TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/061989/06198900.052

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 7.2 KB | 147 lines

                                                                                COMMUNISM, Page 10

COVER STORIES: Defiance


By Strobe Talbott


    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.