What is hardest to remember is not that a powerful, nuclear-armed state felt so threatened by its own people that it used armor to crush dissent. Hell, the tanks would roll in central Moscow two years later. It is that at the time, it seemed so inevitable that the students would win.
History is full of repressive regimes that seem invincible and fall when enough people finally dare to take to the streets. The American experience – one group of people rises in armed revolt well away from the capital and organizes a military response to the central government, with either success (American Revolution) or failure (Civil War) determined on the battlefield – is actually pretty unusual. Far more common is the French experience – one day you are happily ruling a nation that has been in your family for centuries, the next a prison has fallen and the people are on the march. The Shah, Baby Doc, Ferdinand Marcos; for a while regime change was coming fast and true. 1989 was the year it was due to hit the Communist bloc. Before the year was out, the Berlin Wall would fall and the Ceausescus would be put up against a much less famous wall by some folks who knew a thing or two about not letting adversaries live to fight another day.
The Communist regime that emerges from accounts of Tiananmen is an old, scared group with the distinct sense that history is against them. They scheme and plot and complain, and then complain some more. They watch as various levels of police fail to hold back protestors and see the students emboldened by the fact that the all-powerful government is reduced to negotiating. It was only thirteen years after the death of Mao, and not too many more since the Cultural Revolution; China had known precious little peace in all of their long lives. Had they fucked everything up? How many of them, in the smithy of their souls, wondered if they couldn’t weasel their way to Hong Kong on official business, the better to get clear when the nooses came?
In Kristof’s account, even the deployment of the PLA went wrong. The troops were supposed to enter town quietly in the dead of night and provide some backbone to the local police – keep in mind that Tiananmen is maybe a quarter mile from the leadership compound, so all of these old men were living their lives with the knowledge that one stray crowd move and they would be in it. Instead, some truck killed a couple of pedestrians, people gathered and began to assault the truck crew, and the rumor was that the deployment had failed and the students had won. Faced with that hand, Deng thought the only move left to him was to go all-in, to try to forestall the sure revolution if crowds and confidence continued to build.
It shouldn’t have mattered. How many Russians were killed or driven into internal exile in the sclerotic Brezhnev and Andropov and Chernenko days, when everyone in leadership surely knew the country was broke and could not go on? And what did that get them – at best, a few more years on the throne? Does anyone seriously think Soviet Communism would have survived much longer if only the central leadership had a bit more will?
And yet it did matter. It made all the difference. From the threshold of revolution the Chinese Communist party has managed two more transitions of power and twenty years of astonishing economic growth. What once required ferocious force now seems to be clumsy denial:
Umbrellas? Was that the best Hill & Knowlton could come up with? How difficult would it have been to let the Western media do its stand-ups – you block Chinese people from Western media, and what happened twenty years ago is hardly a big secret elsewhere. Indeed, it’s not even clear that people in China care. Of all the Chinese I have discussed the subject with – far away from China, or for that matter any other Chinese who might inform – precisely one showed the slightest degree of giving a shit. He was there that night, and I suppose being shot at gives some level of hard feeling towards the folks giving the orders to shoot at you. But the rest treat it as a curious if sad part of history, a bit the way someone might view the Spanish Flu.
As China moves from tragedy to farce, we also get the spectacle of North Korea’s leadership succession. The students won’t be in the streets of Pyongyang; there are no students. Kim Jong-Il will leave the throne feet-first. I happen to suspect that his grip on power was a bit suspect even before his stroke – that train explosion right after Kim went through was a rather curious, especially given that North Korea is hardly a hotbed of petrochemicals transshipment. His weakened state cannot help things.
Most media seem to attribute the weapons testing pace to domestic concerns, although that hardly makes much sense to me: having a medium-range missile would not seem particularly well-suited to keeping out the assassins. But then, Kim is the one who has survived for decades in the hornet’s nest; he must know what he’s doing.
He knew that he didn’t want his eldest son to inherit the throne after Kim Jong Nam was caught trying to sneak into Japan on a fake Dominican passport to visit Disneyland. Yes, you read that correctly. You might even be asking yourself several questions:
- How dumb would a Japanese customs officer have to be to mistake a Korean for a Dominican? At the least, wouldn’t they take you aside and ask you further questions. Such as “explain the infield fly rule. No, in Spanish.”
- Disneyland? It’s really not that great. You get to ride peasants at home; how cool is Space Mountain going to be?
- How does going to Disneyland disqualify someone from ruling North Korea. You can like Scotch, porn, and elevator shoes and do just fine; is Mickey going to screw things up so badly? That’s a high pressure dad.
Anyway, now we’re on to the youngest son, who surely had Prince Harry syndrome and was sure he’d never get the gig. Will he be able to handle it without sparking a free-for-all that causes significant bloodshed? I guess we will find out soon enough.
If China had really matured, they’d pull the plug on North Korea and open the border. The country would empty northbound, and the North Koreans could step out of the feudal era. They won’t do it for much the same reason they won’t allow filming in Tiananmen – even when there is no objective benefit from lying, no CCP member wants to be the guy who lets go of the wolf’s ears. It’s a shame, and a shame that seemed so unlikely to continue twenty years ago.
[...] get the basics out of the way. Twenty years and a month after Tiananmen, it is clear that the Chinese government is perfectly prepared to use maximum force against any [...]