So it begins. Chinese rulers have been turning on their predecessors since the days of the imperial dynasties, and Jiang will be no different. His eulogy portends a new reading of history in which the Communist Party admits “mistakes,” then lays blame for them at Deng’s grave. “Deng secured his power by denouncing Mao, his ‘father’,” in 1978, a member of the party Central Committee told NEWSWEEK. “So don’t be surprised if Jiang denounces his ‘father,’ too.” Millions of Chinese, including important political factions in Beijing, would rally behind a deftly handled reappraisal of the crackdown. So might the United States, and indeed, Chinese leaders sounded surprisingly moderate last week in meetings with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. In his eulogy the next day, Jiang urged Chinese to “draw on all results of advanced civilization created by all countries… including developed capitalist countries.” U.S. analysts were pleased to hear that the usual rants about “bourgeois” culture had been excised from Jiang’s rhetoric.
Jiang is well positioned to win this battle, which is why he’s likely to fight it. His hands are relatively clean. In 1989, he was party chief in Shanghai, where he defused massive pro-democracy demonstrations without ordering troops to open fire. While Deng was alive, no Chinese would dare compare the peaceful end in Shanghai to the bloody one in Beijing, where as many as 1,000 people died on the night of June 3-4, 1989. “Tiananmen is a fault line that runs right through Chinese politics,” says Richard Baum of the University of California, Los Angeles. “The Communist Party could repair a great deal of damage to its legitimacy by a gradual reassessment.”
There were signs that Jiang would turn on Deng even before the elder statesman passed away. On Jiang’s orders, Chinese television ran a 12-hour Deng biography this January. One segment shows Deng accusing student leaders of conspiring to “sabotage” China and threatening a military solution to the Tiananmen crisis. This segment was broadcast over and over after Deng’s death, driving home how tough he had been in Beijing- and implicitly how much tougher than Jiang was in Shanghai. “The way the editorial was handled shows that Jiang is definitely separating himself from the events of June 4,” says a programming director at China Central Television.
Reassessing Tiananmen would be popular in many parts of the government. The People’s Liberation Army resents the tarnished reputation its troops earned at Tiananmen and by some accounts is demanding that politicians shoulder more blame for ordering the carnage. This month, deputies of the National People’s Congress, China’s mostly rubber-stamp parliament, are expected to scrap the laws against “counterrevolution.” “The participants were not counterrevolutionaries,” says a leading NPC member who visited the square in 1989. “They were students who loved their country and had patriotic motives.”
Chinese Prime Minister Li Peng is the one who stands to lose from any reevaluation. He supported the order imposing martial law in Beijing in 1989 and has defended the crackdown ever since. Last week U.S. officials found him “sunnier” than in previous meetings: “He wasn’t sarcastic, acerbic or dismissive, as he has been in the past,” according to one participant in Albright’s entourage. The prime minister will play host to Vice President Al Gore on his visit to Beijing this spring, and Li may be hoping that making nice to the Americans will give him a leader-like aura. That probably won’t be enough to save him if the chips of Tiananmen start to fall.
