The Two 1989s

This day, which ought to have been the national holiday of the new country, could also have been the birth year of the oldest, one day just as recognisable as that of 1776, 1871 or 1917. As I say it, I must ask; who is to deny that it already is? 

But this year, as the date is also the date of not only the extinction of the wall but also the Night of Broken Glass - the subject euphemistically chosen - the Visigothic Council of Toledo in 694, the verdicts of the Stockholm massacre in 1520, the disembowelling of the Mary Jane Kelly, last of the (recognised) Jack the Ripper killing spree of late 1888, the 1923 aborted Munich Putsch and the subsequent attempted murder of the Führer in a uniquely (as well as revolutionary) deadly act of "lone wolf", single-male terrorism in the dawn of war in 1939 - and numerous other events, and was allegedly blocked as the long-wanted National Day of at long last United Germany for the first mentioned infraction - is also the year of the Tiananmen Square protests, and the following infraction on burgeoning civic and democratic spirit - if not civil liberties, unrecognised and negated in the first place - in central Beijing, at the gates of the palace where so many protests had occurred since the events of May 1919, in the autumn of the decade which had begun under the cruel and very much hibernated yoke of Qing rule.

This upheaval might have been deemed revolutionary as well, paradoxically if it had been the only upheaval of that year, but for ill or good, inspired by external rumblings or solely by the internal conclusions and combustions within the governing Gòngchǎndǎng - a party, or club having outlived its inception, coming to power and, eventually, the ideology it had formed at its crest of challenging the Soviet as well as Western creeds to copy the best, or worst in both - it was the year of 1989, the fourtieth anniversary, to both believers and ordinary citizens having grown under its auspices, of the Communist victory in October 1949. But before its 40-year crisis, perhaps inevitable after the death of its author and the fully inevitable waning of the memory of the Japanese scourge and the incompetence of the (still somewhat cherished) "bourgeois" regime of the Guomindang - still empowered, and more fully so, at Taiwan, the Pescadores and other small islands - in the minds of the bulk of the populus, the regime would be challenged from the young of a people whose growth it had claimed to better. These were embetterers themselves, or so claimed, and would not settle for the mystique of the new clique of leadership struggling on in Mao's shadow. Reforms had been launched, but apart from the death of the mad autocracy with its red emperor, no substantial changes had yet been smelled, experienced, assured anyone but the fanatics. Fans, they may have been. But fans, in an oligarchic leadership as that promised, and rather elegantly incepted by Deng - now soon to reach the ripe age of 85, having the Qing regime in living memory - could choose many idols, and under the broader banner of the man now, as ever, welcoming visitors at the large plaza where Chiang's portrait had once beckoned, there were many names to cling onto and hold in veneration.

Storming the proverbial barricades. As East provided grudging support to enthusiasm to bitter but approving silence, the West so recently acquainted with The Grand Dragon refused to act beyond characteristic condemnation. Which camp, on either side of the fence at Tiananmen in 1989, will prevail? As further protests regarding the status of Hong Kong, granted to the People's Republic only years before and transfered enough years after it, have reignited a struggle for diversification of power and civil liberties lacking a counterpart in these proudly democratic Western states. 

The one from the crowd of jumpsuits whose death launched the great rising was Hu Yaobang, technocrat and one of the most widely recognised among the growing throng fostered to take Mao's place and, as they must have thought, his unexpected princeling's. Deng had once ousted Hua as well as the empress dowager, still alive years after a death sentence with the casual reprieve marking the new, or third republic of Chinese characteristics, and surely he would quietly retire if only the many could peacefully state their adherence to the forces of the young. But dead he was, on the Ides of April, heralding bloodshed to someone acquainted to his Shakespeare, and warm as his body may be, this call could not be one for the man to rise up and take the center seat in their name. Instead, theirs was a call for reform, for political plurality to follow economic reform, or the perceived quake of it, as had not yet happened but was considered all but reality in the Soviet neighbour, the regime's chief beneficiary and now dying rival.

This call - in the name of the dead man, the favourite son of Deng's men - might have been taken for an outcry, but asides its inherent ambitions it called upon, and caught the voice of Zhao, premier of the people's republic and a man of ambition as well as (or so history sealed his fate) popular and democratic reform, and added his voice to those of the students, youngsters, occupants of the square rightly named of the Heavenly Gate of Peace. Whether of peace, or just the call of their ancestors of 1919, or the oldest cry of the widest body politic for political justice and anti-corruption policies added to those of territorial integrity (the annexation, pending, of Hong Kong and Macau as Deng's Austria and Sudetenland, the old empire once again united except for independent outer Mongolia) the answer was clear. Atrocious as if it had emerged from the process and alleged openness of the 1960s, now incompatible with the new regime and wind of change. Or was it?

Deng's answer, and that of the Central Committee united - as far as we may know - was a hallmark not immediately associated with 1989 as the merrier events of Berlin half a year later, but indeed saluted and thus further incurred upon the eternal conscience of the hibernating regime which then still upheld its border fence, the last casualty occurring weeks before the violent stirrings began in Beijing. Then, of course, nobody could have known. But the answer would make stirrings of its own, resting uneasily beneath the surface to emerge bubble by bubble, name by name, eventually in throngs that would not have withstood the ripples of the Maoist torrent. 

Going underground. The democratic movement would re-emerge in the 1990s, with Deng retired and Jiang Zemin Three Represents firmly established, to little avail. The Democracy Party, Zhōngguó Mínzhǔ Dǎng, would be crushed equally in 1998, as the republic arose in full right across the strait. 

Now; thirty years past the event that shaped the decade to come and the closing half score years of this millennium, my millennium and Deng's (and Song Mei-ling, who lived through all of it and more, witnessing the massacres from gilded exile on Manhattan as she had the events of 1911, the triumph of her brother-in-law-to-be over Manchu rule from Georgia) reasons are manifold to consider this as not only a pivotal event, either anticlimax or throwback to an era we thought to be closed et cetera, but a reaffirmation the actual recognition of a system in competition with the Western democracy now made preeminent - or at least recognised by Francis Fukuyama that same year (and made eternal, or so at the time, by the seminal 1992 book christened with same title). Oh heavens, yikes, fiddle-sticks, how our victories are short-lived! This advent of a system was typically disguised by the arrogance of the victors, but precisely as the Cold War - certainly for its second half - in fact was a tripolar struggle, the victors were as united as those of the earlier war, the one still defined as such sans adjectif. As West gained ground and economic growth, if fainter than in the wake of the bloodbath-turned-recovery of the last post-war era, East came inexorably - recognisably - as competitor on a global market, but as far as the resurging West was concerned, an ally. Yet, even without a Berlin (or Hong Kong) Airlift, and indeed throughout the handover of Hong Kong (Island, in addition to the conditions of the Treaty of 1898), Macau, the entry of the Communist state into the WTO as if underlining a propaganda victory, the presupposition remained that it was for China, "Red China" as it was only recently known, only a little more than recently excluded from these halls of temporal international power, to adjust and adapt the institutions of this West which had shunned it, humoured it, and now proclaimed it a brother, or rather those of the "other" Chinese non-state (and thus fulfill, suicidally, the equally laughable dying aspirations of senile autocrat Chiang Kai-shek then as much a figure of the past as Cixi had been). 

However, Deng's theory, which for a lack of terminology representative for the time might be called Leninist (sans the prefix "Marxist-") would maintain rigour strengthened, not undercut, with the wealth it was to behold and deliver, in conformity with traditional Confucian and Han Feizi/Legalist dogma. What would be behold, but certainly not vanquish any of this West which had already won would, far from a grinding paradox of systems and a betrayal of the democratic-capitalist assumptions of the period - and, more broadly, back to the liberal hegemony of the 19th century - be a Chinese model of both liberal capitalism and Soviet-style single-party state, or a unique combination of pragmatic totalitarianism, christened in the blood of the generation of '89 rather than sullied and held back by its mush, bent on achieving allegedly Western goals by characteristically Eastern means. 

Another Volksfest in 1989, months after the blood at Tiananmen, with soldiers passively looking on or performing their duty by either savaging their professional abode or helping to dismantle it as securely as possible. Honecker, who surely had hoped to ride it out as steadfastly, received congratulations from victorious Deng and Jiang, but would not long outlive it. 

How then has this model already shaped our minds, aspirations and choices? Apart from the Bálványos speech, where outcast Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban proclaimed the death of liberal democracy in its most derisive, and the rise of an illiberal, perhaps authoritarian, perhaps more democratic (and thus authentic form) of sovereign, popular government. Is this, then, the "Chinese model", or "model of 1989", authoritarian guidance combined with virtue, a modest and susceptible form of the single-party state, rolling over the people it promises better wealth and health? 

I for myself think not; as the democratic revolt against liberal democracy - a hallmark of the decade which gave this new millennium an even smaller and less virulent boom than the first, the last of the last - was one of popular will, or volonté génerale, popular sentiment, or interest at its centre. The Chinese paradox, a paradox no more than the paroxysm it supposedly entailed, more than a distorted form of Marxist-Leninism of the oarsman than a new and softer (let alone self-deconstructing form) variant, harkens in a more foundational sense to Chinese autocracy in its classical sense, found in the mists of Chinese dynastic culture, refined from Yuan Shikai to Chiang Kai-shek (and, allegedly, Sun) through Mao and Deng into the personalistic ambition of Chairman Xi. This model, uncontroversially following Chinese governments through war and genocide and minority rule, accompanied every government to the dying stages of the Manchus, and until the final whiffs of Chiang Ching-kuo. From a Leninist, and certainly Sun's perspective, this revolution might have been claimed to have wandered a full cycle into fully fledged popular sovereignty. Meanwhile, attempts to sway the non-state into the arms of the stronger "authentic" China remains, and - more interestingly - its moves to entrench power remains largely unquestioned, unchecked and even imitated across the globe its limbs now wrap around. But by no means should this make us less concerned the old republic will not be the first victim of this victorious West, and the continued march of Deng's tanks into the third millennium. 

The future? Or the very present? If cast back into a globe divided, which will triumph, and which parts of the loser will infect the winner? If a power struggle entails in the geopolitical and institutional, as well as the economic, for the 21st century, who has served for Churchill at Fulton, to pronounce the new China as foe as well as brother? 

What then, do we do with this beast, and what is it? We must first acknowledge, fully, that China was participant as well as co-victor of the Cold War, and recognise - a harder chunk to swallow - the inevitability of conflict between the victors, or rather that this conflict has endured for longer than we dare think about. And with this, reimagining the Western way, to which way it is universal or eternal, and may be reinforced . But above all, perhaps the best legacy of the Trump administration now, maybe, in the closing days of its penultimate year (depending entirely upon who will win the contest of the following spring, but let's agree for now unpredictability is at least an asset) is the recognition, hopefully irrevocable, that our great rival has been strengthened in the absence of understanding of the divisions lying between us. China, and the Dengist-Leninist system, will remain for an unforeseeable future, and the absence of a cold and frosty relationship has certainly not served the ancient Bastiat theorem more than Fukuyama's more recent one. And perhaps, or am I deluding myself, that the China of Sun, if maintained, may serve as model as well as incubator for a pandemic yet to come and leave a greater China reunited and, hopefully, more healthy as well as free. In other case, we have reason to recognise 1989 (as well as 1978, 1949 and, indeed, the long unrecognised uprising of 1911) as the birthing year of a new system which, for good or ill, serve our fates as the final one as much as democracy has and, in this time of technological sovereignty, perhaps more final as well.