Tian An Men Is Over but for Democracy’s Lament : China: The last significant sanction has fallen, and recognition of students’ aspirations is no closer to official policy than before.

Deng Xiaoping got away with it. Tian An Men, that is. Last week, the World Bank resumed lending to Beijing, a $114-million loan to help it improve the technology in its rural industries. The last significant remaining U.S. sanction against the Chinese government for the massacre of unarmed protesters on June 4, 1989, was quietly lifted.

This is not surprising. Even when it was abundantly clear what had happened on Beijing’s streets that summer day, George Bush refused to concede that Deng--”my old friend”--had any hand in the atrocities witnessed by television viewers around the world. Only after the din of public and congressional outrage penetrated the Oval Office did the President capitulate and announce a series of actions intended to express the Administration’s disapproval of Beijing’s barbarities.

None of these sanctions--a ban on high-level contacts, bans on military sales--were ever seriously adhered to. Military sales, though still banned, were all completed by the time of the massacre; exchanges between senior military officials remain on hold, although CIA monitoring stations aimed at the Soviet Union from western China are still operating. Only in the case of World Bank loans did the White House persevere.

Then Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Bush suddenly needed China’s vote on the U.N. Security Council. The last serious sanction was lifted.

If there is any doubt about Beijing’s smugness over neatly foiling the Administration’s half-hearted remonstrations over Tian An Men, Qian Qichen, the foreign minister, lays it to rest in an article in the magazine “Seek Truth,” appearing this week. In it, Qian observes, correctly, that “China was not forced to submit, nor was it isolated.” Not coincidently, Qian’s bluntness came just three days before the scheduled arrival of Richard Schifter, the assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, a trip whose purpose Washington has chosen not to reveal. As Qian makes clear, though, the visit will be both without purpose or effect.

It is forgotten now, but when the true dimensions of Tian An Men were finally apparent, Bush blurted out to White House reporters that there could not be normal relations between Beijing and Washington “until there’s a recognition . . . of the validity of the students’ aspirations.”

Bush’s ambassador to Beijing, James Lilley, gave us some sense of what that recognition might mean. While in Seattle last week, he was confronted with protesters demonstrating against the Administration’s expedient accommodations with Beijing. Lilley became enraged at the protest and shouted “coward” at the protesters.

Among them was a Tibetan, to whom Lilley screamed, “You should go back to China and serve China.” Perhaps it might have occurred to the ambassador that this Tibetan might not so easily accept the notion that China has any right to occupy Tibet, any more right, indeed, than does Iraq to occupy Kuwait. Perhaps it slipped the ambassador’s mind that China’s treatment of Tibetans and Tibetan culture has been something less than benign.

In China, there has been something less than recognition of “the students’ aspirations.” Some of the country’s best-known intellectuals, journalists and student dissidents are being put on trial. Political propaganda is running full tilt.

The Chinese people saw on a recent front page of the People’s Daily an article admonishing them to address each other as “comrade.” No longer were they to use the bourgeois affectations “Miss,” “Mister” and “Mrs.”

This article has provoked a great buzz among China watchers and general derision by the Chinese public. Attention to forms of address, to the propriety of names, is not just a peculiar whim of China’s geriatric leadership. Confucius, in a chapter on the nature of government in his Analects, told his disciples:

“If names are not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language is not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success . . . . Therefore, a superior man (Confucius’s term for a man of honor, a gentleman if you will) considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect.”

One of the remarkable accomplishments of Mao Zedong’s revolution was to rupture that relationship, to create a language that distorted and perverted any description of underlying reality. Since his death in 1976, the use of comrade--introduced after the revolution as a way of extirpating the excrescences of bourgeois social pretensions--has diminished markedly, particularly in urban areas and especially among younger people, those who attended universities since the helmsman’s death.

Using Miss or Mister is now seen as more modern, more cosmopolitan, more a reflection of a national effort to discard the wreckage of socialism. Cui Jian, a rock singer who greatly irritated cultural mandarins by setting revolutionary anthems to rock ‘n’ roll rhythms, used comrade to refer to the Communist bureaucrats who ran things in China: “Twenty years and all I’ve learned is patience, holding on. No wonder all the comrades said my head was in the clouds . . . .”

For the Chinese people, the latest injunction is received as nothing more than a laughable last gasping of a leadership foundering in its effort to retrieve a vanquished ideological purity. Slogans, intended to promote greater productivity and enduring fealty to the communist cause, ceased working decades ago; the notion that reverting to comrade will somehow resurrect the carcass of socialism is a joke. Comrades, as the people of Beijing well know, are the bad guys.

For those who try to sort out the inner workings of China’s polity, a task that has become far more arcane in the 18 months since Tian An Men, the pounding of ideological war drums provides a glimpse into the leadership struggles now consuming the coterie of doddering men who wield power in China. What it means, many observers believe, is that the segment of the old guard that fusses over cleansing ideological linen has become alarmed at the strength of popular resistance to the crackdown on free expression and behavior following Tian An Men. The propaganda machine--newspapers, television, movies--has inundated the Chinese with one message: Socialism is the only path for China, regardless of what happened in Eastern Europe and what is happening in the Soviet Union.

By now, the Chinese, schooled in the ways of party proselytizing, are inured to such message-mongering. Little posters denouncing the regime still appear on lampposts, samizdat manuscripts slip hand to hand, state secrets dribble into the Hong Kong press. Crushing this resistance, even the party’s rulers realize, is no easy task. Forcing people to address each other as comrade begins crushing this resistance by dictating the words that come out of their mouths.

Or so the old guard thinks. As Confucius noted, correct names accord with the truth. In the minds of the old guard, calling someone a comrade makes them a comrade.

Another element in this approach has been the recent effort to fan the flames of enthusiasm for something called “Chen Yun Thought.” Chen Yun, now 85 and visibly enfeebled, was the architect of China’s command planning economy in the 1950’s. His works, among the most tedious collection of writings ever assembled, are distinguished by the repeated insistence that any aspect of the economy that relies on market mechanisms must be subordinated to state control. Raising the banner of state planning and control in economic policy is essential for a leadership intent on maintaining the last remaining significant dike of socialism.

But, as with most things in China, there is more to the publicizing of Chen’s dry texts than meets the eye. Indeed, as much as this tocsin sounds for creeping capitalism, it also signals Beijing’s discomfit with parts of the empire going their own way, with the possibility of regional disintegration. A major slice of China’s southland--Guangdong, Fujian and Jiangsu provinces--has economically outstripped the rest of the country, including the north and Shanghai. This region, which has thrived to some extent on foreign investment, particularly from Hong Kong, has relied on private enterprise and free marketing for economic growth.

China’s provincial leaders are not enamored of Beijing’s efforts to extract more revenue from them, to impose its notion of economic wisdom or to control provincial jurisdiction over their own foreign trade and investment. Partly in response to this, Beijing this year shuffled nearly all senior provincial military leaders; it has had less success in rearranging provincial governments.

A reflection of this provincial stubbornness has been the inability of the old men running the country to gather together the party’s Central Committee--the somewhat broad-based ruling body of the party. Although it is impossible to know precisely why this body has not met--something it should have done last month--it is thought that provincial party leaders simply refuse to acquiesce to Beijing’s demands to buckle under to central control. A vague announcement last month that the Central Committee is to meet before year-end gives no hint of whether Beijing will be able to work its will. But most observers are betting on the provinces retaining their relative autonomy.

The Chinese government, meantime, will insist that everyone is a comrade, and the Administration will insist that those who aren’t, are cowards.