EDITORIAL
Tiananmen: what it means in China today
Today, 15 years after troops shocked the world by firing on young demonstrators in Tiananmen Square, the Chinese leadership defiantly maintains the slaughter was justified.
The Beijing spring was not allowed to flower, as happened in Eastern Europe, and China's record on human rights remains largely wretched.
Yet today China is profoundly changed, and changing still. Communism exists only as a curiosity in the title of the ruling party, and few Chinese would say their lives haven't been vastly improved — in every field save politics.
Unavoidably, there will come a "reversal of verdicts," by which the government finally will be forced to own up to the horror it perpetrated upon its own people at Tiananmen.
And while it's impossible to predict when or how political pluralism will follow in China, it will — just as surely as Starbucks, rock music and Buicks have become indispensible features of Chinese life today. The party's conundrum is that the people tolerate it only as long as it delivers increasing prosperity, but prosperity emboldens popular defiance.
Old Deng Xiaoping was mistaken in believing the mobs of young people acting up in the square 15 years ago were the sort of hooligans who, during the Cultural Revolution, had paraded him in a dunce cap, banished him for five years and permanently injured his son.
Equally misled, however, are those Americans who still think the best way to coax China into treating its citizens better is through punitive sanctions. China's opening to the outside world in the last 20 years has obviously produced better results than has the isolation of places like Cuba, North Korea, Burma and Iran.
Managing Sino-U.S. relations remains a challenge. We must continue to encourage democracy, workers' rights, military moderation and peaceful resolution of the Taiwan dispute.
It's important to understand that the Chinese don't dwell so much, as Westerners do, on the bloody Tiananmen massacre, but instead on what preceded it. The horrific night of June 3-4 ended an entire month in which hundreds of thousands of Chinese stood up. They haven't forgotten.
