1. Introduction

Proletarians expressed violently across all China their discontent against their living conditions and this by means of demonstrations, strikes, sabotages, expropriation of food in stores, attempts of arming and fraternizations with soldiers. But the lack of autonomous organization of proletarians and the fact that there was no communist perspective given to the struggle, brought back the organization of this revolt too often under the various flags set and hung by the bourgeoisie of China and from all over the world: i.e. the struggle for their sacrosanct democracy, the struggle against the excesses and other dysfunctions of the regime. The fact that the proletarians themselves carried and reproduced these bourgeois flags, expresses above all the weakness of a class that doesn’t manage to get autonomous, to defend its own class interests, and that is from then on defending and supporting the most radical fraction of the bourgeoisie, “more leftist”, and “reformist”.

Continually in these confrontations, the opposition was therefore between:
* on one hand, the non-organized, and therefore defeated, interests of the proletariat,
* and on the other hand, resistance and direct repression of the bourgeoisie, which were fully made easier through its enemy’s weaknesses in the struggle.

China, as a country producing and reproducing the capitalist system, is in crisis, for the same reason than all the other countries of the world (with peculiar specificities and intensity for each of them according to the characteristics of the country: e.g. its geography, history, economy, social issues etc.). The state in China and its spokesman Deng Xiao Ping have been forced to face this situation through reforms, as everywhere else in the world. These reforms, which started ten years ago, have been led in the framework of a campaign for the “four modernizations” connected to the one of the alleged “opening upon the outside world”, as if the state in China had ever been closed to take part to the development of the world capitalist market. Reforms in China touched the sectors of industry, agriculture, science, research and the army, modifying thus really a series of secondary characteristics of the “Socialist China”. Everywhere the bourgeoisie presents these reforms as “revolutionary” ones, as a guarantee of the change from top to bottom of the old “Communist” system. But if the bourgeoisie presents these reforms in such a spectacular way, it’s really because it’s not about fundamental transformations, whose objective would be other than the eternal race to profit.

These reforms did only damage proletarians’ living conditions of the whole continent by the increased organization of the exploitation system. The first wave of reforms transformed the organizational forms of agricultural production: i.e. the old structures of “collectivisation” –the old Mao’s “communes”- that assured the illusion of full employment (with of course many unemployed) in the countryside and a great mobility of the labour force, while guaranteeing a simple and efficient control on the agricultural proletariat. These old structures have been extensively eliminated and replaced by “domestic agricultural systems of production”, more productive. These new forms of organization can be defined by a more decentralized but more coercive structure of the organization of agricultural production. An administrative framework (which, among others measures, set the prices) indirectly assured the control of the state, and the task that consists in constantly increasing the pressure on work passed from the hands of “communes” managers to those of “domestic farms” managers.

Since then, the myth of “full employment” in the countryside, so much praised previously by the Chinese state, collapsed facing the cruel reality: 50 millions of proletarians left their village and lived as vagabonds on the roads in countryside, or as “squatters” (illegal immigrants) in the slums of cities. And even for the luckier families that had higher incomes this increase of wage was and remained extensively neutralized by the inflation.

During this time the official propaganda and the world media popularised the Chinese agricultural reforms, describing them as the history of a dazzling success. The world media especially underlined the existence and multiplication of “rich peasants”. The reality was that, in most cases, some families of peasants succeeded at the cost of disproportionate efforts in buying some means of production, as trucks. It allowed them to get some sufficient incomes to guarantee the dynamics of their own exploitation. In other situations, a certain number of “domestic farms” that “succeeded” took directly refuge in speculation or in activities of industrial “small capitalism” or even in business.

In spite of the bourgeois international publicity (either favourable or unfavourable) around the old system “to each his iron bowl of rice”, the wave of egalitarian distribution never existed in China: the difference –and thus the competition- between proletarians has always been encouraged by sophisticated methods of alleged “advantages”, such as the renting of material to individuals, or to families, etc. For the whole of the agricultural proletariat in China, anyway, the process of reforms led to the exacerbation of their problems: i.e. lesser job security, decrease of wages, and more pressure on hard work. In one word, reforms meant for proletarians a real and efficient “modernization” and this in the most terrorist sense of the word. The situation of proletarians got worse to such a point that revolts have been led in several places in the name of the return to the archaic system of the Mao-like “communes”, considered as less oppressive than the “modern system of domestic agriculture”.

The industrial restructuring began much later, but led to the same results. The urban unemployment already existed before in China, and became a large-scale phenomenon because of the rationalization of the production in numerous enterprises. The emigration from countryside also played a role: e.g. in the province of Sichuan the population of the capital city, Shengdu, increased of 3.8 millions, and the number of unemployed of one million.

Operations of foreign investment were much more limited than what was suggested by the propaganda. Anyway, agreements (joint ventures) and foreign companies played an important role in sharpening the contradictions and social tensions, the same way the multiplication of commercial agreements on an international scale (the famous “opening upon the outside world”) has made the contradictory nature of “modernization” much more visible.

As for the competitiveness of Chinese products on the world market, it is mainly provided by the extremely low wages. In some years, the real wages in urban China decreased of 40%, and without speaking about the relative wage decrease.

With regard to the modernization of education and sciences, the pressure for the competition became quite intolerable in high schools and universities. Work perspectives for the students are bad; alone children of the bourgeoisie can hope to expect a lucrative work after having finished their studies. In the same time, students’ living conditions became worse than ever: overcrowded schools and boarding schools, disgusting food, etc. We can already see here how the determinations in the struggle of studying proletarians didn’t have for origin the simple “desire of democracy”.

The same observations can be made about the army that concentrated a big number (3 millions) of proletarians. Except for the elite troops, soldiers of the “Liberation Popular Army” generally have the same –in not lower- average standard of living than workers of the cities and countryside: their 50 Yuan –or even lesser- wage per month was not enough to pay food expenses. The military draft is obligatory in China.

The general restructuring of management capitalist methods in China led to a widening of corruption (i.e. essentially that it became more and more visible). The bourgeois propaganda has the tendency to confuse anyway two completely different phenomena: on one hand, the efforts of proletarians cornered and criminalized by their intolerable living conditions and who try to survive while smuggling, stealing or robbing (especially young proletarians in the cities), and on another hand, the financial wheeling and dealing of bourgeois who exploit new (but partial) possibilities for making profit from the speculation on a big scale, as well as those of the individual small capitalists in close collaboration with managers of the state and the party.

Campaigns against “corruption” were thus useful for hiding the fact that it’s the capitalist system itself that provokes the chaos of crisis and the unbearable living conditions the majority of humankind are submitted to. Moreover, jailing some small capitalists justifies the general repression against the necessarily illegal attempts of proletarians who, faced with misery, don’t have any other solutions than to try to snatch by force what the state defends in its stores, its properties, its factories, etc.

At the same time, it would be silly to see the capitalist changes and developments in China only during the last decade. The new poles of capitalist concentration caught up with the old ones: many factories have been built and, in the framework of “the opening upon the outside world”, even the structures of consumption began to change. But all these developments and transformations combined with a deep crisis phenomenon only drove to an exacerbation of the contradictions: the continuation of the industrialization on a big scale concentrated bigger and bigger masses of proletarians in the cities, with terrible housing conditions and miserable wages. The bigger choice of consumption goods (for example, the wide range of clothes, televisions, and even videos, etc.), which made the foreign visitors enthusiastic about the “radical Chinese reforms”, only resulted in an increase of local proletarians’ fear, unable to buy anything, with the exception of a little bit of food, some square meters to rent for sleeping, and a bicycle to go working; with the exception therefore of the minimum needed for the reproduction of their labour force.

Reforms of the production apparatus were necessary in China, so that the local capitalists remain competitive on the market. The Maoist illusion collapsed. A mass of humans armed with small spoons to exploit rice fields, will never replace the capitalist necessity to constantly renew its means of production to remain competitive on the world market. Capital is the only and real master and demonstrated it once again here, while submitting to its laws all those who pretended to manage its economy. Consequences of the reforms in China violently fell on proletarians and it’s in this context that the first workers’ reactions appeared.

2. The struggles: forces and weaknesses of the movement

In Changsha (capital of the province of Hunan), “rioters and looters” swept into the city on April 22nd. Youngsters, mostly unemployed, smashed luxury stores, set cars on fire, assaulted restaurants. At the same time in Argentina and in West Germany the same looting and confrontations against the cops took place, against runaway misery and pauperisation.

Trains and stores were looted in several cities of the country. A few later, proletarians erected barricades in Shanghai, and paralysed the entire public transportation network. In other cities attacks were led against buildings of the party and the government, against warehouses, trains, shopping malls, etc.

As we can see, it’s about a very general struggle, determined by a miserabilization of all sectors of the proletariat, and led therefore also by the whole of the working class “categories”.

We insist on this point because the international media tried to restrict the events in China to a pacifist struggle of the only “students”. Tian An Men Square was under the glare of bourgeois information spotlight, in order to cast a bourgeois light on the struggles that took place in all China –and also on Tian An Men Square-, to provide a very “responsible” version about the events, insisting on the disgusting flags and demands of the “students’ coordination”, this embryo of a new government, still in the opposition.

There was a clear function to fulfil while underlining in such a spectacular way the reformist and democratic purposes the students’ leaders tried to impose –and they on a whole succeeded in imposing- on Tian An Men Square. The bourgeois ideology aims to hide the common foundation of regular explosions of anger that shake the world these last years and this is how the media transforms struggling proletarians in the world into “students” in China and in Burma, into “shanty towns inhabitants” in Latin America, into “nationalists” in USSR, into “opposition democrats” in Eastern Europe, into "Moslem brothers” in Syria, into “young unemployed” in Algeria, etc. The class that is taking a real hammering on the crisis is thus buried in an ocean of flags and confused categories that prevents it from recognizing the common situation that unites it everywhere, that prevents it more widely from recognizing its class brothers and sisters in the explosions of workers’ anger, which follow each other.

The spectacle of the world, given by the bourgeois disinformation channels, appears in the eyes of the proletarians like an incomprehensible chaos, where each category (national, professional, sectional, etc. ones) in which the bourgeoisie trapped them, is completely distinct from the next category.

The young proletarians’ combativeness in Beijing, because it was too easily contained by the “students’ coordination” and its reformist flags, was not sufficient to affirm the indispensable link with the proletarians who first started the struggle in other regions of China. It’s on this basis that the bourgeoisie developed a report of the events in China, while insisting on the strictly “student” character of the movement, its will to change democratically the existing system of management. And as a result, these events didn’t have anything anymore to do with what happened in the rest of China.

Another important element to emphasize is the framework in which movements of struggle started. In China, as everywhere else, the bourgeoisie was forced to apply some drastic reforms in order to try to counter the more and more real decrease in its profit rate and to restructure its production apparatus (as we developed in the first chapter). Never mind these reforms were called “perestroika” in USSR, “modernization” in China, “spring, summer plan” in Latin America or “restructuring” in Europe, they had all of them a common essence attached to the world capitalist necessity to compensate the fall of capitalist profit rates by a cut in the social wage of the working class. These reforms are terrorizing for the proletariat and are accompanied by powerful ideological campaigns aiming to make it accepting the incredible deterioration of its living conditions.

Faced with the spectacle subsequently given by the world media as for the reformist purposes the movement pursued, the matter is therefore about recalling that the struggles initially started following and against the reforms opened some ten years earlier by Deng Xiao Ping, reforms which were greeted, all along their setting up, by the whole of the world bourgeoisie.

The fact that in Beijing the struggles engulfed themselves gradually in the thoughts of political reforms carried by the “students’ coordination” obviously and complementarily served the bourgeoisie to suddenly put forward the fact that Deng Xiao Ping’s reforms didn’t go far enough and give again a perspective of a “more radical” reform, a “political” one. The flag of the “political reform” served thus as standard to “make forget” that the origin of the movement was rooted in the opposition to the reforms, because this opposition concealed in itself the truth according to which no reform of the capitalist system will never improve the fate of the working class!!!

The death of Hu Yaobang, one of the CCP “reformists” who fell into disgrace, was then nothing but one pretext more to increase in scale the agitation that developed in Beijing and culminated in demonstrations of 100,000 people. It’s from this moment that China became to be under the glare of the international media spotlight, drawing attention on the responsibility and the will of pacific change of the “students”, hiding the movements that had taken place in the provinces and that were at the origin of the agitation against the reforms, transforming the local struggles against the reforms into a kill of “communism” and into a hymn to free enterprise and free market.

April 27th a big demonstration took place: nearly 400,000 people marched while shouting… “Long live the communist party”!!! What a terrible illusion to believe that it’s possible to confront the state in China while finding the support of its structures. All along the struggles in Beijing, the proletarians deluded themselves with democratic watchwords issued by the members of the “students’ coordination” who quickly became to be candidates for governing. This is how in Shanghai 6,000 students of the university of Fudan brought to the local authorities a petition for democracy.

As we emphasized above, the media continuously exemplified the expression of this real submission of the proletarians to the democratic watchwords and never gave publicity to the violent attacks of proletarians, students groups and others, against the party and state buildings in big cities like Shanghai, etc.

May 8th, the ten thousands students of Beijing started the strike again. The students’ representatives group for dialogue, newly constituted, launched to the power a new call to negotiation.

May 15th, Mikhail Gorbachev arrived in China. World symbol of democratisation, ideal personification of economic, social and political adjustment of the capitalist system, Gorbachev came to greet the reforms started by Deng Xiao Ping. It’s nothing but the meeting of two accomplices who both of them took since a certain time the necessary measures for the modernization of exploitation, only fearing in return an angry response from a proletariat put under pressure from all sides. Even such a so big symbol like Gorbachev didn’t have anything to teach to the representative of the bourgeois state in China because this one already demonstrated practically since several years his big capacity to reform the anomalies or the deviations of a productive system, which was behind the world necessities for increasing its profit.

On this occasion the Chinese government announced the opening towards what he revelled in calling the “students’ protest”. The Prime Minister Li Peng acknowledged that the students have the right to demonstrate and the leader of the Party, Zhao Ziyang, asked the hunger striking students to stop their movement, promising in exchange that the government won’t take any retaliatory measure against the students and that it will set up “concrete measures likely to promote democracy and the law, and to fight against corruption”.

The students’ leaders answer has been the starting point for an agreement in 12 points, a kind of register of grievances, which has been passed on to the Popular national assembly, the Council of state and the Central committee of the party, then published in extenso by the “China Daily”. This manifesto for democracy proposed a negotiation based on the choice of the delegates, the equality of speech time between both sides, the live coverage of the debates by the Chinese and foreign media, etc. In one word all the things that constitute the basis of the classic program of a democratic bourgeois opposition. The students’ leaders recalled there again that it was neither about deviating from the socialist system, nor to question the very foundations, which it is based on.

It’s when the proletarians showed the most massively their potential force, when the government tried to put pressure to calm down the agitation (demonstrating practically its fear that the movement plunging into an unfavourable balance of forces), that the organized and controlled leadership of the movement issued a register of grievances asking to have a fully-fledged place in this bloody system.

But at the same time, two millions of proletarians demonstrated in Beijing demanding the resignation of Deng Xiao Ping and Li Peng. One hundred thousand people marched in Shanghai, and thousands of others in Shengdu, Wuhan Qingdao, etc. What clearly shows the spreading of the movement, and not its limitation to the alone Tian An Men Square, so much covered by the bourgeois media.

As for the government, it got militarily ready and massed troops around the capital city. However, some regiments (among other the 38th, which was in direct and continuous contact with proletarians) refused to follow the orders.

At any moment the struggle oscillated between, on one hand, the affirmation of the proletariat’s interests, against democracy, against the reforms, against the system that makes them die; and on the other hand, the submission to the bourgeoisie’s ideologies, while the proletarians relayed all the bloody flags (equality, rights, liberty, democracy) that excluded them from the struggle for their own class interests.

With strong demagoguery, Li Peng, and then Zao Ziyang (it was necessary for the bourgeoisie to play all its cards, the most conservative as well as the most radical ones) went at the hunger strikers’ bedside, abjuring them to stop their movement for “the unity of the country”. It’s indeed when the government insisted on the economic consequences of the crisis in order to stigmatise the gravity of the situation, that the students announced the stoppage of the hunger strike and invited the workers to stop the striking movement.

Moreover to demonstrate the pacifist intentions of the movement, the students’ organizations delegates called the proletarians to give back the weapons in their possession and to “commit themselves to remain worthy and responsible in the confrontation with the authorities”!!! These delegates, real unionists, were those who constantly braked, sabotaged and broke the struggling movement. It’s them, these good democrats, who therefore disarmed the struggling proletarians, leaving them powerless facing the bourgeois military terror. It’s also them who handed over to the cops (and therefore sentenced to death!) the few proletarians who smudged the portrait of the bourgeois Mao, on Tian An Men Square, action that concentrated in itself a perspective of qualitative rupture with democracy in China, and the Maoist circus which it is decorated with.

More and more, the bourgeoisie was consolidating its power. Li Peng proclaimed the martial law in Beijing, while claiming to want to continue to discuss, and transported more reliable troop to the capital. Then, he issued an appeal for the troops “to punish the agitators who set up unofficial organizations, and to force the students to go back unconditionally to their campus”. But very quickly the troops met proletarians’ cordons inviting them to fraternize and forbidding the military trucks progression.

When Li Peng issued his ultimatum, asking for the evacuation of Tian An Men Square for fear of military intervention, millions of proletarians everywhere in China went on taking to the streets, defying the martial law.

The army was sent for restoring law and order, and to suppress “agitation”, but this army was divided: facing a caste of officers enjoying the biggest privileges, the rank and file had no motivation and was badly fed, lodged in precarious conditions and didn’t enjoy any respect, hence its kindliness in relation to the movement. Everywhere, fraternizations between “soldiers” and “civilians” took place, uniting in the struggle proletarians having the same interests.

It was for fear that the desertions within the army and the scenes of fraternization increase that the 38th regiment, too much in contact with demonstrators, has been carefully standing at ease, and its major has been dismissed, whereas the 27th corps, more reliable marched into battle. Traffic in Beijing was practically forbidden thanks to roadblocks made of busses, lorries, trucks, but also thanks to the intervention of great floods of people who deployed to forbid the possible advance of the troops. Hundreds of demonstrators thus prevented thousands of armed soldiers to get into position, who reached the station with special trains. Fifteen thousands proletarians also blocked a convoy of 41 trucks loaded with infantrymen 17 km to the East of Tian An Men Square, forcing them to turn back after scenes of fraternization. Similar scenes took place in the suburbs; some officers also refused to use strong-arm methods. Finally, the army declared to be ready “to act without hesitation in conformity with the martial law”. Manhunt against proletarians was open; the slaughter could start!

June the 3rd, the army clashed with proletarians. Thousands of soldiers without weapons were booed by more or less one million of proletarians who took to the streets and resisted. In Nanjing a demonstration of 100,000 people took place to protest against the assault of Beijing. In Shanghai proletarians set up barricades and blocked buses. Demonstrations took place in most cities of the provinces. There were confrontations opposing different military units, some hostile and other favourable to the repression.

In order to limit fraternizations, the troops in charged of repression came from all the regions of China (preventing practically the fraternization between soldiers and proletarians, while not speaking the same language) and intervened after having been deprived of information during two weeks. The 27th corps responsible for the repression clashed with the hostile 38th body that tried to oppose the massacre.

Soldiers deserted their ranks, joined struggling proletarians and used together their weapons, and columns of tanks and military trucks were completely burned. The struggle spread to the all China. Riots broke out almost everywhere: e.g. in Wuhan, Shanghai, Harbin, Shengdu. The power retaliated while launching denunciatory campaigns at the television, while using pictures of demonstrations. All Beijing was under army control. The repression got organized, and arrests increased. Borders were sealed.

Several thousands of proletarians were shot dead, crushed under tanks, sentenced by special courts and sent to rot in jails and other rehabilitation camps.

3. Conclusion

1. The origin of revolts in China directly stood in the context of world capitalist crisis and proletariat’s reactions facing the productive forces restructuring this crisis imposed everywhere. Faced with reforms and violent decrease of living conditions imposed by the exploitation forces, the proletariat rose up spontaneously almost everywhere in China, attacking private property and its direct defenders –government’s representatives at the time and local repression forces-. These struggles started first in the provinces and were the fact of the whole of “categories” of the proletariat. It was only subsequently that things also changed in the capital and there, democracy got quickly the upper hand over the struggle of the proletariat.

The limitation of this spontaneous uprising stood in the lack of organizational consequence angry proletarians showed. Workers didn’t try to endow themselves with an organized centre capable to make emerge a direction to the struggle, in terms of generalization of the uprising, and in terms of affirmation of the autonomous perspectives of the proletariat too.

2. As in most revolts that shook the world the years before, the struggling proletariat in China didn’t succeed in setting up an organized centre, bearing its own flags and affirming its class autonomous interests. From then on, democracy filled this emptiness. In Beijing the situation was more under control, because the democratic forces were much more centralized and concentrated; and therefore Beijing substituted, as a spectacle, as formal centre, as media reference, etc., for the struggling movements in the provinces.

From then on, democracy disarmed the proletariat, and this according to three axes:

* globally, the media started an international disinformation that, while geographically unbalancing the events around Beijing, also politically buried the struggles against reforms and the proletariat’s attacks against property, in the pacific demand of political reforms of the capitalist management system, demand which were formulated by a democratic opposition gathered around the “students’ coordination”.

* the transformation as a material force of this bourgeois disinformation, combined with the weakness of the proletariat in the affirmation of its own purposes, gave the leadership of the struggle to this democratic opposition, mainly under shape of students’ leaders regrouped in the “students’ coordination”; it’s this coordination that disarmed the proletariat in the literal sense.

* Deng Xiao Ping’s government, from the most reformists to the most conservatives, prepared the repression while lulling the proletariat into the negotiation with democratic opponents and mustered during this time reliable forces to crush the movement.

3. The world remained without news of what happened in the provinces where (if we can believe the bourgeois media), the reactions of anger were conditioned only by what was going on in Beijing. In the same time, the crucial moment on Tian Year Men Square happened when, a few days before the massacre, the “students’ coordination” asked the demonstrators on the square to give the weapons back (1). In front of that, the proletariat generally submitted and, rather than to organize themselves against those who disarm them (government and opposition as well), most of them obeyed the democrats’ orders. It was precisely the crucial moment and everything was decided. A few hundreds of proletarians, organized and determined to fight with the bourgeoisie in all its forms, could have allowed a qualitative leap in the organization of the resistance against the repression, about the armed struggle on the spot, while associating and directing millions of people ready to fight in Beijing, as well as about the organization of the prevailing defeatism within the army. This dynamics of centralizing the struggles and the slap it implied for the bourgeois forces regrouped in Beijing, would probably have allowed in return a generalization, a junction with the movement in the whole of China. But the proletariat didn’t take the initiative; it let itself be ingenuously disarmed while contemplating the Statue of Liberty erected on the square, rather than to follow the example of the few courageous comrades who had started throwing pots of paint on the portrait of Mao.

4. It’s in the defeat that the proletariat re-emerged. Facing the army that intervened to finish off the job of those who had disarmed the workers, the proletariat tried to arm; it fraternized with deserters, executed its assassins and postponed several times the massacre. But it was too late: it was not anymore the moment to consider the possibility to reverse the balance by power. The proletariat has not been defeated as the army began to shoot –on the contrary, on this occasion it showed all its potential of fighting spirit-, but rather when it became the “partisan” of democracy and freedom, supporting the left wing of bourgeoisie in its efforts to liberalize the market.

The bourgeoisie in the government in China overcame very momentarily. Like the thousands of other tyrants in history and who imagined remaining eternally in control, Deng Xiao Ping didn’t overcome the hate of those he submitted. But the state in China was much more than the Deng Xiao Ping faction, and if he already sank into oblivion, other factions will impose themselves to preserve capitalism. It’s probably among those who, within the “students’ coordination”, swore their full allegiance to capital and its democracy while ensuring the disarming of the proletariat, that the bourgeoisie recruited its future managers.

In this way, more and more, with the generalization of parliamentary democracies everywhere in the world, with the world restructuring of productive forces and the exacerbation of competition it produces, with the deepening of the world economic crisis and the wars that will be organized to solve it, and therefore with this every time more obvious universalization of the conditions in which the proletariat is exploited, in this way the biggest revolutionary deflagration that the world will know is brewing and sharpening. But before this, the proletariat should necessarily go through a stage of international discussion around the lessons its history allowed to formulate, and to point out democracy –in all its form-, as its worst enemy.

May it remembers then that in China, and more especially in Beijing, in 1989, Democracy took the appearance of these students’ democratic leaders who, as good pupils of capitalism organized in the “students’ coordination”, broke the proletariat’ fervour, from the dawn of the struggling movement till its bloody crushing. Already on April the 23rd, at the very beginning of the movement in Beijing, while at the end of the afternoon hundreds of proletarians assaulted the People’s Palace, headquarters of the popular national assembly, pointing thus out spontaneously the mortal enemy of communism, the students’ leaders intervened to prevent such an action to be achieved. On Tian An Men Square these same democrats organized the maintenance of law and order in direct and admitted collaboration with the cops of Deng Xiao Ping, flooding the demonstrators with nonviolent propaganda, giving in the weapons present on the square to the authorities and even going until handing over to the police the workers who smudged the portrait of the bourgeois Mao! Death to Democracy!

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