Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (33 page)

On January 27, 1979, before his departure for the United States, Deng had given a speech that had seemed to acknowledge the necessity of deeper reforms. He had acknowledged the failures of socialism and even declared that China should emulate the “bourgeois countries” in their practice of democracy. “We should find a way to let people feel that they are masters of the country.” (Tellingly enough, this speech was not included in his
Selected Works
.)
¹²

Yet within just a few weeks, his public stance shifted dramatically. We do not, of course, know what was going on inside Deng’s head. But judging by the way events developed, it is reasonable to conclude that this shift had less to do with the evolution of his beliefs than with a coolheaded assessment of his own political position. Deng was happy to tolerate a certain degree of public questioning as long as it undermined his opponents. But now the Gang of Four was behind bars, the radicals had been defeated, and Hua had been pushed aside. There was no longer any reason for Deng to allow pluralism—and especially not when it called into question the very foundations of the People’s Republic. The public criticisms of the war in Vietnam by dissidents like Wei proved the last straw.

Responding to signals of an impending crackdown, Wei proceeded to burn his bridges. On March 25, 1979, he published an essay titled “Do We Want Democracy or New Dictatorship?” The title said it all: the text directly challenged Deng’s new ascendancy. Wei was arrested three days after his poster appeared. Police tore down the text. Tellingly, the authorities charged him with passing military secrets about the brief war with Vietnam to foreigners—a clear indication that this episode had become a neuralgic point for the leadership. When Wei appeared in court later in the year, the state prosecutor accused him of acting as the “running dog of Vietnam.”
¹³
He would remain in prison for another fifteen years.

The wall’s glory days were over. At the end of March, Beijing city authorities finally cracked down. Police banned further posters and directed would-be writers to a new site far on the outskirts of the city (where, of course, no one would see what they wrote). A wave of arrests swept up other government critics. At least one official publication was banned. The petitioners also felt the heat. Even as the party pushed ahead with the immense job of righting some of the most obvious injustices,
the security forces implemented their own solution. Leaders of the biggest groups of petitioners disappeared into prisons and labor camps.
¹³

As always, Deng understood that simply unleashing the men with the guns was not enough. He needed to explain away his own reversal on the value of “bourgeois” democracy, and the party needed an ideological underpinning for its tightening of the screws. The reasons for ending the political thaw, which some had already dubbed the “Beijing Spring,” had to be made explicit and unmistakable. In a major speech on March 30, 1979, Deng proceeded to elucidate what he called “the four basic principles” (in symbolic equilibrium with the “Four Modernizations”). Every party member, he urged, should uphold “the socialist road,” “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” “the leadership of the Communist Party,” and “Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought.” It was only by sticking to these ground rules, he told his audience, that the country’s leadership could ensure the stability needed to push ahead with necessary economic reforms. Deng did not need to do much to evoke the ancient Chinese fear of “chaos”; the terrors of the Cultural Revolution were still all too present to his audience. He spent much of his text assailing the temerity of the democratic dissidents who challenged the party’s right to rule.

Deng had never been a liberal democrat to begin with. But his experiences since 1966 had merely reinforced this tendency. For him and many other party members of his generation, the word
democracy
—often invoked by Mao and the radical students who had worshiped him—evoked the mob rule of the Cultural Revolution as much as anything else. Deng had no intention of ceding control to the streets, and that message comes through with brutal directness in the speech, which is noteworthy for the ferocity with which it assails the new generation of dissidents. Deng mentioned by name the Chinese Human Rights League, a group that incited his ire by calling upon President Carter to “show concern” for human rights in China. The new paramount leader of the Chinese Communist Party was having none of it. “What kind of democracy do the Chinese people need today?” Deng asked. “It can only be socialist democracy, people’s democracy, and not bourgeois democracy, individualist democracy.”
¹⁵

But he did not forget to proffer a carrot. Once again stressing his fidelity to the “Four Modernizations,” Deng made sure to signal that economic reform would continue unabated. Those who wanted to challenge the regime directly now fell silent. But at the same time, a certain measure of liberalization persisted. The reopening of educational institutions continued. A huge rehabilitation effort, engineered largely by Hu Yaobang (the reformer who had left his stamp on the Central Party Work Conference), cleared the charges against countless victims of the Cultural
Revolution. And the party restored “citizens’ rights” to some ten million people who, as the children of landlords or rich peasants, had borne the brunt of official discrimination due to their class origins through most of Mao’s reign. Deng saw no contradiction between his toleration of mainstream intellectuals and his harsh treatment of the democracy movement. “Intellectuals, especially members of the established intelligentsia, posed no political threat to the regime,” notes historian Maurice Meisner. “They had no organizations of their own beyond those under the firm control of the party.”
¹⁶

Deng was determined to maintain his own freedom of maneuver. Economic and administrative reforms would continue. But the Beijing Spring was over.

I
n most of Britain, the day of the general election dawned cool and overcast. As voters walked to their polling stations, some of them noticed the front page of the
Sun
, prominently displayed at the front of the newsstands. The tabloid, owned by press baron Rupert Murdoch, had long exulted in its status as the preferred reading of the working class; no one, it was considered, commanded the affections of the traditional Labour voter like the
Sun
. (This, indeed, was the same newspaper that had once dubbed Margaret Thatcher “the Milk Snatcher.”)
¹
So its editorial message on this day, splashed across the front page, was all the more shocking: “Vote Tory this time. It’s the only way to stop the rot.” The members of the print workers’ union at the paper did their best to sabotage the day’s edition, even cutting parts of the text they didn’t agree with. The editors still managed to get it out, though a bit late.
²

It was apparent, by the end of the five-week election campaign, that Thatcher’s message of change had resonated with her audience. Callaghan had acknowledged this widespread desire and tried to present himself as the candidate who would ensure that change came in a “controlled” way, without the chaos that, according to him, the Tories’ radical “free-market” approach was sure to bring. But the humiliations of the Winter of Discontent were still fresh, and many voters now saw “Sunny Jim” above all as the man who had allowed the unions to roll over his government. These disillusioned Britons were willing to take a chance on someone truly new.

Many of those who cast their ballots for Thatcher that day were voting against a lifetime of political habit. The famously left-wing playwright Harold Pinter, vexed
by “union selfishness,” cast his vote for Thatcher, as did his wife, the writer Lady Antonia Fraser. The theater director Peter Hall, who had voted for Labour since the 1950s, struggled with conflicting feelings, but ultimately opted for the Conservatives with his vote as well, noting in his diary that “we have to have change.” Journalist Stephen Fay also voted for the Tories for the first time “because he felt we needed a corrective.”
³

But it was not only the traditionally left-of-center intellectuals who found it in their hearts to make the change. So, too, did a remarkable number of skilled workers, the legendary “C2s” of the statisticians. In some parts of the industrial Southeast (including the city that was home to the giant Ford plant that had played such an important role during the unrest of the fall), up to 13 percent of the traditional Labour electorate switched to the Tories. Even among members of the unions, there was substantial support for Thatcher’s positions: 51 percent thought that the Conservatives had the best tax policies, and a shocking 37 percent even believed that Thatcher’s party had the best approach to combating unemployment. Meanwhile, support for the Liberal Party, the political home of centrists, evaporated—an indication that Britons, at least on this day, were willing to vote for a more sharply defined alternative.
⁴

In the afternoon Callaghan called his key aide, Bernard Donoughue, and gave him the bad news: “Mrs. Thatcher [will] be in No. 10 as Prime Minister tomorrow. So we must be out by 3:30 PM.” The polling stations were scheduled to close at 10 p.m., but preliminary counts and exit polls were already showing the scale of Callaghan’s defeat. The Conservative Party won 44 percent of the vote, translating into a parliamentary majority of forty-three seats. Thatcher’s strategy of aggressively targeting Labour voters had paid off dramatically: the 5.2 percent swing from Labour to Conservative was the largest in any election since 1945.

But this was not the only ingredient of her triumph. Simon Heffer, a recent Cambridge graduate who was working in a pub at the time of the 1979 election, represented yet another important segment of the pro-Thatcher vote: a rising new generation of Conservatives who rejected the clubbiness of the postwar party and wanted to see a new, meritocratic Britain. On the night of the election, he attended a Tory victory party with several of his university friends, and as they watched the returns come in on the BBC, they exulted in the palpable sense of a watershed. “It was as if we had been dragged into the modern era, and that prehistoric world where the country was governed by unelected trade unions was over.”
⁵

On the afternoon of May 4, Thatcher paid the traditional visit to the queen in Buckingham Palace. When she descended the stairs, she was met, according to
tradition, by the principal private secretary to the prime minister—in this case, Kenneth Stowe, who had accompanied Callaghan to the palace when he had left Number Ten Downing Street earlier in the day. Now he escorted Thatcher back to the prime minister’s residence. There, standing in front of the TV cameras, she recited an uplifting quote attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi: “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.”

In fact—though few picked up on it at the time—the prayer was of solidly nineteenth-century origins. But no matter. The passage had been chosen for her by her chief speechwriter, Ronnie Millar. Thatcher was not especially keen on it at first. Still, it was her first public statement as prime minister, and as such it was subjected to copious analysis. Most of the commentators focused on her call for harmony, which few of them took seriously. As her biographer John Campbell noted, no one paid particular attention to the middle lines of the quatrain, which neatly summed up her sense of her own mission. Saint Francis, after all, was a reformer whose deeply held beliefs infused a radical program of social renewal. As another observer put it at the time, she was the first “political evangelist” of any stripe to enter Number Ten since 1945.
⁶

The ambiguity of the quote—invoking both consensus and polarization—nicely summed up the political reality in which Thatcher found herself. She had fought the election by forcefully promising change, yet she had done so on a platform that was vague on the details. This was no accident. The Margaret Thatcher we envision when he hear her name today did not emerge in all of her glory from the general election of 1979. She was an evangelist, to be sure, but she was also an eminently practical politician, and she understood perfectly well that she could not unduly try the patience of her voters. Nonetheless, there was no mistaking the decisiveness with which she moved ahead.

The situation the new government faced was dire. Britain in 1979 was a country that had been “collectivized” to an extraordinary degree. Nearly a third of the 2 5 million Britons who had jobs worked in the public sector. The civil service was roughly twice the size it had been in 1939. Nearly half of the people working in manufacturing were employed by nationalized industries. Public-sector corporations had enormous debts, and the government was pouring subsidies into the industries it controlled. Most of that cash was being spent on declining businesses like coal (which was producing a third less than in 1938 despite the injection of public funds) and the railways (which were offering one-half as many miles of service as in 1938). In the private sector, two huge union organizations had an almost unchallenged
say over policy—even though the number of working days lost to strikes was eight times higher than in the years before World War II. Meanwhile, inflation had drastically eroded the value of the pound sterling. One pound in 1980 had one-twentieth the purchasing power of the same amount of currency in 1938. Prices had risen by an average of 13 percent over 1978–1979 and showed no sign of slowing.
⁷

Thatcher had been waiting in the wings for four years, enough time for her to devise a blueprint for what she wanted to do. When the time came, she was ready, and she got down to work with noteworthy speed. She needed all of two days to assemble her new government—a remarkable achievement considering the modest resources of the British prime minister’s office (especially when compared with the enormous apparatus that stands behind every US president). She had always made a point of working harder than anyone else around her, and she continued that ethos as prime minister, sleeping as little as four hours a night. That left plenty of time for her to stoke her bottomless appetite for briefing books and memoranda. Her mastery of homework was a lifelong point of pride.