http://nytimes.com/2004/06/02/opinion/02KRIS.html
OP-ED COLUMNIST
The Tiananmen Victory
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
On Friday, it will be 15 years since I stood at the northeast corner of
Tiananmen Square and watched China go mad.
The Communist Party was answering the demands of millions of protesters who
had made Tiananmen Square the focus of their seven-week democracy movement.
The protesters included students, Communist Party members, peasants,
diplomats, laborers ─ even thieves, who signed a pledge to halt their "work"
during the demonstrations.
I was in my Beijing apartment when I heard that troops had opened fire and
were trying to force their way to Tiananmen. So I raced to the scene on my
bicycle, dodging tank traps that protesters had erected.
The night was filled with gunfire ─ and with Chinese standing their ground to
block the troops. I parked my bike at Tiananmen, and the People's Liberation
Army soon arrived from the other direction. The troops fired volley after
volley at the crowd on the Avenue of Eternal Peace; at first I thought these
were blanks, but then the night echoed with screams and people began to
crumple.
The Communist Party signed its own death warrant that night. As Lu Xun, the
great leftist writer beloved by Mao, wrote after a massacre in 1926: "This is
not the conclusion of an incident, but a new beginning. Lies written in ink
can never disguise facts written in blood."
So, 15 years after Tiananmen, we can see the Communist dynasty fraying. The
aging leaders of 1989 who ordered the crackdown won the battle but lost the
war: China today is no longer a Communist nation in any meaningful sense.
Political pluralism has not arrived yet, but economic, social and cultural
pluralism has. The struggle for China's soul is over, for China today is not
the earnest socialist redoubt sought by hard-liners, but the modernizing
market economy sought by Zhao Ziyang, the leader ousted in 1989. The reformers
lost their jobs, but they captured China's future.
In retrospect, the Communist hard-liners were right about one thing, though:
they warned passionately that it would be impossible to grab only Western
investment and keep out Western poisons like capitalism and dreams of
"bourgeois freedom." They knew that after the Chinese could watch Eddie
Murphy, wear tight pink dresses and struggle over what to order at Starbucks,
the revolution was finished. No middle class is content with more choices of
coffees than of candidates on a ballot.
So Communism is fading, in part because of Western engagement with China ─
trade, investment, Avon ladies, M.B.A.'s, Michael Jordan and Vogue magazines
have triumphed over Marx. That's one reason we should bolster free trade and
exchanges with China, rather than retreating to the protectionist barricades,
as some are urging.
The same forces would also help transform Cuba, North Korea, Iran and Burma,
if only we would unleash them. We are doing a favor to the dictators in those
countries by isolating and sanctioning them. If we want to topple them, we
need to unleash our most potent weapons of mass destruction, like potbellied
business executives and bare-bellied Britney Spears.
So when will political change come to China? I don't have a clue, but it could
come any time. While it might come in the form of a military coup, or
dissolution into civil war or chaos, the most likely outcome is a combination
of demands from below (perhaps related to labor unrest) and concessions from
the top, in roughly the same way that democracy infiltrated South Korea and
Taiwan.
It's often said that an impoverished, poorly educated, agrarian country like
China cannot sustain democracy. Yet my most powerful memory of that night 15
years ago is of the peasants who had come to Beijing to work as rickshaw
drivers.
During each lull in the firing, we could see the injured, caught in a
no-man's-land between us and the troops. We wanted to rescue them but didn't
have the guts. While most of us in the crowd cowered and sought cover, it was
those uneducated rickshaw drivers who pedaled out directly toward the troops
to pick up the bodies of the dead and wounded.
Some of the rickshaw drivers were shot, but the rest saved many, many lives
that night, rushing the wounded to hospitals as tears streamed down their
cheeks. It would be churlish to point out that such people are ill-prepared
for democracy, when they risked their lives for it.