Ten years later, Chinese leadership can't shake Tiananmen legacy

By Edward Neilan
Special to World Tribune.com

TOKYO--The ghosts of the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown are haunting China's leadership internally more than they are affecting the Beijing regime's image externally.

Each time there is a crisis, the schisms and old wounds left by Tiananmen, differences over reform and gaps in party dogma are strained with recollections of who did what and where during the fateful June of 1989.

"There are a lot of accounts still to be settled," said a Western diplomat in Tokyo.

There were echoes of Tiananmen heard when China's Communist Party newspaper heaped praise on the country's leadership recently for its handling of the NATO bombing of Beijing's Belgrade embassy in an effort to portray it as undivided.

"The Communist Party's Central Committee with comrade Jiang Zemin at the core possesses the extraordinary ability to cope with internal and foreign acts and the superb art of handling all kinds of complicated situations," the People's Daily said.

"The strong collective leadership is worthy of a high degree of trust of the whole party, the whole army and all nationalities of the whole nation," the newspaper said.

The praise, analysts said, was designed to quash speculation that President Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu Rongji were under fire from hawks in the party--the military and Marxist diehards--for seeking closer ties with the United States.

Jiang, a Soviet-trained technocrat, has made no secret that he is a buff of American history and movies. He visited the United States in 1997 and pledged to work with Washington toward a "constructive strategic partnership." Unsaid was that he was majordomo of one of the largest spy operations in history, with double agents galore.

Zhu is accused of giving away too many concessions to the United States to clinch a World Trade Organization deal during his U.S. visit in April. The flip side of that coin is that his charisma was so positive that many leaders back home, including Jiang, seemed a bit envious.

"The part about 'the strong collective leadership is worthy of a high degree trust' is meant to repudiate rumors Zhu Rongji is beleaguered ," said one Beijing political analyst who asked not to be identified in an interview with Reuters.

There are several unanswered questions posed by the legacy of Tiananmen.

Among the answers, said California author Orville Schell in "Mandate of Heaven" (Simon and Schuster, New York,1994) could be that a final accounting "would determine whether Deng went down in history as a savior whose astute understanding of China's uniqueness allowed him to ease his country into the modern world, or only a visionary manque whose failure to understand the political dimensions of reform was his tragic flaw. "

It was a wager of enormous importance because as Singapore's former prime minister, Lee Kuan Yew, declared, "It's not possible to pretend that this (China) is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of man."

Jiang claims he was in Shanghai at the time of Tiananmen but records show he was called to Beijing by Deng to help in crisis management. That means there is blood from Tiananmen on the hands of late patriarch Deng Xiaoping, on those of gruff former Premier Li Peng, and perhaps on those of Jiang Zemin.

Zhu was masterful in handling the situation in Shanghai, where he was mayor at the time. "We allowed demonstrations but we never used troops nor even contemplated shooting in Shanghai," he said.

Because it is the official position of the leadership that action at Tiananmen, including the shooting, was justified, Zhu does not speak out. In that sense, he is part of the guilty cabal by association.

But the fact is that he was miles away, speaking against the shooting of demonstrators. This may help when the chips are counted at some future date. Edward Neilan (eneilan@crisscross.com) is a veteran journalist, based in Tokyo, who covers East Asia and writes weekly for World Tribune.com.