How Does a Nation Get From Communism to Something Better?

How does one transform a Marxist, totalitarian state into something else? It has never been done before voluntarily; no one quite knows. The tragedy in Beijing may be a harbinger of events to take place elsewhere as communist leaders from Moscow to Beijing to Budapest to Prague wrestle with the imperative of change. As this inherently unstable process unfolds, incumbent political leaders will attempt to maintain order, relying variously on the threat of force and the negotiated cooperation of opposition leaders.

So far so good in Poland. Realistic Communist Party leaders appear to understand that the specter of Soviet intervention that underwrote their clampdown nine years ago is no longer a viable threat. They seem inclined to accept last Sunday’s election as requiring a more generous accommodation with Solidarity than was foreshadowed in their earlier agreement. If so, it will be yet another tribute to the skill of Solidarity leader Lech Walesa and the courage of the Polish people. In Poland and throughout the communist world, popular pressure will increase and change will accelerate.

In China, the government’s use of the army will fail. One of the several ironies being missed in assessing China’s current woes is the effect of Deng Xiaoping’s gutting of the army in the 1980s--reducing it by 1 million men and turning many of the others into a public-works force. When he needed the army most, it couldn’t respond without making matters worse, such is the state of the Chinese military’s training, demoralization and divided loyalties. His former defense minister’s public stance against the use of force ought to have been a clear signal of trouble ahead for Deng.

China will spend the next weeks and months in traumatic introspection. The government will fall back on appeals to Chinese respect for order, but before long it will begin to respond to the students’ criticisms, perhaps by chipping away at a little of the widespread corruption, and by restoring one or two banished journalists to their posts.

But the country’s leadership will remain behind the curve. The students, buoyed by an emerging national tide of bitterness, latent in all communist states but catalyzed to action by last weekend’s slaughter, will ultimately bring down the government. It will be succeeded by an admixture of scholars, students, military officers, technocrats and other well-meaning people--people with little more than zeal to guide them on what will be a long march toward freedom. It will take a series of governments groping toward an uncertain future before life once more begins to get better in China.

In the end, the death rattle of totalitarianism in China is but a larger-scale and tragic expression of what can and likely will happen elsewhere in the communist world.

This historic tide reaching toward freedom reflects a massive awakening at all levels of most developing countries to the truism that pluralistic political systems and market-driven economies work better in providing for the needs of society--any society. Sensible, self-interested communist leaders are committing their governments to a change of course, being careful in the process to keep an eye on the old guard who have a vested interest in the status quo.

But there is no single formula for how to chart the course. Paul Kennedy defines the task as involving “a sophisticated balancing act, requiring careful judgments as to the speed at which these transformations can safely occur, the amount of resources to be allocated to long-term as opposed to short-term needs, the coordination of the state’s internal and external requirements, and . . . last but not least . . . the ways by which ideology and practice can be reconciled.”

In Poland, after a stunning national call for sweeping change through the ballot, it was Lech Walesa, the brilliant leader of that national victory, who cautioned Poles against succeeding too well too soon. Is there such an heroic figure in China? Should there be? Is China temperamentally more suited to revolution or evolution?

In China, beyond the daunting question of how to get from communism to something better, there is an even more fundamental question at hand: Is modern China governable at all? Scholars point to the impressive growth rates in gross domestic product over the last 10 years and to the probability that China will be the third-largest economy in the world by the turn of the century. But this assessment misses the point on four counts.

China’s remarkable growth rate--at least in agriculture, which accounts for most of it--is probably not sustainable. Bear in mind that China will be trying to feed 1.3 billion people--five times the population of the United States--on arable land roughly equal to that eastof the Mississippi River. And there are limits to the gains in agricultural productivity.

In business, there is a principle that asserts there is an optimal limit to the size of a firm. Is there not a sociopolitical equivalent to that axiom? Can one central government possibly make sensible, timely decisions for the governance of a society as large and as ethnically and socially diverse as China’s? Can effective decentralization be introduced and a semblance of national identity preserved?

What effect will there be on China’s development when foreign investors and importers ponder the implications of sustained turmoil? A major retrenchment seems likely, with very damaging effects on China’s pace of development.

Finally, concerning corruption: To what extent is better accountability among China’s officials--a key demand of the students--compatible with favoring family members, a time-honored tradition in China. Stated another way: To what extent can student demands for policing corruption be met--if at all?

These are questions that few Chinese and probably no Americans can sort out. If that’s true, what can we do to be constructive as China’s internal anguish worsens? Surely we must be true to our values. President Bush has properly condemned the government’s misguided use of brutal force. Those calls should be continued as the violence continues. Suspending military shipments, especially of the kinds of hardware that could be used against the people, also makes sense. Beyond these measures, one can imagine others that focus on isolating China, especially from institutions whose help it needs, such as the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and others. But it is also useful for us to recall that the students are the key influence for change. And, through our colleges and universities, we have contributed more than 100,000 of them to the struggle. Those students of freedom may be the best contribution we can make.