Power Shifts

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Washington
Sept. 27, 1993
For four days the diagram of the proceedings had been drawn and redrawn, until finally it was agreed they all would stand to talk, sit to sign, stand again. Clinton was to act as stage manager. He would reach for the hand of Rabin at the crucial moment, turn next to shake the hand of Arafat, then step back half a pace and enfold the two in a wide and gentle extension of his arms with the expectation that the weight of history would bring their two hands together. It did. First Arafat reached out, then after what seemed like endless minutes, Rabin responded. Simple, shattering.

Berlin
Nov. 20, 1989
It was a combination of the fall of the Bastille and a New Year's Eve blowout, of revolution and celebration. At the stroke of midnight on Nov. 9, thousands who had gathered on both sides of the Wall let out a roar and started going through it, as well as up and over. West Berliners pulled East Berliners to the top of the barrier along which in years past many an East German had been shot while trying to escape; at times the Wall almost disappeared beneath waves of humanity. They tooted trumpets and danced on the top. They brought out hammers and chisels and whacked away at the hated symbol of imprisonment, knocking loose chunks of concrete and waving them triumphantly before television cameras. They spilled out into the streets of West Berlin for a champagne-spraying, horn-honking bash that continued well past dawn, into the following day and then another dawn. As the daily BZ would headline: berlin is berlin again.

Beijing
June 19, 1989
One man against an army. The power of the people versus the power of the gun. There he stood, implausibly resolute in his thin white shirt, an unknown Chinese man facing down a lumbering column of tanks. For a moment that will be long remembered, the lone man defined the struggle of China's citizens. "Why are you here?" he shouted at the silent steel hulk. "You have done nothing but create misery. My city is in chaos because of you." The brief encounter between the man and the tank captured an epochal event in the lives of 1.1 billion Chinese: the state clanking with menace, swiveling right and left with uncertainty, is halted in its tracks because the people got in its way, and because it got in theirs. Knowing something is not the same as watching it happen. For decades critics of communism have been saying that the party has no legitimacy; that its claims of representation are a tattered veil for its true function of repression; that for all their apparent obedience, passivity and discipline, many or even most of the populace are not just unhappy but deeply angry and increasingly overt in their defiance. Still, the seven-week-long student protest in Tiananmen Square hit with the impact of a revelation.