The high proportion of government businesses made it

The high proportion of government
businesses made it likely that more
of this
kind of shady antics
would be seen as official
corruption rather than simply un
savory capitalism.
The government’s economic
role also produced the third sort of corrup
tion,
a
kind
of semi-benign version of the second. The policy
of reducing but not
eliminating detailed central economic planning
created a variety of
imbalances.
Vital goods might be in short
supply in one region while another
had an excess,
but either documents or cash for any transaction
was lacking. A number of
businessmen moved into the
breech as black market deal makers, fixers
who
helped
overcome the contradiction of the
system. They might organize a barter
arrangement which linked
three regions each with too much of something
another wanted. They might arrange the sale of
a good at a price triple the offi
cial one, with only the
controlled price reported. Though
people resented the
fortunes made in this•
way, this was not the sort of corruption
on which they
focused. They did, however,
tend to see the whole mercantile practice
of buying
cheap and selling dear as shady in much the same
way.
One of the problems
the protest movement might have
faced had it not
been crushed was to develop an analysis
of China’s current situation which would
link the democratic
concerns of students to the more narrowly
economic ones of
other people. It is not obvious that democracy
by itself will lessen corruption,
though the student had faith that it would. It is not
obvious either, that a
democratic transition in China could
be managed without serious economic
problems--an issue
the student leaders had not really
addressed.
LIMITS
AND
WEAKNESSES
As exhilarating and unexpected as the
success of the student protest move
ment was, it is
important to recognize some of the issues which were
inadequately
faced and problems which remained unsolved. The
first and most important was
simply that this was
a movement of urban people with
almost no resonance in or
connections to the countryside.
This is not to say that China’s rural population
is
without grievances
or uncritically supportive of all government
policy. It is not.
55

But word of this protest
spread in the
countryside much less extensively
than in
the cities, and primarily through
official government media.
It is still the
case
that few
peasant children go
to universities, and so the informal
communications
network which spread
unofficial and ‘insider’ views
of the protest did not work ef
fectively in rural areas. Links between
students and peasants
also were inhibited
by class bias. Students
in the April 27th march
shouted to soldiers: “Farmers
go
home; you have no business
here.’ Farmers in China
as elsewhere have
suspicions about
“city slickers.” Moreover, some
of the complaints and
interests
of urban
and rural populations
pitted them at least superficially
against each
other as consumers vs.
producers. Higher food prices (even in
the form of an end
to the scrip payments
by which peasants were forced
to loan money
to the
government)
would have furthered the inflation
which worried urban
folks.