China’s Crackdown

“When you undertake to run a revolution,” remarked the Marquis de Mirabeau nearly two centuries ago, “the difficulty is not to make it go; it is to hold it in check.” Substitute the idea of reform for revolution, and you have the problem facing China or any other authoritarian state that chooses to allow experiments with reform. The hard part comes in keeping things from getting out of hand.

The pro-democracy marches that have been staged in the last month or so by students in Peking, Shanghai and other cities have fallen well short of being a mass movement, but they do signal a more worrisome show of overt dissent and demand for political change than China’s leaders had perhaps bargained on. And so at the highest levels the decision has apparently been made: While economic reforms are a good thing and will continue, the “bourgeois liberalization” represented by calls for greater democracy will no longer be tolerated.

The crackdown, now that it has come, can be seen as having been inevitable. The demands for greater intellectual freedom that have been at the heart of the student protests pose a direct challenge to orthodoxy, and since orthodoxy is equated with the supremacy and control of the Communist Party there was little doubt that sooner or later the party, in its own interests, would feel compelled to suppress that challenge.

After intensive internal debate, China’s leaders are trying to move their country into the modern era by giving certain Western economic ideas a chance to prove themselves. But it is one thing to adopt reforms aimed at achieving greater economic efficiencies; those in power, after all, can always stretch the definition of socialism to embrace decentralization and encouragement of some private-sector economic activities. It is something quite different to allow Western political ideas to gain currency, for those ideas remain utterly incompatible with the rigid Marxist-Maoist order of things.

What seems obvious is that the crackdown that has again come won’t really resolve the problem that it is meant to deal with. The reformist impulse, once released, doesn’t stay confined within neat, officially approved categories. It is a certainty that, sooner or later, those who will be the next generation of China’s leaders will again demand greater freedom of thought, and again challenge the governing orthodoxy.