LONDON -- The recently released details of the secret debate among China's leaders before they crushed the prodemocracy protests on Tiananmen Square in 1989 don't just tell us about China's past. They also tell us a lot about its present, and even about its likely future.
What comes through clearly in the documents leaked to the New York-based journal Foreign Affairs is the extent of the generational split in the Chinese Communist leadership 11 years ago. That same split also explains why the "Tiananmen papers" have been leaked now -- and why China will probably get democracy, in the end, without having to go through all that again.
It was always clear who decided to open fire on the students and citizens of Beijing on June 4, 1989, killing at least several hundred of them. The nine Communist Party "elders" who made that choice, most of them semi-retired men in their 80s and 90s, were the original revolutionary generation who had been spent their lives ordering the deaths of any Chinese who opposed them.