But China’s efforts to whitewash the coup turned out to be as clumsy as the putsch itself. When the plot unraveled, so did Beijing’s celebratory official line. The People’s Daily, the official Communist Party newspaper, prepared a congratulatory edition for Aug. 20–then quickly scrapped it. After muzzling its official Xinhua news agency for several hours, Beijing acknowledged Gorbachev’s comeback as “the choice of the Soviet people.” Finally, Xinhua wrote off the entire subject as an “internal affair” of another country. Deng Xiaoping, China’s 87-year-old leader, pondered his country’s dubious distinction as the world’s largest remaining Marxist power. In an emergency Politburo meeting, he reportedly asked, “What shall we do?” The party’s answer was predictable. It stepped up political education in the People’s Liberation Army and prepared a new propaganda offensive against the evils of “peaceful evolution.”

By then, millions of ordinary Chinese had already tuned out the official story and tuned in the BBC and the Voice of America. Late at night in one neighborhood close to Beijing University, a hotbed of student activism in June 1989, someone set off firecrackers to celebrate Mikhail Gorbachev’s resignation as Communist Party general secretary. Citizens furtively flashed the “V” sign to a Russian journalist. Exclaimed a Chinese artist who had been active in earlier pro-democracy campaigns: “Something is going to happen here!”

So far, though, not much has. Supporters of democracy are still reeling from the government’s post-Tiananmen crackdown. Many liberals’ hopes ended with the fall of Zhao Ziyang, the former party chief who fell into disgrace after his accommodating stand on the Tiananmen uprising. No leader has emerged to articulate a new ideology and develop a strong following. “Why not just wait for Deng Xiaoping to pass away?” shrugs one elderly party member, echoing the thoughts of many others who fell silent after the Beijing massacre. Deng enjoys some passive support, if only because he is identified with the economic reforms of the 1980s that improved living standards for millions of people. Prosperity can take some of the sting out of political repression–as long as the government can provide it. “The government’s legitimacy with the public is not ideological or political, but almost completely economic,” reasons David Zweig, professor of political science at Tufts University.

For now, the Chinese leadership’s biggest fear is that the anti-communist spirit sweeping from the Baltics to Soviet Central Asia could spread across the Sino-Soviet border into China’s outlying provinces. It has already penetrated neighboring Mongolia. Last week Chinese President Yang Shangkun’s visit to Ulan Bator–the first high-level official Chinese mission in three decades–was upstaged by mass anti-communist demonstrations. The ferment served to remind Beijing of the nationalist sentiment brewing among ethnic Mongolians on its side of the border: last May Beijing cracked down on demonstrations by alleged secessionists in Chinese-controlled Inner Mongolia. As the Soviet coup was still unfolding, archconservative Vice President Wang Zhen toured the restive, predominantly Muslim province of Xinjiang, which borders on Soviet Kazakhstan. “We must construct a new socialist victory,” he told a crowd. He went on to praise China’s “suppression of the counterrevolutionary rebellion,” a phrase describing not only Tiananmen Square but also the crackdown on antigovernment riots in 1990 that left at least 22 Xinjiang Muslims dead.

In a dramatic bid to keep the spirit of democracy alive in Beijing, two of the most prominent political prisoners from the 1989 crackdown, newspaper editors Chen Zemin and Wang Juntao, have launched a hunger strike to protest conditions in their cells at the Beijing No. 2 Prison. Now in its third week, the strike has received even greater world attention because of Chinese student LiLu’s fasting outside the Chinese Embassy in Washington. Last week the State Department expressed “strong concern” about the fate of Chen and Wang, tried as “counter-revolutionaries” last February and sentenced to 13 years each. Their cause has given fresh impetus to congressional bills for a Radio Free China, backed by a dozen lawmakers and exiled Chinese dissidents. Perhaps significantly, George Bush–Beijing’s staunchest apologist in Washington–hasn’t yet said no to the project.