In China, 1989 was the year that a spark of liberal aspiration flickered on Tiananmen Square, and was decisively extinguished. That was another beginning, or at least a renewal: of Chinese resolve. In May of that year, in the midst of the Tiananmen euphoria, Mikhail S. Gorbachev visited Beijing, and two visions of a new communism stared each other in the face.

The Chinese and Russians scorned each other’s neo-Communist models, but in some ways they have evolved toward one another. Both countries now tolerate a measure of entrepreneurship and social license, as long as neither threatens the dominion of the state. Both countries have calculated that you can buy a measure of domestic stability if you combine a little opportunity with an

appeal to national pride. And both have discovered that if you are rich the world is less likely to get in your way.

President Bush was mocked from both sides for his seeming impotence. Neo-conservatives were appalled by photos of President Bush sharing a laugh with Mr. Putin in Beijing while Russian armor gathered at the Georgian border. Others argued that this was a crisis Bush tacitly encouraged by talking up Georgia’s rambunctious president as a friend and NATO candidate. And by last weekend there was a cold war chill in the air.

The question now is how to deal with these reinvigorated autocracies. This time it is not—or not yet—the threat of nuclear apocalypse that limits the West’s options toward its Eastern rivals. The Chinese are acting as if they have gotten past the saber-rattling stage of emerging-power status. The Russians may be in a more adolescent, table-pounding stage of development, but Putin, too, prefers to work the economic levers, bullying with petroleum.

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