Under Western eyes - democracy movement in China

National Review, June 30, 1989

IT LOOKED too good to be true, and that, in the short run, is what it turned out to be. The upswelling in Tiananmen Square, with its Statue of Liberty placards, its signs in English for the benefit of the global village, the earnest exhortations to bewildered soldiers to behave like a People's Army, became, in a night, shattered barricades, burnt-out buses, a litter of broken bodies on streets swept by a leaden wind. The tale is not ended, but the massacre was the end of the beginning. When its anniversary becomes, as William Safire predicted, a national holiday, the students and bystanders who were cut down will be its martyrs.

The students' idealistic faith in democracy was inspiring. It does not oblige us to respond with a parallel idealism which, given our longer experience of free political life, would be deluded. There has been a good deal of loose talk in recent years, from conservatives as much as liberals, about democracy "sweeping" the earth. We must do democracy-more accurately, freedom-the justice of understanding it better than that. Tyranny, which is simple, can sweep into power quite suddenly; cf. the rise of the happily late Ayatollah. The road to secure democratic freedom is hard.

It may also be long. To take the long view for a moment, as the Chinese are said to do, the student strike lasted seven weeks before its first stage was suppressed, at a cost of thousands of lives. In the mid nineteenth century, the Taiping rebellion lasted 17 years, and cost thirty million lives-after which the dynasty it sought to topple held on for another halfcentury. There is a lot of ruin in a nation, said Adam Smith-by which he meant that rulers can make a lot of mistakes before the final, fatal one.

This does not mean that, in the meantime, the regime will ever be able to regain its popular standing. Maoism was disgraced by the Cultural Revolution, and abandoned by Deng Xiaoping. Deng's dictatorial pragmatism has now been disgraced in turn. The peers and friends of the slain students are unlikely to forget or forgive June 4, however long they must live under those who gave the orders. It is in the interest of the United States to give these Chinese, the cadres of tomorrow, every opportunity to experience the freedoms that were flouted that night: by studying here, by enjoying whatever commercial activity they can at home.

This is one reason why the reaction to the Administration's reaction-an impatience with White House caution, shared by Jesse Helms and Stephen Solarzwas wrong-headed. [See also "On the Right," p. 63.] We could cheer lustily from the sidelines (with no power to enter the game ourselves), which would ensure that the Chinese would be closed off from the outside world, at least our part of it.

The other reason caution is called for has to do with our own security. We concluded, 14 years ago, a war in Vietnam we had entered out of fear of Chinese expansionism. The fear was not unrealistic. China, despite its weakness, is the third power in the world, the second power in the unfree world. For ten years, China and the Soviet Union stood side by side in the world's broils. For thirty something, they have been distant. There was a time we could face down the two of them together. That time is past. The Administration was right to do nothing in moralizing haste that it would repent at leisure.

In the interval between the time these words are written and the time they are read, the Chinese situation may have unraveled to such an extent that American analyses must be reworked. The guiding principles will remain, however. The Chinese government, out of its folly and addiction to despotism, has gotten itself into its present fix. It, and the Chinese people, must work themselves out of the wreckage. We are the friends of the aspirations for freedom in China as elsewhere-the guarantors only of our own.