Tiananmen Diary: Thirteen Days in June.

Tiananmen Diary: Thirteen Days in June

ABOUT MIDNIGHT last June 3, not far from Tiananmen Square, a sweating young man in a blue tank top was tugging at a flagstone on Beijing's principal boulevard. I watched him pry it loose and hurl it with a curse in the direction of an ambulance which had just arrived at the rear of an angry crowd. "It's not really an ambulance," a woman cried out to me. "In it are plainclothes soldiers trying to get beyond the crowd into Tiananmen."

I had come upon the last hours of an extraordinary cat-and-mouse game between the Chinese military and a citizenry whose anti-government emotions had been plucked to the surface by the student democracy movement of April and May. For many days, armies had been inching toward the city. As they advanced, they met a resistance--the tongues and arms of the people--that was an ironic commentary on their own name, People's Liberation Army. Now the soldiers were making ready to crush the resistance once and for all. I wondered if this could really be the China I had known for 25 years, where submission to authority, however misguided, is supposed to be the norm.

In Tiananmen itself, rival loudspeakers conveyed a mood that was becoming tense and jumpy. It was part of the camaraderie of those hours that people shared information with cheerfulness and good humor, and that the foreigner, who cannot always feel at ease in the Middle Kingdom, was welcomed with absolute openness. A crackdown was expected, and yet when it came a few hours later in the form of shooting at crowds, the spectacle seemed incredible even to the Chinese themselves.

At this time Harrison Salisbury, the veteran New York Times journalist, was in his room at the Beijing Hotel, overlooking the increasingly violent scene. In Tiananmen Diary (rushed into print by its publisher), we have his observations from June 1 through June 13; in Beijing until June 5, and then in points south, where he repaired to work on a Japanese TV documentary. The diary becomes thin after he leaves Beijing. He has spiced it--sometimes confusingly in the matter of tense--with flashbacks from his previous experiences in China and in Russia. At the end he offers an impassioned post-mortem of the crisis written on his return to Connecticut.

The crisis had a three-fold political setting. Old Deng Xiaoping had turned into a Mao, reliving past battles, distrusting any Number Two man whose fingers itched for the crown. Second, the army had changed; its status was lower, it was not doing well out of Deng's modernization policies, and the enemy it was supposed to combat was no longer clear-cut. And finally, from the summer of 1988 on, there was a dispute on reform policy. Zhao Ziyang, the Party chief, wished to solve problems like inflation by going ahead with further reforms. Li Peng, the premier, favored pausing for a while. In all these respects Tiananmen was, among other things, a familiar Communist dog-eat-dog power struggle.

Salisbury felt a sense of unreality about the military operation, and he suspected that the government was practicing entrapment to bring on a showdown. On both points I felt the same. The army did not move like troops intent on reoccupying Tiananmen and merely securing order. It was hard to understand at times, as Salisbury says, at whom the military was firing and why. Salisbury was amazed how unafraid people seemed to be. "Almost as if they couldn't conceive that the army has chosen them as its target."

Looking back, we can see that two things ended the eerie days of apparent paralysis in late May: Zhao lost out in the Politburo struggles; then--only then--Deng moved to arrange the shooting. Salisbury was glad to get out of Beijing before the reign of Orwellian rule-by-lies began. On the way south to Wuhan, he found himself at Beijing airport "responding to the sounds of the airport as though I am still in the heart of the battle." A week or so later he left China (calling off the Japanese documentary for the time being), afraid that he might be seized as a hostage.

The publisher, making exalted claims for the book, says the author has "traveled extensively throughout the country for thirty years." Yet from Salisbury's lively, eloquent 1973 book, To Peking and Beyond, one has the distinct impression that a 1972 visit to China was his first. And Salisbury himself makes some surprising claims. "I think I know China as well as, if not better than, any member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo," he writes in Tiananmen Diary, but, since he cannot speak with the Chinese people in their own tongue or read what they write, this is dubious. He insists on using Chinese words, but does not always get them right (hu tong, the word for lane, is repeatedly misspelled). In fact there are so many errors in well-known Chinese proper names--Qinghua University, the new Party chief's name, Jiang Zemin--that the reader's confidence is shaken.

Still, Tiananmen Diary benefits from the familiar Salisbury exuberance, industry, and curiosity. Ultimately it holds one's interest because of its subject, closely observed by a seasoned professional. I also found the book moving in its reflection of a lost faith. Salisbury aptly noted in the confusion of the morning of June 4: "I keep getting stopped by people in the hotel who ask me what I think. I don't know what to think except that Deng has blown it, really blown it--himself, his great reputation, China present, China future."

Salisbury is very much an American liberal (and a bit of a Confucian) in the hope he attaches to good men with good intentions. To me, he overstates the departures Deng made from the Mao era. Leninism, even after Marxist faith has faded, is still Communism; and Communists, when up against it, have a strong tendency to behave like Communists. Salisbury says old age and paranoia overtook Deng, and he tries to pinpoint the timing of Deng's personal decline. I'm not sure this is the point.

Salisbury is left with the bleak conclusion that "there can be no such thing as a peaceful transition from one kind of government to another," but what about Spain after Franco, Portugal after Salazar? What about the more or less peaceful transitions to democracy in South Korea and the Philippines? I would draw a distinction between the prospects of moving away from non-Communist authoritarianism, and from Communist authoritarianism. No Communist authoritarian political system has ever become a democracy (let us wait and see whether Poland becomes the first). Spending the month of June 1989 in China reaffirmed my view of many years that Leninist political systems are intractable.

Salisbury calls the Chinese leaders "reactionaries," but they are leftist authoritarians. To talk of "liberals" and "conservatives" (or reactionaries) in China is to engage in superficial political relativism, as if the Chinese system is really just like ours. It is to ignore the unyielding and monolithic character of Leninist one-party rule. Additionally, the impulse of the individual to take his life into his own hands--the real trigger of the democracy movement--encounters resistance in strong strains of Chinese collectivism and fatalism. The new cosmopolitanism of China's leading cities is reined in by a Chinese heartland maddeningly unable to join the modern world.

In 1949 Mao said China had "stood up," but, held down for forty years by dictatorship, economic backwardness, and aspects of traditional Chinese culture, the Chinese individual is, in fact, still waiting to stand up. Communism, as an ideal, may have died as the people stared in horror at their army on the night of June 3, 1989, but democracy did not take its place.

About 3 A.M. on June 4 my pedicab driver said to me: "You know, I carried the students for free. Didn't charge them a penny."

"Why did you carry them for free?" something made me ask.

"Because they're doing something," this small businessman replied. In a society where staying in line is indeed the norm, the student initiative had been like a streak of lightning that illumines a vast stretch of terrain and brings a thunderstorm to a sleepy land. Something important happened last summer to our perceptions of the Chinese people. China was once a threat. Later China became exotic. Now the Chinese people's struggle for freedom has become a universal cause, understandable the world over.

There is no mistaking Salisbury's personal disillusion. He says just before quitting China: "I am beginning to understand the feeling of the generations of Americans who have come to China and given their hearts to the country and then been driven away by some cataclysm." Reaching Hong Kong, he writes: "It lies on my conscience. To think I know the men who did this!" He now finds China a "cruel country."

Of the future Salisbury writes truly: "There is no way Deng's condition will take a turn for the better. The trend is down and it will not change." Deng cannot retire. Like the emperors, he will rule until he dies. Until that moment, China will remain politically tight and uncreative--then all hell could break loose.

Mr. Terrill is the author of The Australians. His most recent books on China are The White-Boned Demon and Mao. His next (from Simon & Schuster) will be a memoir-history of China over the past 25 years.