Jonathan Fenby, a former editor of the Observer and South China Morning Post, writes in the Guardian:
That reaction from the top and the regime’s inability to handle protest peacefully made June 4 1989, a crucial moment in China’s modern history. Deng could have taken a different decision, to seek a reasonable way forward, admitting criticism and debate to try to solidify a regime which needed to grapple with the wider issues raised by the economic reform he had unleashed. It would have been difficult and messy, but it was not out of the question, and would have given him a unique place in history.
By putting the primacy of monopoly power first, the aged patriarch closed off a key avenue of potential progress for China and, once he had re-launched his drive for the market in 1992, gambled all on material progress being sufficient to give the Communist party popular legitimacy. That has made the people of China far better off, if in a highly unequal manner, and transformed the isolated Maoist state into a global player. A “China model” has emerged. People are, individually, far freer than they were under Mao, so long as they are not seen to represent any political threat to the regime. There is much lively debate in thinktanks and among intellectuals about whether to head right or left economically.
But it all remains cast in the one-party mode. The “Beijing Coma” cocoon imposed in 1989 remains in place. That provides the essential context for the burgeoning superpower, and has set China on a path by which it thinks it can defy western nostrums and pursue its own path. That is why June 4 1989 has to be remembered, not only to honour the dead, but also to understand the rising global power.
Another op-ed piece in the Asian Wall Street Journal, The Beginning of the End by Bruce Gilley, also discusses the post-June 4 political climate in China:
The Chinese regime still uses force selectively to lock up dissidents and ethnic minority leaders agitating for faster change. But, for better or worse, its relationship to most of the Chinese people is a legitimate one. When I measured legitimacy for 72 states in 2002, I found that China ranked 13th overall, ahead of a few Western democracies like France and New Zealand. Nothing has changed to alter that conclusion since.
What does this mean for China’s future? In recent years there has emerged a consensus that the CCP is here to stay. Talk of democratization in China is dismissed as a “fantasy” by journalist James Mann in his book “The China Fantasy.” Fellow writer Ian Buruma speaks of China’s “black triumph” and says the Chinese model represents “the most serious challenge that liberal democracy has faced since fascism in the 1930s.” Author Robert Kagan writes recently of “the end of the end of history” (the notion that all countries were heading toward democracy) taking place in China. Many pro-regime scholars in China and outside of China share this view, writing of the exotic new forms of political organization in China that are going to make democracy unnecessary.
These writers have espied a central truth about contemporary China. It is a relatively legitimate state that is not under immediate pressure to introduce democratic reforms. But does this imply democracy is not in the offing? Absolutely not, and for two related reasons.
