How the Chinese Communist Party Convinced the World to Accept It

The concept of “maintaining stability” that has come to legitimize and even define the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is a recent invention.

The term “maintain social stability” (“weihu shehui wending”) began appearing more in official and academic output after 1989, a result of the political line set down by Deng Xiaoping in the wake of the Tiananmen Square massacre: that the Communist Party at the helm equals stability, and as such, only the Party can ensure China’s growth. The newspaper database begins in 2000. The drop in academic references to the term during the time that China was hosting the Olympics may have been due to Party commissars turning off the output tap, or a bug in data collection. In aggregate, the graphs demonstrate the focus put on propagation of this concept after 1989. (Credit: Diana Hubert/The Epoch Times) Data sources: Eastview China Academic Journals Full-text Database, OriProbe People's Daily Database, Eastview China Core Newspaper Full-text Database

A word used retrospectively to justify a bloody crackdown has become a commonsense platitude used to explain today’s China, accepted alike by American businessmen and politicians and China’s educated young people.

The concept of “maintaining stability” legitimizes and even defines the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), including its vast propaganda machine and the apparatus of physical repression that it has become infamous for.

But the idea is a relatively recent invention. None other than Deng Xiaoping—the Party leader who emerged to lead China out of the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, opened up its economy, then ordered the Tiananmen Square massacre—came up with it.

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“The idea of maintaining stability came after 1989. It was first in one of Deng Xiaoping’s internal talks,” says Chen Kuide, the editor of China In Perspective and former head of the Princeton China Initiative.

The editorial where the need for “stability” first appears was published on the front page of the Party mouthpiece, the People’s Daily, on Nov. 11, 1989. The country was still reeling from the June 4 protests and massacre, which had nearly toppled the Party. The piece, titled “Even More Resolutely Implement the Policy of Consolidating Control and Deepening Reform,” presented the updated Party dogma to the public for the first time.

“Currently the most important thing is to maintain the stability of the country. Economic development requires stability. ... Comrade Deng Xiaoping has pointed out many times that if there is no stable political climate, nothing can be done.”

A soon-to-be-famous sentence followed, for the first time in print: “Stability overrides everything.”

Minting a Term

The phrase can also be translated as “Stability suppresses everything.” This double meaning has been regularly pointed out by dissidents, who are thrown into jails or labor camps for saying or writing things that the Communist Party deems a threat to its “stability,” however defined.