China's Reformers Will Return

BEIJING -- An expiring visa will put me on a flight in a few hours away from the giant roller coaster of hope and fear that Beijing has become over the past two weeks. As I write, the cycle has moved to the bottom point and fear stalks people I have come to know and admire in the space of these two dramatic weeks.

This fear is etched into the face of a Chinese intellectual who had learned moments before we meet of the downfall of Zhao Ziyang, his and others' protector in the leadership. Intellectuals, he whispers, are on an arrest list. They and Zhao are being denounced in closed party meetings for having committed "antiparty" acts.

"You must not use my name if you say we have met," he implores me, his hands trembling as we part.

China's dictatorship has launched a Stalinist purge in a desperate effort to hang on to power just a little longer. The temporary victory will be one of the most costly in communism's history. It will pave the way for the creation of a genuine political opposition that will eventually lead China out of communism.

Deng Xiaoping and other hard-liners have turned on the best elements of their discredited party. They are setting out to silence and perhaps even destroy the very intellectuals and activists who could perhaps inspire a disaffected younger generation to work within the system.

This is the reverse of the approach Mikhail Gorbachev is trying in the Soviet Union. While Gorbachev rehabilitates Bukharin and other Stalin victims, Deng is busily imitating the Georgian monster. He is creating Chinese Bukharins and Sakharovs. By making the Soviet leader's political reforms look momentous, Deng is doing Gorbachev a huge favor.

The Chinese power struggle is being settled in old-style communist methods, with factions and the leadership accusing each other of betraying the party's principles and goals. It is said in physics that new theories gain acceptance only when the generation that developed the prevailing laws die off. China is proving that the same holds for communism.

The Chinese public will now be asked to believe that Zhao, once Deng's closest prote'ge' and architect of China's innovative economic liberalization, has been trying all along to undermine the party. They are likely to accept this outwardly, Chinese analysts say, but they will not believe it.

This retreat into self-deception and Stalinism makes China once again an important weather vane for experimental communism. Is it possible to balance political repression on this scale with economic open-door policies? Deng and his chief henchman in this coup against Zhao, Li Peng, are trying furiously to appropriate the economic reform created by Zhao and say that these reforms will continue in hopes that foreign investment, tourism and military cooperation will continue to come from abroad.

In retrospect, those of us covering this amazing story may have made one crucial error of judgment: we should perhaps have believed Li Peng when he said that the army was not being ordered into the city to clear the students out of Tiananmen Square. It is possible that martial law was declared and that troops were ordered to move in to forestall any military effort Zhao's supporters may have made to save him from being stripped of his post as Communist Party chief.

In this hypothesis, Deng and the hard-liners had planned to use a war of nerves and attrition to wear the students down. The troops sent into Beijing were under strict orders not to clash with civilians and the students, but to encircle installations and to prepare to protect them from attack. The equipment they brought with them was much more suited for such missions than for clearing mobs from the streets.

Zhao wears a medium-gray hat in this adventure, not a spotless white one. It is now clear that Zhao triggered the internal party crisis by publicly disagreeing with Deng's approach to the students on several occasions. As the demonstrations grew, it became apparent that he would gladly have taken power if he could have.

There will be relief in Washington and other foreign capitals that massive bloodshed has been avoided thus far. But that relief should be tempered by the realization that the probable outcome here is a campaign of Stalinist repression similar to the outrages the United States used to denounce in the Soviet Union and continues to oppose, rightly, in Czechoslovakia and Romania.

The United States should in no way associate itself with Li Peng's victory. The Bush administration has responded timidly during this crisis in its public statements in Washington and in its diplomatic communications with China here in Beijing. That puts Washington on the side of Li and Deng in the minds of too many Chinese.

That is not a good place to be. While Deng may be able to stay in place and establish an air of normalcy for as long as a year, China's yearning for democracy and modernization will burst forth again, perhaps in more radical form next time. The roller coaster will soon start heading back up toward the top of the loop.