to shoot or not to shoot：posttotalitarianism in china and eastern europe

To Shoot or Not to Shoot: Posttotalitarianism in China and Eastern EuropeAuthor(s): Mark R. ThompsonSource: Comparative Politics, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Oct., 2001), pp. 63-83Published by: Ph.D. Program in Political Science of the City University of New YorkStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/422415Accessed: 02/12/2010 14:16

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available athttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unlessyou have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and youmay use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.

Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained athttp://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=phd.

Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printedpage of such transmission.

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

Ph.D. Program in Political Science of the City University of New York is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Comparative Politics.

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=phd

http://www.jstor.org/stable/422415?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=phd

To Shoot or Not to Shoot

Posttotalitarianism in China and Eastern Europe

Mark R. Thompson

Democratic revolutionary movements in China, Czechoslovakia, and the German Democratic Republic (GDR) started similarly, as nonviolent, mass-based protests against hard-line regimes. Yet little more than a decade later the massacre at Tiananmen Square in China and the triumphant revolutions of eastern Europe appear to have left little in common. The subsequent direction of these countries could hardly have been more different. After ordering the army to shoot peaceful protesters, China's Communist rulers executed or imprisoned hundreds of democratic activists, while forcing others underground or into exile. In Czechoslovakia and East Germany the order to fire at unarmed demonstrators never came, and the Communist regimes collapsed. Although neither country still exists, their territorial remnants, including Slovakia after recent elections, have democratized.'

The eastern European democratizations are often seen as "one single snowball," as Adam Przeworski has phrased it.2 Differences between negotiated transitions in Poland and Hungary and revolutionary situations in East Germany and Czechoslovakia have been minimized, and the possibility of bloody repression in the latter two countries at the time has been largely ignored. Democracy in eastern Europe is viewed instead as the inevitable result of the political avalanche unleashed by Gorbachev's liberalization policies in the Soviet bloc.3 Because Deng was not a political liberalizer like Gorbachev, the suppression of the Chinese democracy movement is seen as equally predetermined in a nondemocratic direction. Yet China did not have the only hard-line Communist leadership. Czechoslovakia's and East Germany's leaders were equally unyielding, despite Gorbachev's hints that they should undertake reform.

It is easy to forget the widespread fear that the East German and Czechoslovakian protesters would suffer the same fate as Chinese student demonstrators. Such Angst was deliberately cultivated by the GDR regime, which had nothing but praise for the Chinese government's defeat of "counterrevolution." Opposition leaders and ordi- nary demonstrators took these threats seriously.4 On October 9, 1989, the fateful day in Leipzig, where tens of thousands were preparing to demonstrate peacefully against the regime, Honecker welcomed Chinese Deputy Premier Yao Yilin to East Berlin and lauded the crushing of protests in Tiananmen Square. Another East German politburo member warned two Protestant church officials that Beijing was far away from Berlin "only geographically." In Leipzig itself, in addition to the regu- lar police, the workers' militia, and the secret police (Stasi), twenty-eight companies

63

Comparative Politics October 2001

of mobile police with eighty conscripts each were mobilized. This last group, minus the purged recruits who were considered politically unreliable, was briefed by political officers. "Comrades, from today on it's class war....Today it will be decided, either them or us. So be class watchful. If sticks aren't good enough, use firearms. [If children are in the crowd, then] too bad for them. We have pistols, and we don't have them for nothing."5 Extra blood plasma was allocated to Leipzig hospitals, and this information was spread to demonstrators with generous allusions to the Tiananmen Square massacre. Similarly, in Czechoslovakia several members of the central committee in Milos Jakes's regime "toyed with the idea of a 'Chinese solu- tion'....[Using] armed force was seriously contemplated in the first week" of the protests beginning November 17, 1989.6 Protesters were understandably worried about being shot, particularly after the brutal dispersion of the November 17 student demonstration.

Why events in Berlin and Prague did not end as those in Beijing remains one of the most important puzzles of the revolutionary year 1989. Yet surprisingly few have tried to solve this puzzle. Cultural differences are often considered too great to make such a comparison fruitful. Conservative leaders in Singapore, Malaysia, and China propagated a culturally relativist position that western democracy is inappropriate in Asian countries.7 Prominent U.S. scholars point similarly to a clash of civilizations.8 Nevertheless, the successful democratization of the former GDR and the earlier success of West German democracy have laid to rest arguments about red Prussians in East Berlin and chancellor democracy in Bonn, not to mention the inherently authoritarian character of Germans.9 Despite Taiwan's democratization, similar stereotypes about the intrinsic authoritarianism of Chinese culture have yet to be abandoned.'0 Such culturalist arguments, with their assumption of a cultural essence and oriental- ist perspective, will be consciously ignored.' i

Scholars who have considered why the Chinese shot and eastern Europeans did not have offered four key answers: party legitimacy, societal modernization, leadership behavior, and opposition strategies. Although each explanation makes an important contribution, they all neglect the common regime type in China and eastern Europe in 1989 and variations among subtypes. These regimes were posttotalitarian, but there was an important difference between China's early and East Germany's and Czechoslovakia's later and frozen forms.

Party Legitimacy

Gerald Segal and John Phipps ask what motivates Communist armies to defend their parties against popular protests.12 They argue that the military in countries that expe- rienced an internal revolutionary struggle remains loyal to the Communist party

because the indigenous army fought its way to power in the first place. Such fighting helps

64

Mark R. Thompson

enhance the sense of nationalism surrounding the armed forces and the revolution. The armed forces also fight if it is clear that external powers with controlling influence are very keen that they do so...The East Europeans, perhaps because they were installed in power by the Soviet Union, lost confidence in their right to rule [after Gorbachev's reforms]. It was undoubtedly true that the depth of the crisis of legitimacy in Eastern Europe was far deeper than in the Chinese case. It should be clear...that a vital part of the decision-making process concerned the attitude of the Soviet Union. In China there was no outside arbiter, but in Eastern Europe the opinion of the Soviet Union was crucial....It is inconceivable that the revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989 could have taken place without Soviet approval, or at least benevolent neutrality. 13

Segal and Phipps are concerned with elite legitimacy. Different from the mass legitimacy emphasized by Max Weber in his analysis of the forms of domination, elite legitimacy concerns the loyalty of the regime staff.'4 T. H. Rigby and Ferenc Feher have argued that, "even where...[mass] legitimacy plays little or no part in the relationship between rulers and subjects, the mode of legitimation retains its signifi- cance as the basis for the relationship of authority between rulers and the administra- tive staff."'5 Maria Marcus has termed this internal legitimation of Communist regimes despite the lack of mass support "legitimation from the top."'6 Following this argument, Giuseppe Di Palma has suggested that while a self-proclaimed "'vir- tuous regime' can live without popular support...it can hardly live when it no longer believes in its own virtue.'"17

Daniel Friedheim, in his study of East German security elites, provides data in support of the contention that externally dependent regimes lost internal legitimation after Gorbachev's rise to power. His survey of members of "secret crisis teams"- party leaders, civilian state officials, and security agency officers reveals an abrupt erosion of previously near universal support within the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) for the party's goals after the rejection of Gorbachev's reformist course.t8 Friedheim suggests that a "unified, ossified leadership" in East Germany using "pervasive repression" and facing "unorganized opposition" long enjoyed a faSade of stability. But when "hegemonic signals" from Moscow changed, many SED officials lost belief in their party's legitimacy, while the loyalty of their military apparatus became doubtful.'9

Though lacking such systematic data, Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan make a similar argument about Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovak leaders were nervous and confused after Gorbachev's rise to power, particularly as Gorbachev was demanding that the 1968 intervention, the raison d 'etre of Czechoslovak hard-liners, be denounced. Increasingly doubting their own right to rule, they quickly lost control over and the loyalty of the security apparatus when demonstrations and strikes began in mid November 1989.20

With its indigenous legitimacy, by contrast, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was able to survive crisis in 1989 because it retained the belief in its own "virtue," and the People's Liberation Army (PLA) remained loyal and obeyed orders to shoot.2' Unlike the Soviet satellites of East Germany and Czechoslovakia, the

65


geostrategically and ideologically independent Chinese party elite kept its legitimacy from the top. In a crisis situation, a self-confident party retained power that grew out of the barrels of the PLA's guns.

Yet Segal and Phipps's argument seems less persuasive now than in 1990. Indigenous revolutionary legitimacy was not sufficient to save Gorbachev's rule in the Soviet Union in 1991. His regime did not collapse in the face of a civilian revolutionary challenge, but rather after a failed coup from within its own ranks.22 The situation was thus different from both eastern Europe and China in 1989. But the Communist parties in the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and East Germany all suffered a severe decline in elite legitimacy. In the Soviet Union in August 1991 the standing of the party had declined so far that a large part of the security apparatus disobeyed Gorbachev, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), and the military head. While external dependency may well make a Communist regime more prone to collapse during crisis, the independence and national pride a party derives from its revolutionary past is no guarantee of military loyalty, as the experience of the Soviet Union shows. It is necessary to understand better the general causes of declining party legitimacy in Communist regimes, in indigenous and externally dependent ones alike.

Societal Modernization

Modernization theory claims that the more modern societies of eastern Europe had stronger civil societies that demanded democracy more effectively than was possible in backward China. Minxin Pei is the most influential exponent of this position.23

The explicit proposition here is that the likelihood and form of societal takeover may be signifi- cantly influenced by a country's social mobilizational profile, which includes, primarily, level of education, urbanization, and structure of the labor force. When a given country's social mobilization profile corresponds closely to that of societies on the eve of the inauguration of democratic regimes (high rates of urbanization and literacy), a democratic breakthrough is more likely. When a country's social mobilization profile shows no significant deviation from that of societies during the early stages of development, a democratic breakthrough may be less likely....24

Yet a particular regime type can create conditions that favor political mobilization or impose constraints that compel demobilization. Such regime influence can be independent of the level of a society's modernization. Social mobilization must be distinguished from the abilty to mobilize politically. For example, it can be argued that there is less independent political activity in Singapore, which has one of the world's highest per capita incomes, than in Malawi, which has one of the lowest.25 Although Mao's totalitarian regime confronted a relatively backward society, other totalitarian regimes, particularly Nazi Germany, were quite modern yet still banned

66

Mark R. Thompson

independent political mobilization. The level of socioeconomic modernization under certain regime types tells little about potential political mobilization.

Pei attempts to circumvent this problem by arguing that the degree of societal modernization becomes relevant only once an "initial opening" by a reformist leadership is undertaken.26 He uses this phrase to encompass both the chiefly economic reforms that began in 1979 in China and the primarily political reforms launched by Gorbachev in 1986 in the Soviet Union. But there were important differences in the character of the civil societies of immediate post-Mao China and of the Soviet Union at the time Gorbachev took power. In fact, Deng's China was more like the Soviet Union after Stalin's death than just before glasnost more than thirty years later. The Soviet regime under Brezhnev, like the Czechoslovakian and the East German regimes through 1989, was hard-line. But a parallel culture of dissent had nonetheless been firmly established. Persecution of oppositionists continued, but organized opposition, unthinkable before Stalin's death, existed. In other words, the possibility for political mobilization had just begun in China in the late 1970s, while it had existed for over three decades in eastern Europe and the Soviet Union when Gorbachev came to power.

It is particularly important to focus on urban areas, where popular protests in China and eastern Europe took place in 1989. In China the relative size of the indus- trial work force was small compared to the peasantry; polls show that peasants were less democratic than workers.27 Mark Selden argues that one key to explaining the suppression of the Tiananmen Square movement was urban isolation. Despite four decades of rapid industrialization, "China's cities remain isolated if dynamic islands of power and privilege within a predominantly agrarian nation."28 Only about 20 percent of China's population was urban, compared with nearly 80 percent of Czechoslovakia's and East Germany's.29 Still, while surrounded by the countryside, China's urban workers were numerous. According to Chinese national statistics, there were 105 million workers in 1988, 70 percent of the nonagricultural labor force (there were only 2 million students).30 Moreover, the global experience of recent democratic revolutions suggests that even in overwhelmingly rural societies successful popular uprisings can be city-based or even confined to the capital city (for example, Manila in 1986, Kathmandu in 1990, and Dhaka in 1991).31 However, although a successful urban-based uprising was conceivable in China, it is essential to consider variations in Communist regimes to show how far Chinese society could be mobilized, compared to eastern Europe in 1989.

Leadership Behavior

Chinese Communists' resort to violent repression is also explained by Deng Xiaoping's decisive leadership, compared to the paralysis of East German and

67


Czechoslovakian leaders. A split in the Chinese politburo between reformers and hard-liners explains Communist party vacillation between harsh condemnation and conciliatory statements from April through mid May, by which time the number of daily demonstrators on Tiananmen Square was over 100,000.32 Protesters were able to stop soldiers from enforcing martial law after it was declared on May 19. At this point Deng stepped in to end the internal disarray, rallied the old guard, and purged reformists in the party while insuring military obedience.

Deng Xiaoping now took decisive action. Having shrewdly retained the position of Chair of the Party Military Affairs Commission, he was able to call an emergency meeting of the regional military commanders in the central city of Wuhan, far from the madding crowd in Beijing. Zhao Ziyang [the chief CCP reformer] was sacked as Party General Secretary on 24 May....With Zhao out of the way and the infuriated hard-line leadership fully in charge, the military crackdown got under way on the night of 3-4 June. The death toll could never be ascertained, but the best esti- mates are around a thousand.33

However straightforward the argument about Deng's decisiveness may appear in the Chinese context (it is implicitly strengthened by his popular image as a wily operator) it encounters difficulties when viewed comparatively. Deng's leadership was important. Had he not so successfully rallied the party and troops, the crackdown might not have occurred or at least not so soon, and it might not have been successful. But no such unifying leadership qualities were necessary in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. Honecker and Jakes enjoyed united parties, yet leadership in these eastern European countries was politically paralyzed by the mass protests that broke out in 1989. While the infuriated hard-line leadership in China moved decisively to suppress the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, a surely equally disconcerted East German and Czechoslovak leadership engaged in what Steven Saxonberg describes as procrastination, bolstering continuing policies that were not working, and then shifting responsibility.34 Leadership qualities alone can not explain why eastern European leaders fiddled while Deng ordered his troops to fire. Comparison with eastern Europe suggests that even a leader of Deng's caliber might not have been able to save the day for the hard-liners under more difficult circumstances. It is necessary to specify the conditions under which decisions are made.

Opposition Strategies

It has often been claimed that the Chinese student movement made a number of errors that contributed to its defeat. In eastern Europe, by contrast, the opposition is said to have skilfully guided the revolution down a peaceful path that ended in democratic transition. Tang Tsou argues that an increasingly radicalized student leadership

68

Mark R. Thompson

in China missed the chance to accept a tacit compromise offered by the reformist general secretary of the Comlnunist party, Zhao Ziyang.35 Zhao clearly distanced himself in a speech before the students from the hard party line, which was expressed in an April 26 People s Daily editorial condemning the student demonstrations. But student leaders continued to escalate the demonstrations instead of evacu- ating Tiananmen Square as Zhao had requested. Student leaders who showed signs of moderation were removed by more radical students. "It was the radical students as a group who determined not only the fate of the student movemenlt but also the fate of reformers like Zhao....'"36 Tsou analyses the impact of the crucial hunger strike begun on May 13 as follows:

That expressive act grave the student movement a focal point that brought about an unprecedented outpouring of sympathy from the citizens of Beijing, young and old, rich and poor, highly educat- ed and semli-literate. It pushed the studelnt movement to a new height. In terms of tactics it was a great success, but in terms of strategy it was a serious mistake, for it meant that, instead of de- escalating the conflict with the government after Zhao had taken serious political risks to offer what must be considered to have been significant concessions, the students escalated it to a new level... [The student movement becalme] arrogant...as it marched determinedly toward failure.37

As with Deng's leadership, however true these criticisms of student leaders' behavior ring in the Chinese context (and many ex-student leaders have added their own mee cutlpa), they do not hold up well comparatively. In both East Germany and Czechoslovakia organized opposition was small, and its nonviolent strategy was similar to that of the students in China. In his fine analysis of the students' nonviolence, Timothy Brook argues that these protests long drew a "magic circle" around the protesters that made a military crackdown difficult in China.38 It should not be forgotten that the first attempt to clear Tiananmen Square was stopped by demonstrators who blocked tanks and persuaded individual soldiers and commanders to withdraw. The students' strategy initially seemed effective. A very similar strategy in fact succeeded in eastern Europe.

Tsou assumes that Zhao's discussions with student leaders show the possibility of a compromise with the Chinese regime. According to another view, the conservative old guard was merely looking for the easiest way to end the protests.39 This view would explain why they tolerated Zhao's attempt to get the students to clear Tiananmen Square peacefully but purged him after he failed. The leadership's prag- matic attitude should not be mistaken for a genuine commitment to negotiation with the opposition. The old guard never wavered from its hard-line stance.

It can thus be argued that the chief weakness of the Chinese students' strategy was not that it was too radical but that it was too moderate. The Chinese student leaders made only vague demands for democracy and called for reformed socialism that did not directly challenge the regime.40 This strategy was different from the anticommunism espoused by most eastern European dissidents, including the Civic

69


Forum in Czechoslovakia, which called for liberal democracy and a market economy.41 Rasma Karklins and Roger Petersen suggest that the student protesters "accepted the regime's right to rule and focused on the need to fight corruption and introduce some political reforms."42 Andrew Nathan has argued that the students acted as "remonstrators rather than opponents."43 Although a large number of workers nevertheless joined the protests, Karklins and Petersen suggest that a more liberal democratic opposition would have made more efforts to mobilize them. The size of the Tiananmen protests might have reached a "tipping point" that would have caused the regime to collapse.44 Instead, the numbers of demonstrators dwindled continu- ously after the declaration of martial law. Why were the Chinese students revisionists and not eastern European-style dissidents?

Comparing the Explanations

The strengths and weaknesses of each explanation have already been commented upon. Comparing them along structural and actor-centered dimensions reveals a further problem. As structural or macro-level explanations, party legitimacy and societal modernization are too far from the events of 1989. They attempt a causal explanation through the elucidation of party and societal strength, respectively. But by focusing on temporally distant processes (the revolutionary or nonrevolutionary origins of the party's rise to power) or phenomena only indirectly related to the political activity (social mobilization), they are unable to complete the causal chain to leadership behavior or opposition strategies, respectively, during the 1989 crisis. This missing link is also evident on the actor or micro level. Explanations based on leadership behavior and opposition strategies are too near to their subject. They analyze how hard-liners behaved and oppositionists strategized but do not explain why certain behaviors or strategies succeeded or failed (see Table 1).

Richard Snyder and James Mahoney argue that this missing variable between the macro and micro level is to be found in regime institutions, that is, regime types.45 It will be demonstrated below that the posttotalitarian regime type can strengthen the explanations individually and help link structural to actor-based ones. Anthony Giddens reminds us that structures both constrain and enable action.46 By differentiating between subtypes of posttotalitarianism, the constraining and enabling impact party legitimacy has on leadership decisiveness can be more easily grasped. Similarly, the way civil society's ability to mobilize affects the opposition can be more accurately assessed. But despite this emphasis on structures, a significant degree of freedom remains at the actor end of the causal chain. Decisive leadership becomes more or less likely, not inevitable or impossible. The chances of opposition success are improved or hampered by the degree of social mobilization, not predetermined by them, as their own choice of strategy remains a significant part of the overall explanation.

70

MarkR. Thompson

Table 1 Explanatory Strengths and Weaknesses

[ Party Legitimacy Societal Modernization

| Strength: Strength: l Distinguishes "home-growfi Contrasts high levels of

g legitimacy in China from external social mobilization in Eastern | dependency m Eastern Europe. Europe with lower level in China.

Weakness: .Weaknes.:| . Cannot explain general loss of Cannot eplain political 0

elite support over time even by mobilizabitlty tough social a "home-grown" party, e.g. mobilization alone. Gorbachev's Soviet Union.

Leadership Behavior - Opposition Strategies

l Satrngth: Strength:. Contrasts decisive Chinese with Contrasts 'revisionism" of paralyzed East European Chinese students with Eastern

X&. leaderhip. Europeman "dissidence".

We eaaess: Wakness\ Cannot explain why. Cannot explain why.

Totalitarianism and Posttotalitarianism

According to a central premise of totalitarian theory, totalitarian regimes' coercive capacities are so great that political change from within is virtually impossible. In their classic analysis on totalitarianism, Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote that to be a dissenter in a totalitarian dictatorship "is an intolerable offense to the grandeur of the totalitarian enterprise and [the dissenter] must be liquidated because, according to the ideology, [the dissenter] has no place in the world the totalitarian is bent upon building."47 No regime has been fully totalitarian, and opposition has never been fully crushed. Nonetheless, totalitarian regimes such as Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China have gone further than any other regime type in suppressing their opponents.

Only under posttotalitarian Communism is organized dissent thinkable and the question whether or not it will be suppressed worth posing. The end of the worst human rights abuses in the Soviet bloc (arbitrary executions and the Gulag) made the consequences of dissent more calculable and less catastrophic. Hannah Arendt was one of the first observers to recognize this change in the Soviet Union after Stalin. Arendt showed that dissent was conceivable after Stalinism, even if it was still dan-

71


gerous.48 The writings of Vaclav Havel offer the most eloquent analysis of the possibility of opposition under posttotalitarian Communist regimes (a term Havel used).49 Havel dissected the dangers of dissent but also showed the limits of terror. Demotion at work, the loss of holidays, and discrimination (particularly in higher education) against one's children are not sanctions that can be lightly dismissed, but they are far short of concentration camps and executions. Obedience to the regime was no longer commanded through ideological belief but rather through the small advantages to be gained by getting along with the powers that be. Havel's famous description of the greengrocer who puts up a Communist poster in his shop captures this outer confor- mity without inner conviction.50 The official ideology is no longer believed by either the regime or society but is used as a general justification, as an "all-embracing excuse" to keep up pretenses, to '"live within a lie" to such an extent that it becomes "a world of appearances trying to pass for reality."

Juan J. Linz has developed the most systematic concept of posttotalitarianism and, in collaboration with Alfred Stepan, recently elaborated it as a distinct regime type.51 They define posttotalitarianism along four dimensions: leadership, pluralism, ideology, and mobilization. The chief feature of posttotalitarianism is its collective leadership; it is both the most obvious difference with totalitarianism and the chief reason why this new regime type came into existence. Totalitarian leadership, justi- fied by an elaborate ideological mission and unconstrained by law, is usually charis- matic. But it is dangerous for those of whom the ruler grows suspicious, particularly for high ranking cadre. Fearing a "permanent purge," post-Stalinists in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe as well as the CCP after Mao established a bureaucratic form of collective leadership, with sharp limits on the powers of the top leader and corresponding safety guarantees for his subordinates.52 While totalitarianism attempted to abolish all plural elements in society, posttotalitarianism is character- ized by limited political pluralism. Posttotalitarianism, as Havel showed, is highly ideological only on the surface. While the official ideological canon still exists, actu- al belief in it declines. Regime mobilization of society, too, is only a shadow of its former totalitarian self. It becomes ritualized and unenthusiastic. Party leaders and the masses go through the motions at marches, rallies, and meetings without the strong commitments of old. The attempt to politicize the private sphere is abandoned. The Hungarian leader Janos Kadar's slogan in the 1 960s-"those who are not against us are with us" sums up the official acceptance of such political passivity. Havel shows how the average person again his greengrocer-might one day choose to give up "living within a lie" in order to "live within the truth" instead.53 When the circumstances prove favorable (as they did after Gorbachev's rise to power in the Soviet Union), mass rebellion may break out against the regime, and there will be little resistance from powerholders who lack "any authentic conviction."54

An explanatory problem remains, however. If totalitarianism seemed "too strong" (such regimes will always shoot), posttotalitarianism appears "too weak" (they will

72

lMark R. Thonmpson

never fire at demonstrators). If Havel is right about the ideological hollowness of these regimes, then they should collapse once society finally rises up in protest. Since the regime did not collapse in China, it is necessary to distinguish between regime subtypes.

Subtypes of Posttotalitarianism

Linz and Stepan delineate the subtypes of early and frozen posttotalitarianism. The Soviet Union after Stalin and China after Mao are examples of early while Czechoslovakia and East Germany are cases of frozen posttotalitarianism.55 The third subtype, mature posttotalitarianism, is relevant in understanding late reform Communism in Hungary and Gorbachev's Soviet Union. Unlike reformist, mature posttotalitarian regimes that recognized or even negotiated with organized opposition, both early and frozen posttotalitarian regimes considered suppressing popular protest violently. The question was whether these hard-line regimes would collapse before they shot.

Early posttotalitarianism is classified according to its timing. Its closeness to totalitarianism is its crucial characteristic. Civil society was flattened by the totalitarian period. Many totalitarian controls remained, although they were used more spar- ingly. Some dissent was unofficially tolerated, especially when it contributed to de- Stalinization or de-Maoization. Yet there were limits to such tolerance. Although there was no major organized protest in the Soviet Union under Khrushchev, the crushing of the 1956 reform government in Hungary showed the leadership's will- ingness to use force against counterrevolutionaries.

Frozen posttotalitarianism is defined by its political temperature.56 The political climate grew colder after heated experimentation was abandoned. Past reforms, primarily economic but also flirtations with political liberalization, had long been dis- carded and party reformers had been purged. This freezing was most obvious in Czechoslovakia after the Soviet invasion that turned the Prague spring into the long winter known as normalization. It was also apparent in East Germany where promar- ket cadre had been silenced, and the leading architect of the new economic policy of the 1960s, Erich Apel, committed suicide.57 Khrushchev's popularity, which derived largely from his post-Stalinist reforms, was replaced by the deep freeze of the Brezhnev era.

What the Subtypes Add to the Explanations

Party Legitimacy The subtypes of posttotalitarianism explain why the indigenous revolutionary legitimacy of the CCP survived in early posttotalitarian China but not

73


in frozen and mature periods of the CPSU under and after Brezhnev. Deng and others in the Chinese old guard who launched posttotalitarianism after Mao's death were still part of the revolutionary generation. By contrast, Brezhnev, who froze the Soviet Union's posttotalitarian politics, was a fourth generation leader, following Lenin, Stalin, and Khrushchev.58 As in China, the hierarchy of the Soviet bloc Communist parties became increasingly old, but revolutionary glory did not com- pensate for age. The "gang of elders" in China? as they were disrespectfully termed by younger party members, had fought and defeated the forces of imperialism and reaction in 1949. These revolutionary credentials insured the old guard's dominance during the Tiananmen crisis. Gorbachev, by contrast, faced a "double defection" in 1990-91 of reformers and conservatives alike.59 Lacking a comparable revolutionary network to rally the party at a time of crisis, the CPSU fragmented into warring camps, culminating in the August 1991 coup attempt whose supporters included the minister of defense and the head of the KGB. In China such betrayal was unthinkable, as "the CCP and PLA hierarchies, especially at the higher echelons of leadership, remained inextricably intertwined."60 Although both had indigenous Communist regimes, erosion of party legitimacy in China under early posttotalitarianism had only begun, while in the Soviet Union it was well advanced.

Lacking indigenous legitimacy as dependents of the Soviet Union, eastern Europe suffered the most extreme ideological decay. Havel described this situation in Czechoslovakia, where the growing cynicism and hypocrisy of both the population and the regime severely weakened ideology. But the self-justification of these hard- line European regimes eroded further when they rejected Gorbachev's reformist course. The loss of the remaining orientation provided by the ideological motherland was devastating to party members' belief in their own legitimacy. Although there was no clash between conservatives and reformers as in China and Gorbachev's USSR, unity did not bring strength to hard-line Communist parties in Czechoslovakia and East Germany.

An additional source of party legitimacy in early posttotalitarianism was the haulting of the worst excesses of totalitarianism for high ranking cadre (Stalin's purges and the Cultural Revolution). Rehabilitated cadre (including, of course, Deng) were particularly enthusiastic about the new order. The party's collective security was assured by the end of totalitarian purges. Such security-based elite legitimacy gradually declined as party members began to take their safety for granted under later forms of posttotalitarianism. Instead, collective Communist leadership became increasingly bureaucratized, giving the regime a technocratic veneer that was some- times mistaken for a reformist stance.61

Early posttotalitarian regimes also enjoy elite performance legitimacy through rapid economic growth that follows the abolition of the most irrational aspects of totalitarian planning and campaigning. Both Khrushchev and Deng focused on the economy, which had suffered under the excessive, ideologically driven policies of

74

Mark R. Thompson

totalitarianism. Early posttotalitarian rulers in China enjoyed the fruits of easy economic reforms that could be undertaken merely by lifting rigid controls on farmers and no longer exploiting them to subsidize the cities.62 Economic growth reached miracle levels from 1979 to 1989.63 Although the party leadership split over economic reforms in the mid 1980s conservatives merely wanted a more efficient planned economy, while reformers argued in favor of further growth of the private sector-all factions were committed to repairing the damage caused by the Cultural Revolution. This agreement strengthened party morale, even as inflation and growing inequality contributed to popular discontent, particularly in urban areas.64 Yet, as Paul Krugman pointed out in a prescient article written just before the recent Asian financial crisis, high growth rates were also once registered in the Soviet bloc as well, only for it later to be discovered that they rested on shaky, low productivity foundations.65 Long-term economic decline in eastern Europe sapped regime self-confidence.

Societal Modernization Upon Deng's ascent to power, Chinese society was socioeconomically backward and politically demobilized. Much of Mao's state-driven industrialization strategy had failed, society was atomized, and public discourse was monopolized.66 All social groups had been profoundly transformed (though workers more than peasants).67 After years of intense ideological campaigns and state terror, an autonomous civil society had to be built almost from scratch. The Democracy Wall movement of 1978-79 was the first major organized opposition in China since the 1950s.68 Contacts with the outside world through travel, business, educational exchanges, and a more liberal (though still censored) media were just beginning, although this initial opening shocked intellectuals and students by revealing China's backwardness and lack of societal autonomy.69 In addition, many of the old mechanisms of social control remained intact; posttotalitarian leaders still enjoyed much of the power of the old totalitarian state apparatus, even if they used it more judiciously. Crucially, after the declaration of martial law on May 19, 1989, many workers were locked up in their enterprises during the protests, while others feared the loss of their jobs, which were linked to social benefits including housing.70

In frozen posttotalitarian regimes in eastern Europe, by contrast, society was more socioeconomically modernized, and the ability to mobilize politically had increased. Through Radio Free Europe in Czechoslovakia and West German televi- sion in East Germany, as well as contacts with foreigners and limited travel opportunities, substantial information about the outside world was available. Most Czechoslovakians and East Germans, like Havel's greengrocer, were not politically active, but they saw very clearly that they were "living within a lie." Despite the increased repression that often followed the abandonment of early posttotalitarian reform efforts, a number of autonomous social groups had become established. The thirty-five-year time span since Stalinism gave social groups time to organize support, develop traditions and rituals, and find niches in which they were relatively

75


protected.71 In response, the size of the secret police and its network of informers reached grotesque proportions. They kept dissident social groups under constant sur- veillance but could not crush them, nor could they later stop these social groups from leading a revolt against the regime.72

In the GDR the loosely organized citizens' movement made up largely of intellectuals and artists found support in the Protestant church and received some backing from West Germany, particularly in the Green Party.73 Since the 1953 worker-led rebellion, the regime had bent over backwards to woo the working class by easing workplace constraints.74 Nevertheless, the Stasi chief, Erich Mielke, reported that the Leipzig demonstrations in October 1989 enjoyed strong labor support and that workers increasingly criticized the regime at their workplace.75

Despite the severe repression that accompanied normalization in Czechoslovakia after 1968, a youth counterculture developed alongside groups of dissident intellectuals, conservative Catholic critics, and purged reform Communists. Charter 77 created a loose opposition alliance out of these groups that used the Helsinki human rights process to strengthen its international contacts and raise the costs of domestic regime repression.76 Such pressure from abroad helped limit open crackdowns on the opposition. In the fall of 1989 protests were led by students who enjoyed strong worker support.77

Leadership Behavior Early posttotalitarianism helps explain both why Deng faced a more divided politburo than his hard-line counterparts in eastern Europe and why he still saved the regime in China while East European Communism collapsed. In China after Mao young reformers brought in to reform a moribund economy sat uneasily beside old orthodox Communists who merely wanted to return to pre- Cultural Revolution economic planning. Such a divided leadership is typical of early posttotalitarianism, as the split between Khrushchev with his reformist allies and his conservative opponents indicates. In frozen posttotalitarianism in eastern Europe the failure of earlier reform efforts led to the purge of reformers, creating a united politburo by default. Though not facing internal divisions, frozen posttotalitarian leadership was hollowed out in Havel's sense. Neither rulers nor ruled believed in the official ideology. In China, by contrast, the orthodox old guard and the military hierarchy could be rallied because they came from the same interpenetrated generational cohort in which ideology still played an important rule, they valued political stability and personal safety, and they acknowledged improved economic conditions since Mao's death even if they opposed further "capitalist" reforms. Deng could invoke the still fresh fears of disorder caused by the Cultural Revolution while underplaying his own divergent, economic reformist aims.

Opposition Strategies The subtypes of posttotalitarianism help explain why the Chinese student protesters were revisionists while eastern European oppositionists

76

Mark R. Thompson

were more likely to be dissidents. The closer the opposition is to the totalitarian past, the more likely it will cling to socialism, rather than turn to anticommunism. The Prague Spring was revisionist in its aims, the culmination of two decades in which critical eastern European intellectuals had tried to rescue socialism from Stalinism by giving it a "human face." But the frozen regime that followed the defeat of this attempt to reform socialism in Czechoslovakia destroyed any hope of a third way between capitalist democracy and Communist socialism and turned revisionists into dissidents. Due to the ideological strength of antifascism in East Germany, the citizens' movement there remained revisionist. But opposition leaders had limited control over popular protests in which workers were well represented and calls for unification soon emerged. Christian Joppke argues that in the German context these protests amounted to anticommunist dissidence.78 In China, in contrast, many influential opposition leaders were former Red Guards disillusioned with their experience during the Cultural Revolution but still influenced by many of its ideas. It is revealing that during the Tiananmen Square protests, beside the symbol of the goddess of democracy, representations of Mao expressed discontent with the impact of the Communist Party's economic policies.79

As revisionists, the Chinese student opposition did not actively try to form a Solidarity-like coalition of workers and students, the CCP's greatest nightmare.80 Student demonstrators instead took an elitist stance of calling for the return to socialist ideals and were reluctant to rally workers against the self-proclaimed party of the proletariat. As a percentage of the work force, urban labor was smaller in China than in eastern Europe. Moreover, the ability to mobilize workers was more constrained by early posttotalitarian China than by the frozen regimes of eastern Europe. Yet the students did not even maximize the possibilities available to them. Had they built an alliance with the workers in the early weeks of the protests, labor organizations might have been created that could have better resisted the crackdown on labor groups after the declaration of martial law in mid May. Because of student revisionism, even the limited opportunities for worker mobilization were not utilized.

Conclusion: Linking the Explanations

In early posttotalitarian China the CCP still enjoyed considerable internal party legitimacy through the revolutionary credentials and ideological conviction of the old guard, the increased personal safety of its members, and the country's rapid economic growth since 1979. The CCP faced a socioeconomically backward society whose totalitarian legacy and still existing state controls (particularly in the workplace) from the totalitarian period limited the ability to mobilize it politically. These constraints on society made it more difficult for the student-led opposition to reach a tipping point in which a mas- sive student-worker alliance would have doomed the regime. But although they demon-

77


strated peacefiully, the student activists did not do all they could to recruit workers, in large part because of their revisionism. They demanded the reform of socialism, not the abolition of Communism. Strong party legitimacy made it possible for Deng to unite the divided party leadership by purging the reformers and to act decisively to crush the protests. The regime pulled together during crisis. It shot.

In East Germany's and Czechoslovakia's frozen posttotalitarianism the loss of Soviet support fiurther weakened party legitimacy that had already been eroded by ideological decay and economic decline. Society, though seemingly passive, was actually both highly modernized socioeconomically and capable of being mobilized politically. When Gorbachev's doctrine and the democratic transitions in Poland and Hungary provided the political opportunity, small opposition groups demanded the end of Communism and were quickly able to win social support, including crucially that of workers, until a tipping point was reached and overwhelmed the regime. Lacking legitimacy and doubtful of the loyalty of their own security apparatuses, hard-line party leaderships in East Germany and Czechoslovakia became paralyzed as peaceful revolutions broke out, and these regimes collapsed (see Figure 1).

The crushing of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989 is the most recent of a failed series of democratic revolutions under Communism: 1953 in Czechoslovakia and East Germany, 1956 in Hungary and Poland, 1968 in Czechoslovakia, and 1970, 1976, and 1980-1981 in Poland. After all these revolutions lost, democracy was finally regained in 1989 in eastern Europe. Whether China's future will be so rosy is uncertain. But by repressing protest, the Chinese regime has become increasingly frozen and thus vulnerable to regime collapse should another crisis occur.

NOTES

An earlier version was presented at the APSA annual meeting, Atlanta, September 2-5, 1999. I would like to thank Daniel V. Friedheim, Peter Gelius, Rasma Karklins, Siegfried Klaschka, Oskar Kurer, Juan J. Lopez, Ann L. Philipps, Steven Saxonberg, Achim Siegel, Stephen White, and four anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

1. In contrast, in China secessionist movements in Tibet and to a lesser extent in northwestern China have been brutally repressed as part of the general illiberality of post-I1989 Communist rule.

2. Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market: Political and Economic Reforms in Eastern Europe and Latin America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 3.

3. Jacques Levesque, The Enigma of 1989: The USSR and the Liberation of Eastern Europe (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), argues against such a simplistic view.

4. Elizabeth Pond, Beyond the Wall: Germany s Road to Unification (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1993), pp. 111-12.

5. Ibid. 6. Bernard Wheaton and Zdenek Kavan, The Velvet Revolution: Czechoslovakia 1988-1991 (Boulder:

Westview, 1992), pp. 61, 72.

78

X -~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~O 4I

' ',iSiSS, "Early": High mobilization constraints Sl

o J S }-Xi obstruct revisionist opposition reaching "tipping poinmt"f'

Qcs z "IFrozen" Low mobilization constraints t| ~ ; < ^~~ease "bandwagoning" by dissidents

'o S

cO .

I'"~~~~~~~~~~~~~~) ''

EI I, |^I ,)

c * *a 0 > *

o ; * 3

. e 3^ -S : a c) 1 '-

+-*~'~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

- SC

> g--*_ IISSSK^ 9 "Early": Revolutionary legitimacy (if regime "home-grown"), collective t=- : ^- .2 security, and economic growth make decisive leadership possible W. Sa; ;;S

- i:;?SiS^^ ff Frozenk: Post-revolutionary leadership generation and/or loss of support - SBI^K ^

3 r; - i -f after economic decline and ideological decay make paralysis likely I :- KSi ._ ,,,....ii.... . .. .. . .. ..

._* t


7. Mark R. Thompson, 'The Survival of 'Asian Values' as Zivilisationskritik" Theory and Society, 29 (2000).

8. For an appropriately sarcastic analysis see Jacob Heilbrunn, "The Clash of Samuel Huntingtons$' The American Prospect, 39 (July-August 1998), 22-28.

9. Randall Collins, "German-Bashing and the Theory of Democratic Modernization," Zeitschrift fiir Soziologie, 24 (1995), 3-21.

10. Stephen Manning, "Social and Cultural Prerequisites of Democratization: Generalizing from China," in Edward Friedman, ed., The Politics of Demlocratization: Generalizing East Asian Experiences (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994), pp. 232-48.

11. Not all culturalist arguments are so essentialist. See Lucian W. Pye, "Tiananmen and Chinese Political Culture: The Escalation of Confrontation from Moralizing to Revenge," Asian Sturvey, 30 (April 1990), 331-47.

12. John Segal and John Phipps, "Why Communist Armies Defend Their Parties," Asian Survey, 30 (October 1990), 959-76.

13. Ibid., pp. 960-61,972-73. 14. A point Weber also analyzed. Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive

Sociology, vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 212-13. 15. T. H. Rigby and Ferenc Feher, "Ilntroduction," in T. H. Rigby and Ferene Feher, eds., Political

Legitimation in C'omnmunist States (London: Macmillan, 1982), p. 15. 16. Maria Marcus, "Overt and Covert Modes of Legitimation in East European Societies," in Rigby

and Feher, eds., pp. 82-93, cited in Giuseppe Di Palma, "Legitimation from the Top to Civil Society: Politico-Cultural Change in Eastern Europe*" World Politics, 43 (1991), 55.

17. Di Palma, p. 56. 18. Daniel V. Friedheim, "Democratic Transition through Regime Collapse: East Germany in 1989"

(Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1997), pp. 53-65. 19. Ibid., Table 37, p. 421, and ch. 8. 20. Juan J. Linz and Alfred Stepan, Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation: Southern

Europe, South America, and Post-Communist Europe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 322-28. 21. Andrew Scobell, "Why the People's Army Fired on the People," in Roger V. Des Forges, Luo Ning,

and Wu Yen-bo, eds., Chinese Democracy and the Crisis of 1989: Chinese and American Reflections (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1993). pp. 191-221.

22. Stephen White, After Gorbachev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 23-27, Richard Sakwa, "The Revolution of 1991 in Russia: Interpretations of the Moscow Coup," Coexistence, 29 (December 1992), 335-75; John B. Dunlop, The Rise and the Fall of the Soviet Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), ch. 5. For his own (controversial) account, see Mikhail Gorbachev, The August Coup (London: HarperCollins, 1991).

23. Minxin Pei, From Reform to Revolution: The Demise of Communism in China and the Soviet Union (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), chs. 1, 2. Also see Xiaoxing Han, "Democratic Transition in China: A Comparative Examination of a Deified Idea," in Des Forges, Ning, and Wu, eds., pp. 224-28.

24. Pei, p. 58 (emphasis in the original). 25. In 1997-98 Freedom House gave Malawi a rating of "free:" while Singapore was considered "part-

ly free," although the former had a real GDP per capita (PPP) of only $695, while the latter had one of $20,987. Adrian Karatnycky, ed., Freedom in the World 1997-1998: The Annual Survey of Political Rights and Civil Liberties (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1998).

26. Pei, p. 52. 27. Ibid., p. 57.

80

MarkR. Thompson

28. Mark Selden, "The Social Origins and Limits of the Democratic Movement," in Des Forges, Ning, and Wu, eds., p. 124. 29. Pei, Table 2.2, p. 59. 30. The National Statistics Bureau, ed., Zhongguo tongji nianjian 1988 (Beijing: Chinese Statistics

Press, 1988), pp. 117-30, cited in Shaoguang Wang, "From a Pillar of Continuity to a Force for Change: Chinese Workers in the Movement," in Des Forges, Ning, and Wu, eds., p. 180.

31. Mark R. Thompson, "Whatever Happened to Democratic Revolutions?," Democratization (2000). 32. Marc Blecher, China against the Tides. Restructuzring through Revolution, Radicalism and Reform

(London: Pinter, 1997), p. 106. Elsewhere, however, Blecher's argument is more structuralist. 33. Ibid., pp. 107-8. 34. Steven Saxonberg, "Regime Behavior during Crisis: A Comparison of East European Regimes in

1989," paper presented at the APSA annual meeting, Atlanta, September 2-5, 1999, p. 4. Also Steven Saxonberg, The Fall: Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Hungaryn and Poland in a Comparative Perspective (London: Harwood Academic, 2001).

35. Tang Tsou, "The Tiananmen Tragedy: The State-Society Relationship, Choices, and Mechanisms in Historical Perspective," in Jan Elster, ed., The Roundtable Talks (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 213-40. 36. Ibid., p. 222. 37. Ibid., pp. 223-24. 38. Timothy Brook, Quelling the People: The Military Suppression of the Beijing Opposition

Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), Introduction. 39. Scobell, pp. 194-95. 40. Selden, pp. 126-27. 41. Wheaton and Kavan, pp. 206-8. 42. Rasma Karklins and Roger Petersen, "Decision Calculus of Protesters and Regimes: Eastern

Europe 1989," The Journal of Politics, 55 (August 1993), 610. 43. Andrew J. Nathan, "Chinese Democracy in 1989: Continuity and Change," Problems of

Communism (September-October 1989), 17, cited in Karklins and Petersen, p. 610. 44. Karklins and Petersen, p. 610. 45. Richard Snyder and James Mahoney, "The Missing Variable: Institutions and the Study of Regime

Change," Comparative Politics, 32 (October 1999), pp. 103-22. 46. Anthony Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in

Social Analysis (London: Macmillan, 1979), pp. 59-73. 47. Carl J. Friedrich and Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), p. 135. 48. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1976), pp.

xxxvi-xxxvii. 49. Vaclav Havel et al., The Power of the Powerless: Citizens against the State in Central-Eastern

Europe (London: Hutchinson, 1985). For background on the term "posttotalitarian" see Mark R. Thompson, "Neither Totalitarian nor Authoritarian: Post-Totalitarianism in Eastern Europe," in Achim Siegel, ed., The Totalitarian Paradigm after the End of Communism: Towards a Theoretical Reassessment (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998), pp. 303-28. 50. Havel, pp. 27-28. 51. Juan J. Linz, "Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes," in Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby,

eds., Handbook of Political Science, vol. 3 (Cambridge, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1975), pp. 175-411; Linz and Stepan, chs. 3, 4, 17.

52. Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, The Permanent Purge: Politics in Soviet Totalitarianism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956).

53. Havel, pp. 39-40.

81


54. Ibid. 55. For another approach applying a modified version of totalitarian theory to China, see Weizhi Xie, "The

Semihierarchical Totalitarian Nature of Chinese Politics,' Comparative Politics, 25 (April 1993), 313-30. Chien-min Chao, "Some Thoughts on the Party-Legislature Relations of Leninist Regimes: The Case of China," paper presented at the Conference on Institutional Analysis of Political Transitions in Germany and China, Beijing, September 13-14, 1999, uses the term "posttotalitarian authoritarian regime."

56. Linz and Stepan drew the term frozen posttotalitarianism from Timothy Garton Ash, "Czechoslovakia under the Ice," in The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe (New York: Random House, 1989), pp. 61-70. 57. Hermann Weber, DDR: Grundri/J der GeschiChte 1945--1990 (Hanover: Fackeltrager, 1991), pp.

119-121,260. 58. Susan L. Shirk, The Political Logic of Economic Reform in China (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1993), p. 12. 59. Philip G. Roeder, Red Sunset:. The Failure of olviet Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1993), pp. 239-45. 60. Scobell, p. 192. Such party-military interpenetration went back as far as the 1920s, when key

members of the old guard had held important military positions and "can be logically classified as 'military men.'

61. Peter Christian Ludz, The Changing Party Elite in fEast Germlany (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1972). 62. In later posttotalitarianism, as in the Soviet Union under Brezhnev, the state began to subsidize

farmers; farming collectives accustomed to state largess often initially viewed market reforms hostilely. See Mark Selden, "Post-Collective Agrarian Alternatives in Russia and China," in Barrett L. McCormick and Jonathan Unger, eds., China after Socialism: In the Footsteps of Eastern Europe or East Asia? (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), pp. 7-28. 63. This miracle growth rate was canonized in World Bank, The East Asian Miracle: Economic

Growth and Public Policy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), Box 1.3, p. 59. China enjoyed an annual GNP growth of 9.4 percent from 1979 to 1989, with a surge of 11.34 percent from 1982 to 1988. 64. Selden, "Limits of the Democratic Movement," pp. 114-20. 65. Paul Krugman, "The Myth of Asia's Miracle," Foreign Affairs (November-December 1994),

62-78. 66. Barrett L. McCormick, Su Shaozhi, and Xiao Xiaoming, "The 1989 Democracy Movement: A

Review of the Prospects for Civil Society in China," Pacific Affairs, 65 (Summer 1992), 186-187. 67. Selden, "Post-Collective Agrarian Alternatives," pp. 7-28. 68. A demonstration against the Gang of Four in Tiananmen Square on April 5, 1976, though small,

could also date the beginning of the revival of China's democracy movement. 69. Selden, "Limits of the Democratic Movement," p. 111. 70. Andrew Walder, "The Political Sociology of the Beijing Upheaval of 1989," Problems of

Comnmunismn (September-October 1989), 30-40, cited in Karklins and Petersen, p. 609. 71. This term was coined by the West German diplomat Gunter Gaus, Wo Deutschland liegt (Munich:

Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1986). 72. On the East German Stasi see David Childs and Richard Opplewell, The Stasi: East German

Intelligence and Security Service (New York: New York University Press, 1996); Walter SuB, Staatssicherheit am Ende: Warum es den Mdchtigen nicht gelang, 1989 eine Revolution zu verhindern (Berlin: Ch. Links, 1999). On the StB see Wheaton and Kavan, pp. 136-37.

73. For an encyclopedic look at the East German opposition, see Ehrhart Neubert, Geschichte der Opposition in der DDR 1949-1989 (Bonn: Bundeszentrale fur politische Bildung, 1997). Also see Hagen Findeis, Detlef Pollack, and Manuel Schilling, Die Entzauberung des Politischen: Was ist aus den poli- tisch alternativen Grnppen der DDR geworden? (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1994). The best

82

Mark R. Thompson

English language studies are Christian Joppke, East German Dissidents and the Revolution of 1989. Social Movements in a Leninist Regime (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995); and John Torpey, Intellectuals, Socialism, and Dissent.: The East German Opposition and Its Legacy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995).

74. Jeffrey Kopstein, The Politics of Economic Decline in East Germany, 1945-1989 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

75. Cited in SuB, pp. 339, 360-61. 76. Wheaton and Kavan, pp. 11-13. The standard work on the establishment of Charter 77 is Gordon

H. Skilling, Charter 77 and Human Rights in Czechoslovakia (London: George Alien and Unwin, 1981). 77. Ibid., pp. 606-7. 78. Joppke, ch. 5. Also see Mark R. Thompson, "A Hostile People but a Loyal Opposition: National

Identity and Anti-Fascism in the GDR," in Howard Williams, Colin Wight, and Norbert Kapfer, eds., Political Thought and German Reunification (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 1-27.

79. Selden, "Limits of the Democratic Movement," p. 127. 80. Ibid., p. 121.

83

to shoot or not to shoot：posttotalitarianism in china and eastern europe

Documents