COMMENTARY / EXCERPTS : A Mighty Blow for Friendly Persuasion

The drama of China and the Soviet Union today lies in the tension between liberalization and democratization. The drama yet to come is the conflict between the dream of democratization and its achievement.

Liberalization is what an authoritarian system’s leaders concede to prevent democratization. China’s students, and the others demonstrating in Beijing and other cities, ask for democratization, and China’s situation has probably now gone beyond the point where further liberalization by the leadership could successfully deflect these demands. The government no longer appears to possess the ability to reimpose itself. Even if it managed to convince the army to attack the demonstrators, its authority has been wasted.

The students condemn corruption, social inequalities, political compromise. But inequality and compromise are essential ingredients, and corruption an inescapable one, in the reforms Deng Xiaoping has been carrying out in China--to the extravagant praise of the same foreign commentators who now celebrate the students. These are the reforms which have made China’s economic progress possible and presaged today’s events.

Twenty years ago another generation of students was against just the same three things: compromise, inequalities, corruption. They called themselves the Red Guard and demanded “extermination” of the “devils and demons of revisionism.” They had a leader; they were driven by the messianism of the aging Mao Tse tung.

There is no Mao today, thank God. There also is no evident force capable of taking the place of a ruined government and producing a constructive solution. There is messianism, unfocused. All that has happened is now to produce a marvelous abstraction, a shining, beautiful something. It is wonderful, alluring--but no one should be surprised if it ends badly.