A Day in The Life . . . . . . Of China: Free to Fly Inside the Cage

(17 of 18)

While the professor talks about the government's propaganda efforts, his face becomes heavy. His brooding eyes are cast downward, his mouth grows sulky. But not because of the coffee, which he insists is "quite good." What causes the professor to lower his voice to a drone is the presence, at the next table, of a local Communist official. "They say he is honest," says the professor. "They say that he doesn't have a crooked bone in his body. Maybe so, but I am certain those bones are held together by crooked fat."

Nonetheless, the professor wants to make one final point. What resonates for most Chinese, he says, "is when Deng and the others argue that permitting Tiananmen to run its course could have led to chaos and disorder, to another Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution is the benchmark against which everything looks better, the one thing above all that we do not want again."

He is describing a social contract, abhorrent to an American but understandable, even comforting, to many Chinese. In exchange for letting the rulers rule, the subjects will be permitted by the regime to continue the economic progress they have enjoyed for ten years.

But how exactly will the balance be struck? What is a controlled expression of opinion that does not threaten the party's authority? Thousands believed their criticism within bounds when Mao urged freethinking in the mid-1950s campaign known as "Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom." Then Deng, whom Mao had / once described as "a needle wrapped in cotton," orchestrated a crackdown that sent many to prison for merely following the Great Helmsman's invitation to criticize.

Most of those I meet seem to believe that despite the current retrenchment, China's economy is evolving into one not unlike South Korea's or Taiwan's. And while neither of those nations offers the political freedoms available in the West, both are light-years ahead of China economically. Is that really where China is going, or will the new resemble the old, a return to the Stalinist economic system that even Mikhail Gorbachev is trying to abandon? Will Deng succeed in anointing party chief Jiang Zemin as his successor, and would Jiang, in power, affirm continued economic liberalism?

"If the retrenchment worsens and if the economy fails, if Premier Li stops Jiang's succession, then all bets are off for Deng and his cronies," says the Chengdu professor. "Deng got the point that Communism doesn't work, that it tries to change human nature. He got the point about incentive. The problem is that many of the other old guys don't like his views and never have. And right now they are trying to force a serious turn back, and they're using the ammunition of a faltering economy. Well, the macroeconomic numbers are indeed bad, but most people have conveniences they have never had and never dreamed they would have. The stores are full of goods, and you still see many people buying. But most want more, and having now been exposed to the outside world, they know very well what more means."