Question of Hu

Screenshot via ABC News, October 2023

I'll get to Carter in a moment.

But first I have a few words to say about Hu Yaobang, the popular general secretary of the Communist Party of China during the early parts of the Gaige Kaifang (Reform and Opening-Up) of the 1980s, when the real power in China was held by Deng Xiaoping from his shadowy perch as chair of the party's Central Advisory Commission. Hu really was pretty popular, in a way that hadn't been familiar in the Mao years (when being popular could get you disappeared, like Liu Shaoqi or Lin Biao), as an acknowledged architect of the government's move to what we call market socialism (and the CPC calls "socialism with Chinese characteristics"), especially among the people who stood to benefit the most from the reforms, such as university students; Deng didn't mind allowing him the credit for the hugely improving Chinese economy, perhaps because he also served as a lightning rod attracting the attention of Deng's enemies, the angry old Communists who saw the reforms as a political threat.

This became a big and problematic thing in 1986 and 1987, when students began agitating for political reforms in the context of a brutal 16% inflation rate and widely circulating stories of government corruption, particularly inside Deng's own family. The demonstrations began with students at the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, who demanded the right to nominate their own candidates for the National People's Congress instead of having to choose from a government-nominated slate, and spread from there to some of the most prestigious schools in the most important cities in regions across China: Shanghai, Tianjin, Nanjing, Kunming, Guangzhou, Beijing, and others.

The protests were not very well organized, and not especially successful, but they had an important consequence for Hu Yaobang, in that he failed to crack down on them and thence fell out of favor with Deng; that was more Opening-Up than Deng was prepared to put up with. Hu was pressured into resigning his power posts, though he kept his seat in the Politburo, and went into semi-retirement in the Zhongnanhai compound in Beijing, where he died of a heart attack suffered during a meeting on education reform, in April 1989, at the age of 73.

Hu Yaobang in the Communist redoubt at Yan'an, 1930s, via Wikipedia.

Hu's death was the signal for the events we all remember, starting with the students' successful demand that he be given a state funeral, leading to a memorial service in the Great Hall of the People on the west side of Tiananmen Square on April 22 and eventually to the occupation of the square by something like a million people demanding democratization, together with demonstrations in some 400 other cities, followed by the violent military move to disperse them, killing an undetermined number of persons (probably fewer than a thousand, but it remains unclear how many and under what circumstances—a lot of evidence suggests that the troops never fired directly on the crowd camped in the square). 

Those protests, in any case, brutally put down by the Tiananmen Massacre (whether it was actually in Tiananmen or not), failed politically too; Deng fired Hu's liberal-minded successor Zhao Ziyang and began instituting the system that has led China back to dictatorship-for-life (Xi Jinping has little in common with Mao Zedong, neither his murderous craziness nor his literary talent, but Chinese students from kindergarten to grad school are now required to study something called "Xi Jinping Thought" and refer to his accession to power as the "New Era",  and btw the economy is not doing so great).

What put me in mind of Hu Yaobang's death was a not exactly parallel event in the US last week, the death on December 29 of President Jimmy Carter, timed in such a way as to cast a shadow over the inauguration of Donald Trump as 47th president, in a way that seems to have infuriated Trump because it means some bad optics:

Sorry, Donald, I definitely want to see it, and I'm pretty sure I'm not alone. Better-behaved Democrats than me won't want to admit it, but I don't think I really care what they think. Let's say I love the America that gave us Jimmy Carter a lot more than I hate the America that gave us Donald Trump, and I'd like to be able to keep that in mind in this trying moment.

It's amusing to try comparing Carter to Hu because it's such an outlandish idea, but there really are some things you can say. First, both embodied a reaction to corruption: Hu (child of a poor peasant Hakka family from Hunan, who had to teach himself to read for lack of a school) for his bold attacks on the corruption of the "Crown Prince Party"; Carter (from a Georgia county so poor that he wasn't socially segregated as a child, though it was his family that owned the peanut farm) because he rose to national politics at the moment when unspeakable corruption in the Republican party was coming to the surface. And in the same way both were noted for a "common touch" distinguishing them from the norm of the political operatives. Finally, both were taken down in part for economic issues—inflation—they really weren't responsible for.

Love for Carter in the US population, as it's manifested itself in the last days, doesn't seem to be attached to his presidency at all, but to the nobility and generosity of his post-presidency, his devotion as an ex-president to housing the poor, preventing and eliminating horrible diseases worldwide, and promoting international peace and democracy.

I personally think he was a much better president than liberals and leftists generally suppose, and I've argued that before, not just because I'm a beneficiary of his mass pardon for Vietnam-era draft evasion. Labor historian Erik Loomis argues beautifully that he may not have been very good at presidenting (he couldn't get along with the overly political members of Congress, but could embrace terrible positions for political reasons), but that he was always a fundamentally good person in the ways his exemplary ex-presidency suggests, his worst fault as president being excessive honesty

Much of what Carter faced was an era where he was pretty clear-minded about America’s limitations, governing a nation angry at having those limitations exposed. Americans wanted to drive huge gas-guzzling vehicles, not having gas rationing plans, which Carter presented to Congress in 1979. His famous “malaise” speech from later that same year, based on our energy issues, but talking about the overall position of the United States at that time, was widely attacked. One might argue that Carter simply lacked the political skills to be an effective president. Terrible at messaging these issues and too honest for a cynical media, he struggled to connect with Americans. Perhaps a different politician could have taken on these issues more effectively, but we will ever know. In any case, he had so alienated Congress by that point that in May 1979, the House voted against giving Carter the authority to create a gas rationing plan; Carter responded by calling the vote “embarrassing” which did not help him mend those needed relations.

On other environmental issues, Carter was really great. His choice to lead the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, Eula Bingham, was outstanding and this was the only administration in which OSHA was really moving toward the activist force it could be. His 1978 declaration of a federal emergency at Love Canal and the Superfund program that followed was brilliant...

To which I would only add that his record on labor, health care, and industrial regulation (we owe him American craft beer!) also deserve a closer look.

I think it might make a difference if we mourned Jimmy Carter over the next few weeks in the way the Beijing students mourned Hu Yaobang: associating his loss with the unrealized promise he represented, the huge issues he fought for. I'll get back to Biden and Harris in a minute, but big demonstrations for Jimmy Carter. masses in the streets expressing their love, are what we need. If anybody else thinks so, keep me informed.