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Monday, Jun. 19, 1989

Communism: Defiance

One man against an army. The power of the people versus the power of the gun. There he stood, implausibly resolute in his thin white shirt, an
unknown Chinese man facing down a lumbering column of tanks. For a moment that will be long remembered, the lone man defined the struggle of
China's citizens. "Why are you here?" he shouted at the silent steel hulk. "You have done nothing but create misery. My city is in chaos because of you."

The brief encounter between the man and the tank captured an epochal event in the lives of 1.1 billion Chinese: the state clanking with menace,
swiveling right and left with uncertainty, is halted in its tracks because the people got in its way, and because it got in theirs.

Knowing something is not the same as watching it happen. There is nothing new in the proposition that Marxism is riven with contradictions as fatal to
the system as they are brutal to its subjects. For decades critics of Communism have been saying that the party has no legitimacy; that its claims of
representation are a tattered veil for its true function of repression; that for all their apparent obedience, passivity and discipline, many or even most of
the populace are not just unhappy but deeply angry and increasingly overt in their defiance.

Still, the seven-week-long student protest in Tiananmen Square hit with the impact of a revelation, especially since it coincided with a very different
sort of democratization taking place in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. While the leaders of China dithered over what to do about the students'
occupation of the political heart of the country, President Mikhail Gorbachev presided over the opening of a Congress whose members included purged
former comrades, dissident intellectuals and outspoken non-Russian nationalists. In Poland the first halfway-open election in four decades produced a
humiliating defeat for the Communist Party.

Whether the men in power were resisting the forces of democracy in China or trying to harness those forces in the Soviet Union and Poland, they could
not escape potent reminders of the most ominous and fundamental of all of Marxism's contradictions: the one between people power and the power
that Mao Zedong said comes from the barrel of a gun.

The unevenness of the match has always been obvious, and the outcome has been taken for granted. In a showdown between the rulers and the ruled,
the rulers would have their way. After all, it was a well-established truism of the 20th century that a Communist regime is a military regime in
disguise. The disguise came off in Hungary in 1956, in Czechoslovakia in 1968, in Poland in 1981 -- and in China last week.

Still, history seemed to be deviating from its script. The trade union founded by a spunky electrician won the election in Poland, but the military seemed
to stay in the barracks. The Soviet press blazoned news of violent ethnic unrest in Uzbekistan to a public it formerly kept in the dark about domestic
strife. And even in China, where old men reverted to the only kind of power they knew, there was at least the phantom suggestion of tanks against
tanks. But in the end, the name of the People's Liberation Army still turned out to be a cruel mockery.

It was as though everyone, whatever his assigned role, understood the larger meaning of the drama. Something is happening in the Communist world,
a revolt against the system. From the Baltic to the China Sea, people are straining against the confines of Communism, demanding a greater share in
the world's riches and a fair share in their own governance.

And so the unnatural act was the massacre on the square, not the peaceful democracy protests that preceded it. It was the party's attempt to reimpose
order that brought chaos to the world's most populous nation.

As the turmoil spread from Beijing to Shanghai to Guang-zhou to Xian to Chengdu, the shock waves reverberated throughout the Communist world.
Publicly the Poles congratulated themselves on the contrast between their political accomplishments and the calamity unfolding in China. But privately
many said they feared what they might yet have in common with the Chinese -- a system that has still to prove it can tolerate genuine democracy.

In the Soviet Union, the latest outbreak of ethnic unrest in Uzbekistan was a reminder of what may be the operative difference between Deng
Xiaoping's realm and Mikhail Gorbachev's: in the Middle Kingdom, things fall apart from the center outward, while in the U.S.S.R. it is the other way
around. Both face a common challenge in devising ways to meet the demands of their citizens.

It was a week that should concentrate the mind as never before on the real Communist threat: not conquest but collapse. Again the proposition is
familiar, but the confirmation by events that it may be true has the shock of an epiphany.
Throughout history, empires in their death throes have often caused as much ; trouble as when they were in the ascendant. What spasms of military
desperation might accompany the crumbling of the Soviet bloc? What if some new Chinese warlord in a breakaway province ended up with a few of
his country's nuclear-armed missiles?

It has been almost a given among experts for some time that part of the challenge to the U.S. and its allies is to bring global Communism in its decline
to a soft landing rather than let it crash and burn. American politicians and statesmen have understood as much, at least in theory. Ronald Reagan
spoke of Marxism as "inherently unstable" and doomed. But in the policies that went with this confident rhetoric, he, like his predecessors, concentrated
on the task of matching Communism's strength and deterring its expansion, not on the more subtle and relevant dilemma of coping with the
consequences of its weakness, decay and retrenchment.

George Bush seems to see the problem clearly. He has said that the industrialized democracies, led by the U.S., should move "beyond containment" and
"integrate the Soviet Union into the world order." But he has spoken of that opportunity -- which is really an obligation -- in the future tense, as
something we should think about now but do something about later, if current trends continue.

The work of reinventing Communism belongs to a new generation of party leaders who must first grasp what much of the world already knows: that
economic reform and political reform are impossible without each other. That generation, personified and led by Gorbachev, may have arrived at the
pinnacle of power in the Soviet Union. In China it is still waiting for Deng Xiaoping and his fellow aged revolutionaries to accept the judgment of that
lone, anonymous man in front of the tanks.

Last week's message was that the trends have continued long and conclusively enough to put new and primary emphasis on the management of
Communism's decline, perhaps its disintegration, certainly its transformation. We saw it coming. But that is different from seeing it happening, before
our eyes.

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