China's increasingly abundant economic banquet of recent years has been haunted by ghosts of the bloody Tiananmen massacre of 1989. For most of the dozen years since, China's leaders have tried to ignore those specters.
But with President Jiang Zemin and his colleagues getting ready to retire, those ghosts are looking a lot more frightening to them, while the frivolity of the banquet has less and less ability to distract.
This way of understanding China today explains many things, including perhaps, the arrests of China-born American scholars -- most recently Shaomin Li, a Princeton-trained demographer (and friend of this writer) who now teaches in Hong Kong and was detained just across the border in Shenzhen a month ago (though the news has only just broken).
Professor Li, now 45, is typical of his generation of educated Chinese. He participated in the democracy movements of the late 1980s that culminated in the massacre, but like many others in his cohort, he also set aside his activism -- but not his beliefs -- when confronted by the overwhelming brute force of the Chinese state. Instead, he turned his attention to the peaceful study of the myriad social transformations that economic liberalization was bringing to China, hoping and expecting that these would slowly bring the changes that street demonstrations had not.
But when the time comes, probably within the next decade, to write the history of China during the turbulent years of the democracy movement and the massacre, one can expect that people such as Li will write it and that they will not spare the memory of Jiang Zemin or even Deng Xiaoping. This inevitable development is what has the current leadership so frightened.
The process of historical truth-telling already took a huge step forward earlier this year with the publication of the Tiananmen Papers -- a compilation of secret inner-party documents related to the decision, which not only revealed the disarray of the Chinese leadership in 1989 but also made clear -- and this is what really spooked the leaders -- that people high in the party were smuggling out top-secret documents to support the democratizing agenda.
The response? The leadership already has repaved and landscaped Tiananmen Square, inveigled President Clinton into speaking there and even proposed using the square to host the Olympic volleyball competition. Now some sharp teeth are being bared. Dissidents report that party units are undergoing compulsory indoctrination about Tiananmen, Politburo members have been sworn never to overturn the verdict that the movement was "counterrevolutionary" and death has been promised for anyone involved in translating or disseminating the Chinese version of the Tiananmen Papers.
Widespread rumor has it that Li and others now being detained have in common not anything they have done recently but rather their attitudes and activities in 1988 and 1989. Disillusioned former Taiwanese intelligence officers who have gone to China since President Chen Shui-bian's election may have provided sensitive information about Taipei's relationship to the democracy movement a dozen years ago. But the fundamental reason activities long ago are suddenly sensitive today, after a decade of live and let live, is that a change is coming in the Chinese leadership -- and, eventually, in the official assessment of 1989.
In other words, even though Americans are being arrested, the key to this story is to be found not in Washington (where many commentators look first) but in China itself.
The arrest of Americans does, however, put Washington in a difficult position. For if we make a stink about these detentions the Chinese will see to it that every other aspect of our relationship suffers. A chorus of business lobbyists, foreign leaders, American experts and so forth will then lift their voices to blame the Bush administration's "overreaction" for a deterioration in relations with China. But if we don't make a stink, then we will confirm Beijing's impression that we are irresolute and easily manipulated -- and thus invite more misbehavior.
For that second reason (as well as for the fundamental rights of the people detained), our only correct choice is to insist on their immediate release -- and pressure Beijing steadily until that is achieved.
The writer is a professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania and director of Asian Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.