From: "micky wong" <micky.wong@canrem.com>
Subject: revolt against communism
Reply-To: "micky wong" <micky.wong@canrem.com>
Organization: Canada Remote Systems
Distribution: soc
Date: 23 Nov 92 00:46:58 EST


Copyright Time Inc. Magazine Company


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


Copyright Time Inc. Magazine Company


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


Copyright Time Inc. Magazine Company


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.
--
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