The lessons of history

EVEN after the Chinese army moved into Tiananmen Square on the night of June 3rd 1989, and cleared it of the detritus left by the students who had occupied it for most of the previous seven weeks, it was several days before observers were certain who was in control of China. Your correspondent, looking down Beijing’s central boulevard, Chang’an Avenue, at a maze of still-burning barricades a day after the bloody operation, was not alone in wondering whether the Communist Party could ever heal. This newspaper, with which he was not then linked, summed up a common view: “This week China looked into the abyss of coup, counter-coup and civil war”. Foreign doomsayers were proved wrong. But even after 25 years of relative stability, it is still wise to be cautious about the cohesion of Chinese politics.

It was not just foreign observers who were given to apocalyptic musings at the time. “If the rebels had had their way, there would have been a civil war,” Deng Xiaoping told a visiting Chinese-American physicist, Tsung-Dao Lee, three months after the army crackdown that left hundreds, if not thousands, dead. Thanks to strenuous efforts by the Communist Party to erase memories of what happened (see article), many in China now have only a dim understanding of the history of the protests in Tiananmen Square and the nationwide unrest they triggered. But Deng’s analysis is remarkably close to the mainstream among the generation of young urban residents who have grown up since: if they have heard of the 1989 protests, many feel that, though the killings may have been bad, the army’s resolute action helped to create the stability that allowed China’s economy to grow from one that was then smaller than Britain’s into the world’s second-largest.