464 { China’s Quest
Modern political systems legitimize political authority through a process
of free and full debate followed by competitive and fair elections resulting in
empowerment of removable political elites that derive their authority from
this process. These modern processes have been embraced by most of China’s
neighbors: Japan, Mongolia, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia,
Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, Bangladesh, and India. But not China. There
the political half of the Bolshevik legacy precluded these modern processes.
This in a world in which liberal ideas are transmitted electronically at the
speed of light. Ideas of all sorts, including liberal ideas, hurl across state
boundaries with unprecedented speed, carried by modern communication
and information technologies. Full utilization of those technologies is inte-
gral to participation in a rapidly evolving global economy and development
of advanced technologies and potent military capabilities. China cannot dis-
engage from those technologies if it hopes to achieve wealth and power. Yet
engagement is potentially subversive of CCP authority. Thus a rapidly global-
izing China was ruled by an anachronistic Leninist elite that saw its authority
to rule profoundly threatened by the dynamics of globalization. Eventually,
the CCP would develop an apparently viable nationalist and non-Marxist but
antiliberal narrative. During the 1989–1991 upheaval, however, that was still
years in the future.The Global Wave of Liberal RevolutionsNineteen eighty-nine was one of those curious years when revolution swept
from country to country almost like a contagious disease. The wave began
early in the year in Poland and crashed at year’s end in Romania—the CCP’s
closest fraternal party regime in Europe. In between, a tidal-wave uprising
for freedom swept across China. The CCP’s violent crushing of that uprising
in June played a big role in Europe’s subsequent anticommunist revolution
by creating the specter of a “Chinese solution” that haunted East European
countries as they struggled to free themselves.
It began in Poland. Eruption of a powerful and ultimately successful anti-
communist movement in Poland in late 1988 shaped the reaction of CCP
leaders to the freedom movement that erupted in China in April 1989. An
independent, noncommunist-led trade union, Solidarity, had emerged at
Poland’s Gdańsk shipyard in August 1980. Solidarity had expanded to enlist
perhaps one-third of all Poland’s workers by the time of imposition of mili-
tary rule under the threat of Soviet invasion in March 1981. The new and in-
tensely anticommunist US President Ronald Reagan, inaugurated in January
1981, cooperated with Polish-born Pope John Paul II (who had become pope
in 1978) and with American labor unions to sustain and encourage the under-
ground Solidarity resistance during the period of military rule. Though the