Weak at Home and in the World : China’s People and Its Stature Will Take Years to Mend

The world’s attention has been riveted these past few days on the government atrocities against the people of Beijing. Expressions of outrage inevitably are accompanied by questions about what produced this astonishing resort to military force, what this means for China, and how it affects American interests.

Military forces were ordered into the city on the pretext of “putting down chaos and re-establishing order.” In reality, as I saw in Beijing during the days leading up to the carnage, it was the military invasion that itself created the chaos and disorder. The city had been peaceful and calm until the troops poured in during Saturday afternoon and evening.

Why the attack occurred remains a mystery. The government had pursued a “wait them out and grind them down” strategy toward the students and their numerous supporters. Gradually, the Communist Party had mobilized the Chinese media to present a harsh view of the students’ activities, and increasingly the government turned to bribing peasants and factory workers to show at least outward support for the authorities. Nobody thought the government was gaining real popularity, but the situation had become calm and the students were giving up in frustration. Indeed, as of late last week almost all Beijing students had withdrawn from Tian An Men Square; most of those remaining were from other provinces.

Fundamentally, therefore, this tragedy demonstrates the limitations of the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. Deng has long been lionized in the Western press for pursuing economic reform and for opening China to the outside world, and he deserves enormous credit for his accomplishments in these areas. But Deng changed Chinese society without being willing to cope with the consequences of those changes. Like South Korean and Taiwan leaders of a decade ago, he thought that economic modernization need not lead to political accommodation. He was wrong, and his inability to understand the forces that he unleashed has now produced a totalitarian response that is a profound tragedy for China.

This terrible conflict between an aging and out-of-touch leadership and a society demanding major political reform will almost certainly continue producing political and social unrest during the next few years. The population is disillusioned and very angry--feelings not limited to the citizens of Beijing. The government itself is highly polarized, with many officials at all levels opposed to the current leadership.

The core problems that provided the initial tinder for this popular unrest are, unfortunately, becoming more intractable. A weakened government will find it nearly impossible to stop the corruption by officials that has caused so much resentment among the populace. A government that feels it is sitting on a social volcano will be unwilling to risk administering the harsh economic medicine necessary to curb the inflation that has fed discontent. In a fundamental sense, therefore, the Chinese government has been weakened by the events of the past six weeks, and it will take a long and painful process to reconstruct effective central control.

America has since the 1970s counted on having in Beijing a strong, stable, reform-minded and peaceable government. Recent events have substantially diminished the first three of these characteristics.

There will be at least three consequences of importance to us. The first has already been felt. Americans have traditionally cared deeply abut human rights and about the freedoms available to others. China’s turmoil has clearly diminished the level of political and social well-being of many of its citizens, and that is a loss for all of us.

American business will undoubtedly assign far greater political risk to China, and our economic involvement there will suffer. American trade and investment in China has been very substantial. Two-way trade in 1988 topped $13 billion, and we have more than $2 billion of direct investment there.

We have seen China as a key building block in constructing a stable and peaceful environment in Asia. Recent events, though, will upset a number of trends that we had applauded. The likelihood of a smooth transition to Chinese sovereignty over Hong Kong has been substantially diminished, and there will be increasing economic disruption and pressures from people in Hong Kong to obtain citizenship elsewhere as a consequence. The rapidly increasing contact between the mainland and Taiwan will probably also suffer, as will China’s ability to attract investment from Japan and South Korea. In short, China will for the next few years be less well integrated into the East Asian regional economic and political communities, and that is a loss for the Chinese, the region, and the United States.

The harsh repression has thus exacted an enormous cost both domestically and in China’s foreign affairs. The country has entered what will probably be a very difficult period of several years’ duration. Both in and out of China, the tragedy produced by an aging leadership unable to come to grips with the consequences of its own reform policies is hurting us all.