Secrets of the Square

(2 of 2)

Deng: "The minority yields to the majority!"

Zhao: "I will submit to party discipline; the minority yields to the majority."

In some respects the lesson of these papers is exactly the opposite. They are almost a guidebook on how to make a majority submit to the needs of a powerful few. The papers reveal a Chinese leadership convinced that political will can be maintained by force. The book's editors suggest that the current leadership holds the same conviction. But China's economic openness--begun, ironically, by Deng in 1978--has surely created a challenge to the monopoly on power enjoyed for so long by so few. "Those goddamn bastards!" party elder Wang Zhen shouts at one point in the papers. "Who do they think they are, trampling on sacred ground like Tiananmen so long!? They're really asking for it! We should send the troops in right now to grab those counterrevolutionaries!" Wang died in 1993. One wonders what he would have made of the Starbucks that now sits near the square.