Jan Wong concludes, in her book
Red China Blues, that China’s answer to its ugly past of feudalism and revolutions may be through its burgeoning middle class. Though I believe Wong is not trying to be prophetic, her conclusion already has precedent for the following reason.
Wong, of course, by the 90s, had finally seen the light, although it took a lot of deprogramming in the form of gunfire, death, misery, etc. to free her and all her comrades from that utopian-workers’ nightmare. It also took time for a change: that with all the intelligentsia and bourgeois “running dogs” out of the way at the height of the Cultural Revolution, another generation of time would pass before the new Children of China appeared on the scene, in the form of students with new ideals, not unlike young Jan Wong of Montreal.
In looking into her past, she points out why she left and, much later, why she wanted to return to the West. She points out the bourgeois lifestyle she left in the West, and all that which she later realized she had taken for granted. What she did not realize when young was that of the sacrifice it took to make it in the New World, and the reasons for wanting to leave the world from which her forebears had left in the first place. She was to find out the truth, of course.
Yet, with all the success stories of so many other overseas Chinese who had made it in other lands, it finally took a massacre and a landscape of suffering to bring her to realize that what she once considered ideal, to be seriously flawed. The fact that Taiwan, by 1989, was well on its way to democracy, launched by a clamorous middle class, was given no mention in her book.
By the time Deng had come to power in 1976, Taiwan was already experiencing exponential growth. Though still under martial law, Taiwan’s people were not starving and far from it. In comparison, China was reeling from starvation, as pointed out by Wong. Deng was not being so creative in establishing reform, I think; he was simply envious of the fact that another system had one-upped him. He was a reactionary.
Of course, looking back at the modern history of Taiwan, its rise to democracy did not come without its own trials (2/28 massacre; Mei Li Dao incident, 1978). Indeed, it took 24 years of American economic aid, which began in 1964, for Taiwan to bring itself to pull itself up by its democratic bootstraps. By the time of the lifting of martial law (1988), the middle class, already solidly established, was voicing its democratic aspirations with subsequent, resounding success, and was a model of the future for those yearning for democracy on Mainland China and those who died dreaming it at Tiananmen.
