Harvest of Brutality

In the end, the old men who cling to power in China could think of no better way to deal with six weeks of popular clamor for change than by ordering the army to turn its machine guns and tanks against the protesters. The ensuing slaughter in the streets of Beijing has appalled the world and quite probably severed the final cords of respect linking China’s ruled with their rulers. The students and their supporters who demonstrated in and around Tian An Men Square had sought only modest legal and political reforms. A divided regime answered them first with patronizing equivocation, then with threats, finally with brutal repression. It was the response of men who remember the past all too well but who lack any relevant vision of the future. It was a response of a kind that invites open rebellion.

At no point throughout the long demonstrations did the protesters ever attack the unique authority claimed and exercised by the Communist Party. While there was much talk of the need for more democracy--if little clarity or agreement about just what that means--there were no demands for a multiparty system that, as in Hungary and Poland, could in time lead to the electoral replacement of the Communist regime. Instead there were calls for a freer press, for curbs on rampant official corruption and nepotism, for the regime to pay more attention to what the students and the masses want. This was hardly a radical, let alone a counter-revolutionary program. Yet Deng Xiaoping, his fellow ruling octogenarians and their proteges chose to respond to it virtually as an insurrection that threatened national chaos.

The decision to bring the full weight of state power to bear came only after an evident power struggle in the party’s upper ranks, the full nature and extent of which remain uncertain and perhaps still inconclusive. For now, obviously, the hard-liners have carried the day, invoking vicious, relentless and shameful force in an effort to reassert unquestioned control. But whether they can maintain control, as Deng’s health deteriorates and popular outrage swells, is another matter.

The regime has claimed from the beginning and claims now that only a handful of troublemakers were involved in the calls for a freer society. That attempt to minimize the depth of the protests fools no politically aware person in China. What has taken place, what still goes on, is a mass protest triggered by frustration and anger over economic and political conditions. Even the military is now seen to be less than wholly on the side of those who would have it turn its guns on the people. Deng and the others who made the decision to smash the protests have--perhaps--got what they wanted in the short term. But the costs of this morally odious action to China’s stability, to its international standing, to its prospects for future development are certain to prove enormous.