China The Wrath of Deng

Surely this way madness lies. Having suffered through the massacre of thousands, China continued to lose its mind, lurching from question to question, contradiction to contradiction, sorrow to sorrow. Who was in charge? Would soldiers of the People's Liberation Army fight one another? Had the yearning for political change been snuffed out or merely suspended? What next for an anguished nation of 1.1 billion?

China last week was not the China of freedom banners and victory signs. That China perished on June 4. The new China brutally rejected the demands for change that are sweeping the Communist world. But in ordering the bloody suppression of the democracy movement, the government lost much of its authority, leaving itself isolated and condemned at home and abroad. There are even fears that Chinese Communism may be reaching backward for a discredited tool. Warned a Western diplomat: "Everything that has gone on has been preparation for Stalinist terror. Deng Xiaoping is an old Communist who , believes that when you don't observe party discipline, you are dead."

Yet, after days of invisibility, as Deng and his conservative supporters, appropriately clad in Mao suits, paraded across the television screen to show their grip on power late last week, the contradictions -- and the questions -- remained. For the time being, the old men seemed to be in control again. But for how long? If the Chinese were being cowed into submission, a long- standing compact between them and their government had been broken. Tiananmen Square and Beijing might belong to the P.L.A., but the struggle for control of China is far from over.

That did not appear to matter in the red-walled Zhongnanhai compound, where China's leaders live and work. The dead apparently did not matter either to the aging revolutionaries who came to power by force 40 years ago -- and used force to keep it. Reason itself did not seem to matter. The government that once trumpeted the need to "seek truth from facts" manufactures facts to buttress lies.

In the days after the Tiananmen massacre, government organs pressed a surreal drive to mislead the country about what had happened. Most of the victims of what they described as a battle against "counterrevolutionary insurgents" were soldiers, claimed a government spokesman, who placed among the dead a few hundred troops and only 23 students. Hours later, those figures were revised again and turned into impossibly good news by a man in military uniform on state television. Said the officer: "Not one person died in the square." Late last week state radio was even claiming that no soldiers opened fire in Tiananmen.

The truth was different, and Beijing knew it. An estimated 5,000 citizens died in only a few hours between Saturday night and Sunday morning after units of the P.L.A.'s 27th Army launched their brutal assault to oust pro-democracy students from Tiananmen; the exact number of victims may never be known.