Kurt Groetsch @ OldTasty.com

I enjoyed reading Nicholas Kristof’s dispatches from China when he was stationed here in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and with the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square incident around the corner, he checks in with a thought-provoking column:

The Tiananmen Victory

“So, 15 years after Tiananmen, we can see the Communist dynasty fraying. The aging leaders of 1989 who ordered the crackdown won the battle but lost the war: China today is no longer a Communist nation in any meaningful sense.

Political pluralism has not arrived yet, but economic, social and cultural pluralism has. The struggle for China’s soul is over, for China today is not the earnest socialist redoubt sought by hard-liners, but the modernizing market economy sought by Zhao Ziyang, the leader ousted in 1989. The reformers lost their jobs, but they captured China’s future.”