Republicans have landed a serious challenger to incumbent Sen. Evan Bayh: former senator Dan Coates. Coates will join a field of lesser known GOP contenders, but I suspect will soon clear the field. In addition to his time in the House and in the U.S. Senate (he filled Dan Quayle’s seat when Quayle became VP), Coates served as ambassador to Germany under George W. Bush. (He also was the “sherpa” for Supreme Court nominees Harriet Miers and Sam Alito. The former couldn’t be helped, the later needed little assistance, but assigning the task to Coates was some indication of his standing among former colleagues.) Charlie Cook moves the race from “Solid Democratic” to “Leans Democratic” with Coates’s appearance in the race.
It’s not likely that in an ordinary election year Coates would venture back into electoral politics. But this is no ordinary year. Coates no doubt sees what other Republicans (as well as neutral observers) do in an increasingly long list of states: the chance for a solid conservative to take out a Democratic incumbent laboring under the burden of an unpopular ultra-liberal agenda in a state far more moderate than the Beltway Democratic leadership. In the short term, Coates’s candidacy will, one suspects, act to restrain Bayh from adhering too closely to his party’s liberal agenda. Indeed, in recent weeks, as high profile Republicans’ names were tossed about for the race, Bayh has been voicing more vocal opposition to the Obama agenda on everything from health-care reform to terrorism policy.
The problem for Bayh, however, are his votes. He was one of the 60 votes (the Democrats all are the 60th vote, remember) to jam through ObamaCare last Christmas. He also voted for the 2009 stimulus bill, which most voters consider to be a bust. He’ll have more opportunities this year to demonstrate whether he really is a fiscal conservative or just talks like one when viable challengers appear back home.
The spectacle of those personnel carriers spitting machine-gun bullets, charging into a packed Tiananmen Square, was brutal and heinous. But there is a reason the Chinese government has gotten away with that atrocity and will continue to do so:
That show-down was largely provoked by the demonstrators in the square. Their fervor was straight out of the Cultural Revolution. Theirs was the old Maoist fanaticism and mob mentality, Only they did not have Mao’s Little Red Book to wave, but danced around a paper-mashe goddess of liberty. During the Cultural Revolution most had not read the Little Red Book and in 1989 most did not really know what liberty meant, certainly not its American conception. They were callow and opportunistic naifs who thought they could take over and run China. Their banners read, We will strangle Deng Xiaoping and his Cohorts. Deng had fought the Kuomintang, participated in the Great March, battled the Japanese, strained his own feces for food. His son had been thrown from a window and crippled during the Cultural Revolution. The excited student leaders who were going to strangle him, repeatedly fall down in a faint in the middle of a speech, and then would jump up and continue their rant.
The hard truth is that had those demonstrators prevailed China would have dissolved and splintered in chaos and civil war. It would certainly have negated the colossal economic strides she was about to make.
Perhaps, instead of machine guns a few tear gas canisters could have been used to clear the square. But those protests had been going on since April. Anything short of a very tough demonstration of the govt’s determination would not have chastened those enthusiasts and ended the demonstrations.
The Chinese people are entitled to liberty as much as any other people and what they now have is a dictatorship. But it is relatively benign and it has allowed the country make enormous progress over the last two decades. If the next 19 years will see as much political and economic progress as the last, Tiananmen Square 1998 will be transformed from an atrocity to a tragedy.
My impressions of that time, nacl, were quite different. People asked my questions about separation of powers. They asked whether political leaders in the United States could get away with criminal acts.
A drop in crime was reported at that time. During the hunger strike, ambulances were carrying unconscious hunger strikers to the hospital. Students were very well organized at all the busy intersections in central Beijing, and guided the ambulances through the intersections.
On a train ride from Baoding, where I was living and teaching, to Beijing, on May 19th, I saw sheets on farmers’ houses on which was written, in Chinese, “We love students,” only instead of the Chinese character “ai” meaning “love,” there was a red heart. When I got to the area in front of the Beijing railroad station, there was a banner saying “Workers love students.” And at the north end of Tiananmen Square, there was a banner saying “Communist Party members love students.”
There were peaceful demonstrations not only in Beijing, but in Baoding as well. During my spring break, my daughter and I went to Inner Mongolia, and on the campus of Inner Mongolia University, there were traces of posters that the students there had put up. Whoever tore the poster down left enough little pieces remaining to show they had been there.
The mood in Tiananmen Square was extraordinarily peaceful and orderly. Demostrators sang the Chinese National Anthem and the International to show that they were not being anti-Chinese.
I of course cannot know what sorts of discussions were taking place between President George H.W. Bush and Deng Xiaoping. I assume that President Bush-41 told Deng that the United States would not complain if the demonstrators were crushed. Certainly, there was no a peep of disapproval after June 4, 1989, from the US government.
I was there. Read my book, Nacl. It is called THE BLESSED HUMAN RACE.
Add the fourth of June to the list of atrocities carried out by the Communist party of China. Mao murdered more of his own citizens than Stalin or Hitler did. The standard of living there is still a joke.
China should’ve been a successful modern country decades ago. Its cultural tradition of totalitarianism has been stifling the great chinese people since the inception of its oldest Dynasty. The only thing impeding its development now is the Communist party. Taiwan, Singapore and (formerly) Hong Kong are examples of what the Chinese people can accomplish without tyrants standing on their necks.
A world dominated by China would be a nightmare. I pray that McCain becomes President and puts an end to American kow-towing, but I don’t count on it. I do believe he would change our servile foreign policies, but to what extent I couldn’t guess.
HONG KONG — Tens of thousands of people gathered in Victoria Park on June 4th to commemorate the massacre which took place 19 years ago.
http://www.nysun.com/foreign/annual-tiananmen-square-vigil-draws-thousands/79317/
I shall never forget not forgive.
Sorry, I meant “I shall never forget NOR forgive.”
Kin-ming, neither will we.
#6 “Kin-ming, neither will we.”
4 hours ago: Goddess of Democracy at Congress on Tiananmen anniversary:
http://afp.google.com/article/ALeqM5g5neczMav3m_JC78I4VWKuNFFRcA
I believe the future of Chinese freedom is in the Internet.
This spring China has surpassed the USA in the number of Internet users
(233 mln by the end of March, http://www.usatoday.com/tech/world/2008-04-20-Internetusers_N.htm – and rising very rapidly).
There are 30,000 censors (last time I checked) riding herd on this ocean -
but how much can they do? They mostly work by means of forbidden
word lists; any literate person can’t have much difficulty in rephrasing his or her
ideas to bypass such traps.
I’m in agreement with Kin-Ming and Gordon. Our bag of carrots and sticks is being underutilized, especially the stick part. Can this be fear? Greed? We need to get with the program. Thanks
nacl outlines the unvarying argument of the US foreign service and its Amen corner in academia and the media: that if the opponents of Marxist tyranny prevail, there will be chaos. (Note that this is different from the argument of those, usually on the Right, who are concerned that if the opponents of a non-Marxist dictator prevail, the result will be — Marxism. Whatever their objective merits, these two arguments are not equivalent. Fear of chaos and fear of Marxism are two very different motives.)
But nothing can ever transform Tiananmen from an atrocity to a tragedy. It will always be an atrocity. The time at which it occurred is the key to why it has not recurred: the Soviet Union had signed the INF Treaty, was collapsing on itself, and had begun an incoherent but unmistakable withdrawal from Europe; Poland had effectively shucked off her Soviet Russian masters; Austria was opening her frontier to East German emigration, and refugees were flooding west by the thousands; from Czechoslovakia to Yugoslavia to Romania, local peoples were demonstrating in favor of freedom and self-determination, and not being rolled over by Soviet tanks. Even in Latin America, the late 1980s saw a remarkable triumph of popular self-determination over Communist tyranny, including the unlikely run-up to free elections in Ortega’s Nicaragua. The year 1989 was an incredible, unbelievable, almost unforeseeable year: in November, the Germans would do the unthinkable, and tear down the Berlin Wall with their own hands.
Americans remember ’68, as the peoples of Europe do, but have little sense for the worldwide political earthquake of 1989. For us it was just a new president’s first year. For those Chinese students, though, it had to be a cresting wave of hope, as thuggish Marxist regimes were rocked on their heels across the globe. There has been progress in some places since, and regression in others, but there has not been another year like 1989.
Ronald Reagan required the former Soviets to allow him to meet with dissidents as a price of his visits to the USSR. He bargained on other occasions for the release of dissidents, knowing that he had the upper hand and could get what he wanted if he asked for it. That is what Bush should do with China. I don’t think he lacks either the compassion or the determination about freedom of conscience. I fear in Bush’s case that it’s a different perspective, a more defensive one than Reagan’s — as well as, very simply, a lack of Reagan’s bargaining skills, honed during his years as president of the Screen Actors Guild. Business executives actually have such skills pretty rarely.
Where we should threaten China is in trade. We can recover much more easily than China from any consequences. And China’s leaders know that, or ought to. But with our State Department in charge, we are, as John Bolton says, walking softly and carrying a big carrot.
I was over there at the time, though not in Beijing. I had lots of time to interact with college students, faculty, and ordinary people in Central China. I heard of the massacre on VOA about 5 AM as I was preparing to leave a conference at Huazhong Normal University and fly to Nanjing for an appointment with the director of the National Second Archives. When I emerged into the lobby of the guest house, I knew that everyone else knew what had happened. There was a kind of numb silence. In Nanjing the city was at a standstill, the streets filled with mourners and peaceful crowds–with no authority in sight. I got to my meeting, to the astonishment of the director, then waited a few days, drove all night to Shanghai, and was evacuated.
This was one of the most moving and educational experiences of my life. It was a glimpse of the real China–everyone from babies to grannies to hospital patients in wheelchairs to police and army in uniform in perfect order, taking their turns at a microphone, calling for democracy. It was a time when power shifted, because everyone who had hitherto thought that they alone doubted CCP orthodoxy saw the crowds and realized that everyone agreed with them. The Party saw the crowds and went cold. The basic fact–that the mass of Chinese people don’t want communist rule–was revealed and it has not changed. Hence the drum tight repression and censorship right up to now. And don’t tell me that without that repression no economic growth could have taken place. Everything the party has done since has, one way or another, been an attempt to re-establish (or perhaps I should say, establish) legitimacy. They have shown great ingenuity–tribute missions from Sarkozy and Dubya, generous purchases of aircraft from Boeing, visa denials to attempt to silence foreign critics, payoffs to politicians and journalists, spectacle like the olympics, luxury tourism, ingenious propaganda taking credit for development (without the CCP China would have been an economic miracle already in the 1950s).
But none of it will work. Legitimacy comes from elections and legislation and laws and human rights. The Chinese leaders know that. We make fools of ourselves by pretending that we don’t know and that we believe that Chinese are somehow different. Sooner or later this unsustainable system will change.
As for the rationalizations of the massacre, all they prove to me is Waldron’s Law of foreigners dealing with China, well known to all Chinese: “Foreigners can rationalize anything.” And do, regularly, in a way that makes them feel total intellectual and moral contempt for us. Don’t imagine they aren’t sizing you up to see whether you have a brain or not.
I can say flatly that the demonstrators had NOTHING in common with the madness (government inspired) of the Cultural Revolution When I arrived a week or two before the massacre, people were happy, exhilarated by the new freedom, full of hope. Responsible people like college presidents supported the movement.
It was more like a color revolution in Europe. Change could have been peaceful and easy, had it been allowed. It was not madness, but rather, at long last, SANITY in a country where everything had been upside down since 1950.
All Deng needed to do to defuse the situation was to appear on television, say that the government had heard the voice of the people and understood their grievances, AND that he was appointing a commission of honest people [everyone in China knows who they are] to consider change–If Deng had done that he would have gone down in history as the greatest ruler since Yao or Shun.
Change then would have avoided the subsequent deformative Chinese growth that has strengthened the dictatorship, created a wretched underclass and an elite that is wretched in its own way as well. The country is shot through with major corruption. The party has acquired a vast financial stake in the operation, which means that clean up and reform are well-nigh impossible.
The argument that had the students “won” China would have collapsed into chaos is rubbish. The reason is that the Party in those days had a liberal wing genuinely committed to democratic change AND to economic development. A win would have meant power for that group. The students did not imagine themselves taking power, after all. Elections would have followed. The result would have been a legitimate regime that did not fear its people. After Tiananmen the liberal wing of the CCP was amputated, leaving only the opportunists and the hard liners–nit wits like Jiang Zemin, hard men like Hu Jintao. China has far far better talent.
Make no mistake, Chinese people know about the massacre and the secrets that the party has expunged from textbooks and scrubbed from the cityscape. They will neither forgive nor forget. One of these days this will all be revisited politically. That will be an explosive moment but necessary one. Then perhaps the fools in the West who accept the official propaganda that is scarcely believed even by those producing it–maybe then those people will come to understand the full historical significance of 6/4.
The old joke went: (in future Russia) “Who was Brezhnev”? answer: he was a communist official during the time of Solzhenitsyn. Ditto in China: Who was Deng Xiaoping? He was a high official in the government at the time of June Fourth.
Waldron’s Law of Chinese, always to be borne in mind: “Whatever else the Chinese may be, they are MOST EMPHATICALLY not stupid.” So if your understanding of them has them credulous, or malleable, or not very bright in what they are doing–you are wrong. Whatever they are doing, and various groups may be working against each other, first rate minds are at work. That can lead to horror, also to great cultural achievement.
I am ashamed as an American of the unwillingness of our political or business or even intellectual elites to tell the truth about all this. The truth, after all, is not in doubt. it is well documented. But we cringe. Why I am not exactly sure. When we cringe, however, we betray our responsibility to every unfree person in the world.
P.S. George I have just ordered your book–thanks for mentioning it. Best ANW
Thanks, Arthur, for reporting your experiences while in China 19 years ago, experiences that echo my own. I am at the moment wearing my Da dao Gongchandang (Down with the Communist Party) T-shirt even though it is already June 5. The months I spent in China in 1989 have changed my way of thinking–and my life. And thanks, of course, for ordering my book.
And thank you, J. E. Dyer, for bringing up the earth-shaking events that occurred in Europe in 1989. They probably never would have happened had it not been for Beijing Spring.
There is something that any ordinary person can do to fight Marxist theory. We can point out the the cruelty of Marxist regimes follows logically from the words of Marx, the words he wrote about a time when all people would think alike and would raise cattle in the morning and criticize literature after dinner, a time when there would be people who wrote and composed but no writers or composers. Trying to reformulate human nature, and denying human individuality, leads automatically to repression, to thought control, sixian gaizao in Chinese. If we start saying this among ourselves, if we start understanding it ourselves, the ideas will get to China, as all ideas eventually do.
Another thing we can say among ourselves is that Marxism has always led to famine. Americans and Europeans who support Marxism think it is kind to the poor, but what it does instead is to create starvation on a scale that never existed before the 20th century. Nothing in human history ever approached the Mao-made famine of 1959-61, despite the fact that Stalin, Pol Pot and the Kims also created famines. Anything said in America gets hear around the world.
FHO,
even if it’s accurate, that USA Today study is based on a flawed premise. Most IP addresses in America belong to families with multiple computers and multiple users. Most Chinese addresses don’t. I wonder if the study took internet access at schools, libraries and the workplace into account? I doubt it. America has close to 100% internet access by its population of 300 million.
The growth of internet access in China is definitely good news. I agree that it will help the populace there. Comparing their living standards to those of the free world they see online must be a real eye opener. It was for the Iranians and Iraqis.
Dear Arthur,
I agree very much with what you said, particularly the last paragraph:
“I am ashamed as an American of the unwillingness of our political or business or even intellectual elites to tell the truth about all this. The truth, after all, is not in doubt. It is well documented. But we cringe. Why I am not exactly sure. When we cringe, however, we betray our responsibility to every unfree person in the world.”
Nothing pains this admirer and supporter of the United States of America more than this.
AW and Kin-ming. Speaking the truth is a duty, and Arthur’s comments resonate with the same.
it is always interesting to read someone, outsiders as i regarded, commenting 64… when ppl sound like a christian evangelist preaching things such as democracy like hackneyed christian dogma, it is really annoying and counter productive. 20 years after 64, can not you talk about something new? or at least have some fresh idea, constructive or not. by taking out couple of dissidents is a noble deed, but does it matter to china or chinese in that land? at least right now, i don’t see much differences.
as a one stayed at the square that night, i am begging you: shut up. if you can not help constructively, at least you can shut up.
tony zhao, I respect your views because you were there. Nonetheless, it is important for the world to remember what happened in Tiananmen, even if the participants do not want to do so.
After all, we have to understand the essential nature of a Chinese regime that wants to change not only the international system but also the United States and the Western democracies.
gordon,
i am not sure that i understand your comment
“After all, we have to understand the essential nature of a Chinese regime that wants to change not only the international system but also the United States and the Western democracies.”
your concern sounds really far fetched. are you accusing china exporting its doctrine and wanting to change the world? this would be a big conspiracy theory. but for argument sake, i would say that if china can bring a better solution to the problems of this planet, better than US and the west, then why don’t we change?
in a deep sense, you sound like a holy inquisitor whose sole job is to root out the heresy for sake of the God. china, as a weird entity outside of democratic-dome, has to be penalized or wiped out if china dare try to standalone. and then we are in total different domain. so you are a huntingtonian, anticipating the clash of civilization and fearing of losing western ideology.
tony zhao, it is a tragedy that the Communist Party represses its own citizens. One can argue that this is not our business. Yet it is most certainly our business when Chinese government agents act in our country to suppress debate. And it is our business when China attacks our satellites, threatens our allies, and supports dangerours regimes that threaten us.
This is not some theoretical clash of civilizations or the product of “anti-China forces.” Chinese acts are, in fact, destablizing the international system. Are you surprised that a government that plays so tough with its own people poses a threat to others?
gordon
if the current international system sucks, then it has to go. it does not matter whether the new guy is china or who else. US did it to the old system created by european 100 years ago.
if you think it pathetic that china toyed its citizens, how could one expect it to be so strong that would challenge a sound international system? so it has to be something else bothering you.
sometimes it is very hard to discuss anything related to “chinese gov. mistreated its own people”, the discussion is always sentimental, not rational. can we have a quantitive discussion? let us have some real data to compare how chinese gov “mistreated” its people with how other “nicer” gov. treats its own people. we can use a percentage scale to make the comparison. since china has long history, we can try to have a survey starting from 1000 years ago. then we can make some rational discussion. the basic comparison would be ” the percentage of mistreatments over total population”.
tony zhao, the current international system has lifted more people out of poverty–many of them Chinese–than any other. So why does it have to go? If it does fall apart, Chinese people will suffer as their country is less self-sufficient than others.
Chinese authoritarianism will not make China strong in the long run. We have thousands of years of Chinese history to prove this. Do you really want China to be weak again?
And what’s with your formula? Why do you feel you must defend repression of your fellow Chinese?