Not by Guns Alone

It now appears that the full weight of police state vengeance is about to fall on those brave Chinese who dared to challenge the rule and political vision of some of their country’s top leaders. The chilling rhetoric that always before has portended a new wave of repression--allegations of counterrevolutionary and anti-party conspiracies and calls for renewed class struggle--is again being heard. A lot of people, and not only students, stood up over seven weeks of protest to demand greater freedom and an end to official corruption. Through the fog of secrecy, distortions and lies that hangs over Beijing can be discerned grim signs that mass arrests of the protesters may now be under way.

The power struggle in the Communist Party’s hierarchy that was brought to a head by the popular clamor for reform thus seems to have been resolved. The victory of the hard-liners has been advertised with appearances on television by the aged and ill but still apparently paramount leader Deng Xiaoping and by Premier Li Peng, both of whom were shown congratulating the army units that murdered so many Chinese in the streets of Beijing. It has been heralded as well by the prominence suddenly given the little known Qiao Shi, the nation’s top secret policeman. The big loser seems to be party leader Zhao Ziyang, until a few weeks ago Deng’s heir-apparent but now probably fated to be reviled or worse because he sympathized with the calls for reform.

But the victory achieved by the defenders of the political status quo surely carries a heavy price. When the Peoples Liberation Army was ordered to turn its guns against the people, the moral authority of the Communist Party suffered an immense and perhaps irreparable blow. In China, now as before, there is no real political alternative to the party. But it’s clear that the political legitimacy of the regime--its claimed right to speak for and act in behalf of popular opinion and public welfare--is being doubted as never before.

The slaughter in Tien An Men Square reaffirmed Mao Tse-tung’s dictum that power grows out of the barrel of a gun. But economic growth and modernization can’t be ordered by the gun. They depend instead on policies that wisely mobilize resources, free up mass energies and give people the incentive to labor for an achievable better life. Deng and other economic reformers recognized this a decade ago when they began loosening crippling state controls over agriculture and later over parts of the urban economy. The result for most people was a dramatic improvement in the material conditions of life.

But the result, too, as history has always shown, is a spreading sense that just as economic subsistence is no longer accepted as enough, neither is a political and intellectual life limited by totalitarian proscriptions. It’s probably always been something of an overstatement to describe the Beijing protests as “pro-democracy.” But unmistakably they were pro-freedom, and while that goal may have to be deferred for now, it is a certainty that it will never be forgotten.