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June 5, 2002, 8:45 a.m. The Remarkable (and Regrettable) Resilience of Dictatorship The Tiananmen Square anniversary. By Pan Hu

very June since 1989, the Consulate-General of the People's Republic of China, on West 42nd Street in New York, has been the scene of a commemorative gathering of overseas Chinese dissidents. The event being remembered is the bloody crackdown on unarmed student and worker demonstrators by Communist troops in and around Beijing's Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989 — a cataclysm that produced arguably the most vivid photographic image ever of mankind's heroic stand against tyrannical statist machinery.

This past Sunday marked the 13th such demonstration in front of the PRC Consulate-General. About 200 people showed up for the two-hour program.

Anyone who has followed the progress of the exiled pro-democracy movement since 1989 would conclude that, judged by concrete results, it has been a flat failure. In the early post-Tiananmen years, a majority of dissidents and Americans were confident that the Chinese Communists were on their last legs. Today the former have largely given in to resignation or outright despair, while the latter have come to accept that despite Beijing's thuggish behavior, the apparatchiks are there to stay. Who can blame such attitudes? The Communists have not merely survived; they have actually flourished since 1989. Visit any big Chinese city today, and their grip on power seems very firm. NRO's own John Derbyshire couldn't escape that observation during his vacation last summer. Not to say that there is no discontent — there is, in fact, widespread discontent with the exceptionally corrupt and parasitic ruling caste and its collaborators. But the Communists can easily keep their potential critics scattered and disorganized.

A dictatorship will eventually employ the carrot as well as the stick to stay in power. Contemporary China is quite distinct from most other autocracies in that its use of carrots seems every bit as important as its use of sticks — though of course the latter is still the ultimate determinant. As everyone knows, the Chinese Communists had to figure out a way to hang on after Tiananmen Square. Ideologically speaking, they abandoned orthodox Marxism for hyper-nationalism. And practically speaking, they came up with a strategy of co-opting the population into believing that the only way forward was to accept their rule, and of handing out unprecedented personal and economic freedoms to the people (those who toed the line, that is). The Party showed a good grasp of human psychology. Try putting yourself in the shoes of a Chinese citizen in the aftermath of the June 4 massacre: You know that opposing the government doesn't pay, and at the same time the government is telling you that you can do almost anything you want, so long as you don't give them trouble. Not so surprising, then, that as the years passed, so did the immediate danger to the dictatorship — especially as it rode the crest of a rapid economic expansion.

Many would say the Communists have all but won their battle against the exiled dissidents, who have lost not only the limited degree of cohesion they had to begin with, but a good deal of willpower as well. Even if the various discontented elements of Chinese society do present a true crisis for the regime, it would be difficult to imagine the old guard of the pro-democracy activists playing a big role in it. Faced with this harsh reality, at least one of the speakers on Sunday night couldn't help giving the audience a quick reminder as to why the movement still had relevance to China's future after all.

Sunday's most important speaker happened to have been officer in the 39th Army of the Chinese PLA, Li Xiaoming. Mr. Li's unit was ordered into Beijing to participate in the crackdown that began late on June 3, 1989, but his commander hesitated — as did Mr. Li and other subordinates — and purposely refused to relay orders from the high command, so that the 39th did not enter the capital until June 5. This general, not surprisingly, was expelled from the army in the massacre's aftermath and forced into an ignominious retirement. He may have considered himself lucky. The commanding officer of the 38th Army — the unit responsible for most of the killing — was sacked for insubordination shortly before the bullets started flying, and is believed to be in prison to this day.

Mr. Li spoke of how he came to realize the extent of the Chinese government's atrocity. He was particularly touched by talks he had with Ding Zilin, a Beijing woman whose teenage son was killed, and who in recent years has become renowned in human-rights circles as the leader of the "Tiananmen Mothers." At Sunday's ceremony, a recent recording of her voice was released for all to hear. "At this time of year," she said tearfully, "I always carry a heavy heart."

There is not much of a chance for Chinese democracy in the near future, and anyway, the exiled dissidents will not contribute as much to it as they had hoped. But as one listens to the recollections of soldiers like Li Xiaoming, or the grieving of mothers like Ding Zilin, one realizes that the movement can never become irrelevant to Chinese political development. The dissidents will always have a key weapon in their arsenal: Truth. Economic collapse and other calamities may destabilize dictatorships, but truth is what does them in. Truth needs only the opportunity to do its work, and any order based on lies will crumble. China's overlords may yet find that dictatorship isn't so resilient after all.

— Pan Hu is a third-year student at New York University active in the Chinese dissident community.