Editor's Introduction

Abstract

In December 1986 some key issues of China's open door experience were dramatized as Western viewers were treated to televised news scenes in which Chinese students marched through the streets holding up banners proclaiming demands for "freedom" and "democracy" and held public burnings of party-controlled newspapers, which they felt had misreported their activities. While these protests were linked to such internal issues as inadequate campus living conditions, authoritarian patterns of university governance, and malpractice in election processes to local people's congresses, the rhetoric invoked by students was clearly influenced by "bourgeois" liberal ideas introduced through the open door.1 It only has to be compared with the well-known sloganeering of the Cultural Revolution period, to which a nervous Chinese leadership made reference, to see the contrast. The official campaign against "bourgeois liberalization," which started with the removal of Hu Yaobang from his post as party secretary2 and proceeded to the expulsion of a small number of prominent and contentious intellectual figures from the party, seems also to have been affected by the open door. The relative moderation of this campaign was probably due to the concern of all factions within the Chinese leadership to maintain conditions of economic confidence and political moderation essential to success in a modernization program oriented toward the outside world. The Thirteenth Party Congress, held in October 1987, reinforced this direction.