So, too, could Deng Xiaoping. As the paramount leader totters toward his 90th birthday on Aug. 22, China has quietly begun to assess his legacy in light of the Tiananmen crackdown, which resulted in the deaths of hundreds if not thousands of students and all but snuffed out the democracy movement. The masses won’t see that side of him next week. They probably won’t even glimpse Deng: he suffers from advanced Parkinson’s disease and, say diplomats in Beijing, spends most of his time in bed, while still exerting considerable political control. Instead, China’s millions will be reminded in the press of his accomplishments as the prime mover of modernization and radical market reforms. Yet even as the government trumpets Deng’s successes and many ordinary Chinese rejoice in their new prosperity, there’s an audible undertone of discontent. Among exiles and dissidents, at universities and even inside the National People’s Congress, talk has turned to Tiananmen – and its indelible stain on China’s past. “Historically, there is precedent for a new interpretation of events,” says a member of the Communist Party’s Central Committee.
Deng himself soared on the wings of revisionism. After Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, Deng – twice disgraced, twice rehabilitated – helped purge the ultraleftist Gang of Four and repudiated the Cultural Revolution, China’s disastrous experiment with “continuing revolution.” Declaring that Mao had “made gross mistakes,” Deng consolidated his own power and plowed ahead with economic reform. But Tiananmen is another matter, left largely unexplained to China’s 1.2 billion people. Calling in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to crush the student demonstrations, Deng praised the victory of socialism over the forces of “bourgeois liberalization and spiritual pollution.” Clumsy ideological explanations hardly satisfied the survivors of bloody repression – the hundreds of political prisoners, as well as academics and army officers, whose lives are a shambles. “Nothing will change until Deng’s death,” says Zhang Langlang, a dissident writer and artist, one of the estimated 100,000 intellectuals who either escaped China in 1989 or postponed their return. “Then there will have to be some kind of reckoning.”
How will Beijing’s next generation of leaders present the story of Tiananmen? It is more than an issue of historical accuracy; the answer may well determine the course of China’s future. Deng’s chosen triumvirate – Prime Minister Li Peng, President and Communist Party General Secretary Jiang Zemin and Deputy Prime Minister and economic czar Zhu Rongji – hew to the official version: that the student protests represented a dangerous assault on the soul of the party and the imposition of “evil influences from the West.” Any tolerance of dissent, according to the hard-liners, leads irrevocably to chaos. Li recently left little doubt about his views. On the fifth anniversary of the massacre, he announced new security regulations that regard political discussions outside the party line as sabotage. “Fabricating or distorting facts,” says the decree, can result in a long prison sentence; so can talking to “hostile institutions,” especially the foreign press. Last month Li defended the Tiananmen clampdown, saying that without the tough measures, China “would have been worse off than the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe.”
Reformers may use a reassessment of Tiananmen to launch political liberalization – and claim a novel public legitimacy. No one seems more eager to take up the cause than Zhao Ziyang, the former party chief, ousted during the crackdown for his support of the student demonstrators. After four years of living in obscurity, Zhao hit the comeback trail. Last fall he toured southern China, the cradle of the nation’s economic miracle, where he was received as a senior leader; this year Zhao visited Sichuan province, Deng’s birthplace, and reportedly criticized Beijing’s anti-corruption drive, claiming he had done a better job while in office. Not surprisingly, Beijing diplomats say Zhao’s populist jaunts have aroused Deng’s concern. Another possible successor has also built a reputation as a moderate and a pragmatist – but his Tiananmen connection is more troublesome. Qiao Shi, chairman of the National People’s Congress, was head of internal security and directed student arrests.
The ghosts of Tiananmen will continue to haunt China’s present and future leaders until they make peace with both the aggressors and the victims of the massacre. Deng’s successors must assuage the 3 million-member PLA, whose prestige plunged after troops fired on civilians, and satisfy an institutional longing for absolution. The military wouldn’t tolerate a major challenge to party authority, but Beijing’s new leaders must also reach out to the dissidents who have gone underground and the intelligentsia who fled abroad. At stake is the reversal of a costly brain drain. China’s emigre population has long been the source of revolutionary inspiration – the seat of Sun Yat-sen’s support and the ideological catalyst for Deng during his student days in Paris. They can help exorcise the demons – or keep China stubbornly isolated. Deng’s heir, whoever he is, will need them.
JIANG ZEMIN, 68 Deng’s choice; leads the government, party and military, but lacks support in Beijing.
ZHU RONGJI, 65 His job: keep the roaring economy on track and the enemies of reform at bay.
LI PENG, 65 Tainted by his role in Tiananmen, he still has the support of the bureaucracy.
ZHAO ZIYANG, 75 Purged for siding with students in 1989, this economic reformer and moderate istrying to make a comeback.
QIAO SHI, 69 As head of the National People’s Congress, this moderate is trying to expand his power.
