The repressive massacre on Tiananmen Square in June was an illuminating variation on a theme by Mao Zedong: "Power grows out of the barrel of a gun." That, too, is how power is maintained when the people rise against a self-perpetuating tyranny.
Whether the order to the People's Liberation Army (PLA) to fire on the people was given by the old and ailing Deng Xiaoping, or merely in his name by Premier Li Peng or the head of the security service, Qiao Shi, is of minor importance. The point is that in China, as in the Soviet Union, communism is in deep, perhaps terminal, crisis.
Elsewhere, too, the god of the godless has failed. In Poland, voters crossed out the names of party candidates to vote for Solidarity trade unionists. In Hungary, the party has embarked on the ultimately suicidal course of sharing power with noncommunists. But in the final analysis, the fate of communism will be determined by its two giant centers of power--China and the Soviet Union.
There is an enlightening contrast between Deng and Mikhail Gorbachev. The errors they have made are equally serious, but contradictory. The paramount leader of the People's Republic of China (PRC) freed the economy but banned free speech; the Soviet president failed to get the economy moving but allowed the critics to point out his failure. In both regimes the point at issue is the legitimacy of the Leninist party's monopoly of power. Can the Leninist state survive when the infallibility of the party is flagrantly in question? For 72 years in Moscow, for 40 years in Beijing, the party was always right--even when it was demonstrably wrong. When the "line" changed, as it often did, the advocates of the discarded line were in disgrace in varying degrees: at the least, censured; at worst, purged or shot as "antiparty elements."
There was a name for it: "democratic centralism." Having decided on the line, the party was supposed to present a united front. Unanimity guaranteed infallibility. It was the surest recipe ever devised for a permanent hold on power. Now, the method as well as the creed is endangered.
We have seen much of this tremendous drama at home on our television sets: deadly communal clashes in Nagorno-Karabakh; thousands of Muscovites demonstrating on Red Square in favor of the popular political maverick, Boris Yeltsin, who had won his seat to the new Congress of People's Deputies in a landslide only to be denied access by a cabal of party "conservatives"--until a self-effacing deputy gave up his own seat to him.
And more, much more: a once-famous world champion weightlifter, Yuri Vlaslov, now a deputy, denouncing the KGB. The current head of that dreaded organization, Vladimir Kryuchkov, calling for controls of the kind the U.S. Congress imposes on the CIA. The best-known dissident of them all, Andrei Sakharov, booed, heckled, and denounced by fellow deputies for accusing Soviet helicopter pilots of firing on Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan to prevent them from surrendering to the mujahideen.
Unprecedented though all of this was, it surely yielded pride of visual impact to those unforgettable scenes on Tiananmen Square--of students and workers by the hundred thousand peacefully demonstrating against their own government. Of a deeply embarrassed Deng losing
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