Ten days that shook the Middle Kingdom - democracy movement in China

T0 BEGIN BY PLAYING Devil's advocate, what the Chinese leadership ought to have done, having decided to disperse the student strikers occupying Tiananmen Square and much of central Peking, was to fly in troops ftom the remotest part of China, and with the least fellow-feeling for the demonstrators-fly them in, and let them set mercilessly to work. Indeed, it is a pity for the Chinese leadership in its extremity that it has so oppressed and abused Tibet all these years: a few loyal Tibetan regiments would be just the thing.

But of course the leadership has not acted in this way because it is not united-because there is, in effect, no leadership. So the world, watching the Chinese events unfold, has tried desperately to process: Zhao Ziyang (he's the pro-student leader) versus Li Peng (he's anti); Wuer Kaixi and Wang Dan, students (Wang, by the look of him, would be carded in any bar in America); student signs printed in English to catch the eye of CNN cameras, until the powers-thatunsteadily-be succeeded, finally, in turning the cameras off; Mikhail Gorbachev, world-class headline hound, first distancing himself from, then complimenting, the demonstrators; reports that Deng Xiaoping, on an inspection trip to assess the situation, was refused permission, by local authorities, to spend a night in Shanghai; thousands marching, in a typhoon, in hitherto apolitical Hong Kong, anxious over the fate of the country that will absorb them eight years hence; a student manifesto ending with the words, spoken two centuries and half a world away, "Give me liberty or give me death."

How much liberty they end up getting will depend on which leader best turns their protests to his own advantage. Increments of freedom are truly secured, not by waves of unrest from below, but in the interstices of circulating and superseding elites. There are two ways of looking at this truth. On the one hand, the path of political progress tends to be slower than many of the actors imagine. On the other hand, real advances do get made.

The quality that made Deng Xiaoping for several years a benefactor to his country is the same one that brought him to this pass. That quality was cynicism. Disgraced during the Cultural Revolution and forced to work in a tractor factory, Deng saw how the Chinese system worked, or didn't work, first hand. When the wheel turned and he came back to power in the late Seventies, he was determined to bring economic relief, however the ideologues might parse the wisdom of Mao. But he was determined to do it entirely on his terms, manifesting a perfect contempt for the rights or opinions of others. "We put Wei [Jingsheng] behind bars, didn't we?" he once asked, of the leader of a previous move for political loosening. "Did that damage China's reputation?" Now there are a million Weis in the street. The remark may go down alongside Stalin's query about the Pope's divisions in the annals of materialist political science. Deng's incarnation of Mammon was far more benign than the FiveYear Plan/Great Leap Forward Mammons of his predecessors. But he worshipped it, and only it, all the same. The upheavals were the just reward of his single-mindedness.

The other lesson of the Chinese drama is the racism of tbe West. Fifty years ago, racism was expressed in "No dogs or Chinese" signs in the Great Power enclaves in Shanghai. For the last 25 years, it has been expressed, far more damagingly, by the willingness of Westerners to see Chinese as totalitarians at heart. The fact that the new evaluation was ostensibly admiring did not make it, at bottom, any less contemptuous. Enlightened folk in the Sixties made a halfcamp cult of Mao, even as the Cultural Revolution raged. Scholars like Ross Terrill made careers of writing that whatever is Chinese, is right (they will wait until the present disturbances settle down, then swing behind the winner). The height of euphoria occurred when Richard Nixon towed seventy journalists to Peking for a love-feast. It turns out that Chinese enjoy having no say in their affairs about as much as Poles or Armenians. The desire for freedom, of course, is emphatically not the same thing as fulfillment. But the West owes China, in the West's own mind at least, an apology for so many years of continuing dehumanizing condescension.

COPYRIGHT 1989 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group