.400
He's one of the premiers of China. But Deng Xiaoping starts opening China to the West and he allows
00:03:55.300
specifically foreign direct investment to come into China, realizing that communism has been a failure
00:04:02.420
in terms of economics, but then not wanting to lose power over the entire country from a political
00:04:09.760
perspective. And so we knew he had to say something about Chairman Mao. And there's a famous saying
00:04:14.840
from Deng Xiaoping, he's a famous for being a pragmatist. And one of his famous sayings about
00:04:22.040
Chairman Mao, and they asked him was, was Mao good? Was Mao bad? Of course, he knew that he had to
00:04:27.260
acknowledge the failures of Chairman Mao, but he also had to find a way to maintain Chairman Mao's standing
00:04:32.620
as the leader of China, the leader of the CCP, really the initial, if not formal founder, but certainly
00:04:40.700
the original main leader. And so Deng Xiaoping comes up with a statement of saying, Mao was seven parts
00:04:47.500
good, three parts bad. And that's still essentially the official narrative from the party when it goes
00:04:54.580
to Chairman Mao. And then when Mao had passed away and Deng started introducing these market reforms
00:05:01.100
into China. He said, they asked him about this once and they said, you know, isn't this, isn't this a form
00:05:06.700
of capitalism? Isn't this the, the opposite of communism? What are you doing? And, uh, later on this, this system is,
00:05:13.660
is known as socialism with Chinese characteristics, uh, and Deng responds, it doesn't matter if a cat
00:05:28.940
is white or black. It only matters if the cat catches mice. And so again, the same type of pragmatism that
00:05:37.700
you would see as opposed to the ideological dogmatism of Chairman Mao, whereas Deng Xiaoping
00:05:43.380
wanted China to become richer, wanted the party to become more powerful. But here's the difference.
00:05:50.300
Here's the difference between him and say, a Khrushchev. Here's the difference between him
00:05:55.500
and a Gorbachev was that Deng never wanted the party to lose power. And so as this, the country
00:06:06.100
and as the CCP opened up more and reformed more, the 1970s rolled into the 1980s and the, and throughout
00:06:13.860
the 1980s, remember the USSR at this point, it's beginning to crack. The communist block is beginning
00:06:20.460
to open thaws are happening between first, obviously between the CCP and the United States,
00:06:26.520
but then also between the Warsaw nations, Berlin wall, more and more protests all throughout
00:06:35.020
the 1980s. Reagan becomes president, Reagan and Thatcher, Pope John Paul, the second they're
00:06:40.200
fighting. They're going behind the Berlin wall. Pope John Paul, the second goes to Poland,
00:06:45.060
holds massive rallies. Worldwide communism is beginning to fall. And the power of communism
00:06:53.160
over these areas is beginning to weaken. All of this comes to a head. And at the same time,
00:07:00.360
Deng Xiaoping, he's out there preaching reform, opening up reform, reform, reform. Well, students
00:07:06.600
and youth throughout China start hearing this and they say, we don't just want economic reform.
00:07:13.120
We want political reform. We want social reform. We want the freedoms that we've seen in the West.
00:07:20.840
We want the freedoms that we've seen in the United States. We want the freedoms that are being denied
00:07:26.120
to us. And this sparks off a movement as well. And in fact, some party leaders of the CCP
00:07:33.980
back this new movement of political reform. One of those leaders ends up passing away.
00:07:43.120
And a funeral is held for him in a place called Tiananmen Square in April of 1989.
00:07:51.300
And the students flooded the square. They stayed there for months.
00:07:56.520
And when we come back, I'll tell you what happened next.
00:07:59.260
So it's April 1989. There's massive movement for social change across all of China, every major city.
00:08:11.980
And one party leader in particular, not Deng Xiaoping, but a pretty high leader named Hu Yaobang is championing
00:08:19.160
these reforms. But Deng Xiaoping and the hardliners, the long marchers, they don't want this.
00:08:24.760
They don't want any social reform. They don't want any reform at all like this, because they want the party
00:08:31.260
to always be the unchallenged head of all of China.
00:08:38.380
So Hu Yaobang is forced to resign. But not long after his forced resignation, he suffers a heart attack and dies.
00:08:46.400
Many of his supporters, many of the students wonder, could he have been killed?
00:08:54.580
Could something have happened to him? Like something happened to Lin Biao?
00:09:04.700
Not just Tiananmen Square, but Shanghai, Chongqing, hundreds of thousands in Hong Kong,
00:09:10.940
all over China. I remember Hong Kong, by the way, had not been under Chinese rule at this time,
00:09:18.440
not under the CCP rule at this time. It was still under British rule.
00:09:21.580
Hong Kong never went communist. Hong Kong was always a British enclave.
00:09:26.240
The same way that Taiwan never became communist, because it was always under the nationalists after 1949.
00:09:32.560
So you have to remember this. Hong Kong and Taiwan always stayed outside of communist China
00:09:37.920
until later on with Hong Kong. So, here we are.
00:09:49.420
The protests get bigger and bigger. They go on for weeks.
00:09:54.320
The weeks turned to months. Now it's June, and it's still going on.
00:10:09.320
Because Deng Xiaoping and the leaders of the CCP
00:10:12.640
saw a potential for a new civil war and a new revolution on their hands.
00:10:22.400
what would happen if they allowed that movement to get off the ground.
00:10:33.780
And they killed thousands of students, workers, and everyone else in that square
00:10:40.860
of the gate of heavenly peace, which is what Tiananmen means.
00:10:45.320
The same gate where Chairman Mao, just 40 years before, exactly 40 years before,
00:10:52.040
had commemorated the founding of the People's Republic of China.
00:10:58.020
But in fact, at this point, their People's Republic had just become a new dynasty.
00:11:07.920
One that was not willing to relinquish power to anyone.
00:11:26.880
He went down into the protests himself as a high-ranking member of the party
00:11:33.280
and showed support to them, showed respect, listened to them.
00:11:39.620
And for this, Zhao Ziyang was purged, of course, in the midst of these protests.
00:11:45.680
However, because of his background, because of who he was,
00:11:50.000
because of his legal service to the CCP in the past,
00:12:09.340
that were then smuggled out of his house between 1999 and 2000.
00:12:17.080
He actually had children's cassette tapes for his kids
00:12:26.700
with the little battery-operated radio that he had at his house.
00:12:32.480
And the CCP guards never noticed what he was doing in there.
00:12:41.760
He was secretly recording what actually happened
00:12:50.060
as well as his take on everything that had gone on prior to it.
00:13:00.180
who mobilized the military to crack down on students.
00:13:09.320
to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square,
00:13:20.140
that China could solve its problems of corruption
00:13:22.320
and a growing gap between the rich and the poor.
00:13:27.880
By insisting on my view of the student demonstrations
00:13:49.020
A tragedy to shock the world had not been averted.
00:13:59.200
that's ever come out of a high-ranking CCP official
00:14:04.280
actually admitting that the Tiananmen Square massacre
00:14:12.280
through his kids, his grandkids' cassette tapes.
00:14:22.100
Deng has always stood out among the party elders
00:14:24.200
as one who emphasized the means of dictatorship.