Everybody is asking one question about Hong Kong's impending reversion to China: to what extent will China crack down on civil liberties? A recent article in Foreign Affairs (May/June 1997) argued that China would not crack down, whereas Newsweek spent an entire commemorative issue strongly implying doom and destruction.
But what both sides of this discussion miss is why China would (or would not) stifle the liberties of this economic jewel, and the answer to this question is indispensable for predicting China's actions. Let us turn back the clock, just a little, to 1989, the year Communism "fell."
The breakup of the Soviet Union was an amazing breakthrough in human history, a triumph of the spirit of freedom over the forces of tyranny, and a total mess. Multiple regions, languages and ethnic tensions which had been held together by tanks were suddenly pried apart, sometimes lubricated with blood. The economy collapsed, crime soared and there was serious doubt as to whether the new government could hold together.
About the same time, China's citizens attempted a little glasnost of their own, but China reacted differently -- it ran them over with tanks in Tianenmen Square. Although China was roundly criticized the world over for its horrible display of violence and oppression, its leaders were adamant about the rightness of their reasons. Jiang (already presumably in charge, since Deng Xiaoping was so old even Anna Nicole Smith wouldn't marry him) decided that in order to hold together the Chinese empire, which encompassed Tibet and various western regions with Muslim populations and other disputed territories, it was worth taking out a few students. After all, Jiang was responsible for the lives of over one billion people and he did not want to go down in history as the man who lost China. In the next few years, the crackdowns on freedom continued, as the concomitant Soviet breakup brought nothing but instability, and the Chinese leadership decided they would prefer not to pursue that route.
Was Jiang right in a moral sense? It's easy for us to say absolutely not, since killing college kids merely because they're noisy is a fairly clear-cut moral wrong, despite what you thought about the last Alpha Beta party near your house. But it is easy to understand why Jiang felt he had to do it. He honestly believed that if the Chinese government was overthrown, or even seriously weakened, if those students managed to persuade enough people to join them, it would destroy the livelihoods, and perhaps lives, of over a billion people. Jiang, like Deng before him, is not a hot-blooded ideologue like Mao Zedong -- he is cold, calculating, and a big fan of what used to be called "realpolitik."
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