Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century (64 page)

Official anxiety about religion is reflected not only in the party’s continued persecution of Falun Gong but also in its efforts to ensure state control of other confessions. Tibetan Buddhism, for obvious reasons, is particularly high on the list. But so too, rather oddly, is Roman Catholicism, a faith that claims only about 13 million believers in China. The refusal of the People’s Republic to establish diplomatic relations with the Holy See has much to do with the history of Christian missionary movements as collaborators with Western colonial movements, but it also owes a great deal to Beijing’s sharp awareness of the role played by the Catholic Church in the collapse of Eastern European Communism. Once again, while secular Westerners tend to discount the political role of religion, this is a mistake that Communists are less inclined to make.

Chinese Communist Party leaders take political history very seriously. It is not only the challenge of organized faith that worries them. They are also extremely sensitive to the disruptive potential of “crises of prosperity” of the kind that—to name but one example—brought down the shah in 1979. (The CCP has not restricted its analysis of the weaknesses of one-party rule to Communist Eastern Europe at the end of the 1980s; its studies also encompass places as varied as Indonesia, Mexico, Taiwan, and Japan.)
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As the example of 1970s Iran demonstrates, rapid economic growth can be profoundly destabilizing. As people watch society change before their eyes, old values can appear outmoded or inadequate. Sudden prosperity, as welcome as it is, can bring in its wake nagging ethical, political, and even metaphysical questions—especially if one of the results of development is a dramatic uptick in the gap between rich and poor. And, indeed, one striking trait of economic reform in China since 1979 has been a stark increase in inequality, a feature that distinguishes it dramatically from the other East Asian tigers. In terms of wealth distribution, in fact, contemporary China is much more similar to Brazil, Mexico, or Indonesia than to Taiwan or South Korea.
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So it is not a surprise that the Chinese Communist Party has taken measures to fill the resulting “meaning gap.” In the wake of the 1989 Tiananmen Square
massacre, Deng Xiaoping and his comrades tried to compensate for the loss of faith in Marxist-Leninist dogma by playing up patriotism and pride in the glories of the Chinese past. The party’s propaganda campaign intensified an already existent nationalist trend, particularly among young people, that may prove hard to manage in the years to come. (Extreme nationalism was also one of the by-products of the “late modernization” of Meiji Japan and late-nineteenth-century Germany—and in neither case was it an experience that ended well for the world.) In the twenty-first century, the powers that be in Beijing have also experimented with a revival of traditional Confucian values, with particular emphasis on the Great Sage’s message of respect for authority. But this, too, could potentially backfire: Confucius had minimal tolerance for corrupt or self-serving public officials—a concern shared by many of the Internet critics of the present regime.

It is striking that many of those who lived through it in China depict the turnaround of 1979 in moral terms rather than strictly economic ones. Even if the Communist Party continued to preserve its prerogatives, the rejection of the principle that ideology was more important than everything else amounted to a widening of personal freedom that most Chinese regarded with relief. “[The year] 1979 is very important for me,” one Chinese journalist told me. “It’s a watershed. Before that we were living in the Cultural Revolution movement and class struggle. After 1979 there was one word:
humanity
.”
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The creative energy of millions of Chinese people unleashed by the reforms of 1979 has produced remarkable achievements. How sustainable those achievements will prove in the end depends to a large extent on the Communist Party’s ability to respect the humanity of its citizens.

As I strolled around Kabul on a clear, chilly afternoon in January 2002, I happened upon a place called the Behzad Book Store. At that particular moment, a few months after the collapse of the Taliban regime, the Afghan capital was enjoying a moment of peace and hope in the future; everywhere, it seemed, people were starting new businesses, expressing a longing for prosperity so long thwarted by years of war. But it was really the past that caught my eye. I was surprised to see so much surviving evidence of the period of relative prosperity that Afghanistan had experienced in the 1960s and 1970s. The cars on the street included a disproportionate number of Volkswagen Beetles and fat Chevrolets so familiar from my far-away American childhood. (Some of them still had their eight-track tape players.) The magazine that I worked for had rented a place for its employees to live in, and the ranch-style house, with its shag carpeting and tubular aluminum light fixtures, evoked exactly the same period. When US Marines reopened the long-dormant US Embassy, they
found stacks of intact vinyl records in the basement—Billy Joel and the Eagles—and a perfectly good turntable to play them with.

The best time capsule of all, though, turned out to be the Behzad Book Store, which had managed to save much of its inventory through the years of Taliban rule. (Some of it, the owners told me, they had preserved by burying it.) Its shelves were like the strata of an archaeological dig: each layer revealed more clues to Afghanistan’s overly eventful recent past. There were thick academic tomes on economics and sociology, in a variety of languages, brought in by the well-meaning development economists and missionary socialists of the 1960s and early 1970s. There were well-thumbed paperback best sellers—such as Alvin Tofflers portentous
Future Shock
, another artifact from my junior high years—in English, German, and French, left behind by the tourists and aid workers who had crowded into the country in the years when they were still welcome. There was a Communist-era propaganda pamphlet entitled
CIA Agents Expose Their Crimes
, published in 1984, in which captured rebels confessed to their sins against the state. And there was even a crudely printed booklet, green letters on a fading yellow paper cover, of Mawdudi’s
Fundamentals of Islam
, translated into Russian. It was, evidently, part of the mujahideens information war, targeting the Red Army troops who hailed from the Muslim republics of Soviet Central Asia.

The most poignant relics of them all, though, were the postcards. The bookstore had a whole wall of them, each one a tiny window onto a happier time. They were produced by Afghans inside their own country—an achievement that seemed almost unimaginable in 2002—in the days when peddling such things to tourists offered plenty of scope for profit. There were wide-angle views of Kabul that showed a picturesque, well-watered metropolis thick with trees. There were inviting pictures of exotic mosques and archeological sites. There was a snapshot of the pool at the Intercontinental Hotel, one light-skinned visitor in the foreground enjoying the turquoise water with the nonchalance of his oblivious present.

There was one image that has haunted me ever since. It showed a glamorous woman sitting on the grass, her knees bent. Her loose, flowing dress was all folkloric swirls, purple and black, a fusion of 1970s psychedelia and ethnic chic. Her head was uncovered, and a cigarette dangled from one casual hand.

I wondered about her fate. Had she somehow managed to survive the Soviet invasion, the antioccupation jihad, the civil war among the victorious mujahideen, the triumph of the Taliban? Had she stayed inside Afghanistan, or had she been forced to live her life in one of those huge refugee camps in Pakistan? Had she
perhaps joined the hundreds of thousands of Afghans who succeeded in fleeing to the United States, or Germany, or Eastern Europe, and started a new life there? Or was she now, invisibly aged, passing by the shop as I stood there, hidden away beneath one of the light-blue burkas that seemingly all the women in Kabul were wearing in early 2002? And, if so, how would she feel about being forced to live her life under wraps? It was such a stark contrast to the moment depicted in the photo, when many women could still stroll the streets with uncovered heads. By the time of the early twenty-first century, the women who might have taken her place were mostly confined to their homes and frequently prohibited from holding jobs. It was hard to imagine burka-clad women smoking cigarettes.
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And it wasn’t just her. Her Afghanistan had vanished as well. The tourists who had once provided a market for these postcards were long gone, and the photographers and publishers who had manufactured and sold these images had vanished, too. The hotels had shut, and the archaeological sites had become too dangerous to visit. The domestic textile industry that had once hoped to expand its markets through advertising had been consumed by decades of war and impoverishment. It was almost impossible to reconcile the Kabul in the postcards with the city that surrounded me, a place of dusty riverbeds, amputees on every corner, and miles of skeletal ruins, rocketed into dust during the 1990s civil war.

All images can lie, of course, and it would be easy to dismiss the cigarette-smoking model as an outlier, a solipsistic stand-in for a superficial program of Westernization with no organic connection to the surrounding society. But this is lazy. The Afghanistan she stood for was real. She may have belonged to a minority, but it was unquestionably a growing minority that many wanted to join. Afghanistan’s path was never preordained.

It was this modest encounter with pre-1979 Afghanistan that started the train of thought that led to this book. Though the vision presented by the model in the postcard might have seemed like ancient history, it had actually existed within my own lifetime. This Westernizing, secular, hedonistic Afghanistan was not a phantom; it represented a genuine dream for many Afghans who either left the country after the Soviet invasion (among them, Akbar Ayazi, the young Kabul radio announcer, who now lives in the United States) or who, in the early 1990s, sided with the post-Communist Najibullah regime against the encroaching forces of the Islamic rebels who were determined to wipe it out forever. These traces of the past stand for an option snuffed out, a line of development that proved too weak to survive the successive blows of Communist rule, the Soviet invasion, and the harsh
backlash of the mujahideen. In Afghanistan, secular modernization was a road that was not only not taken, but dynamited out of existence. We may not see anything like it return for generations, if at all.

Why did Afghanistan take the course that it did? I am not sure that anyone can ever give a truly satisfactory answer. To study 1979 is also to study the tyranny of chance. It is worth noting, among other things, that many of the leaders whose careers are examined in this book were the targets of assassination attempts. How would our story look if their lives had been cut short?
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If we can gain any lesson from our examination of this watershed year, it is that history is, above all, the study of contingency—a search for an answer to the question of why certain courses were followed when others, equally attractive or potentially viable, were not. To say that historical or economic conditions predispose a country to embark on a particular path does not mean that its politicians will necessarily decide to take it. Under different conditions—if Mao had died earlier, for example—China might have chosen a much different course. Its economic experiments before the late 1970s, the speed of Deng’s final ascendance, and the astounding vector of China’s transformation since 1979 all suggest a potential that could have been exploited even earlier. The same is true elsewhere. What if Edward Heath had decided, as he apparently considered, to stick with free-market reforms in the early 1970s? What if Gorbachev had chosen Deng’s path for the Soviet Communist Party? Why did the shah fail when Kemal Atatürk, the shaper of the secular modern Turkish state, succeeded? Historians are not in the business of speculation; they should strive to explain why paths were taken rather than not. Yet we will never understand past events with the necessary clarity unless we retain our sense of the choices that historical actors faced at the time—leaders as well as those who followed or defied them.

In the end the counterrevolutionaries were victorious, and they achieved that victory by mastering a central contradiction that resonates today: the paradox facing those who aspire to safeguard the old by creating the new. Counterrevolutionaries can be distinguished from mere conservatives. Conservatives strive to enhance the primacy of tradition as one of several options available in the political marketplace; counterrevolutionaries seek to restore values to a world that has been deeply altered by revolution. The example of 1979 reminds us that we should pay close attention whenever politicians begin to exploit the past. Khomeini invoked Islamic traditions as he struggled to build something that had never existed before, but he did so in competition with rivals who held dramatically different visions of those same traditions; once Khomeini succeeded, he ultimately folded many of the modern state institutions created by the hated shah (and utterly unknown to the Prophet) into
his new Islamic Republic. One of the notable fault lines that ran between Deng and his Maoist opponents involved an argument about who would best safeguard what was called “the fine tradition of the Communist Party.” The winners, led by Deng, were those who vowed to “restore” that legacy rather than to “uphold” it. Thatcher extolled the lost virtues of family, thrift, and nation even though she ended up retaining certain features of the post-1945 welfare state. Pope John Paul II largely repudiated twentieth-century Vatican realpolitik in his search for a new church that would respond more closely to the needs of his flock in an increasingly interconnected world. Massoud and his fellow holy warriors conducted their ultraconservative jihad even as they ransacked the political toolbox of twentieth-century revolution. As many leftists have learned to their chagrin, even transparently artificial paeans to cherished and embattled values can have a powerful appeal. Memories of tradition may be highly selective, but those who would mock the “naive” nostalgia of conservatives forget that the past has an authenticity with which disembodied utopias cannot easily compete.