NOW LET US ALL celebrate the 50th anniversary of the proclamation of the Peoples' Republic of China by chanting together this slogan composed especially for the occasion:

``Adhere to the basic economic system with public ownership dominant and diverse forms of ownership developing side by side, and `to each according to his work' as the main distribution form and with other forms as well.''

Among the 50 or so slogans printed in the Peoples' Daily for the guidance of the half-million people packed into Tiananmen Square on Friday, you'd have to guess that that particular slogan was composed by some cynical apparatchik, who knew perfectly well it was unchantable, let alone virtually incomprehensible. ``Diverse forms of ownership'' means, if anything, capitalism flourishing in the midst of socialism. Whoever penned it must have done so in order to fulfill his quota. Others, scarcely better, were: ``Unite as one, struggle hard, be persistent'' and ``Rely on the working class whole-heartedly.''

Mostly, they concentrated on making sure that no one said anything he or she wasn't supposed to say. Half of Beijing was effectively under martial law. Suspected dissidents were put in preventive detention. A few individuals who went to Tiananmen Square and there adopted the prayer postures of the banned Falun Gong sect were instantly seized by police and hustled away. Copies of Time magazine, which contained an article about Tibet's Dali Lama, were impounded.

In one sense, Beijing's rulers would seem to have a pretty impressive story to recount. China is at peace, with no warlords or insurrections, in a way it hasn't been in centuries. Because of its free-booting, near-anarchic version of capitalism, intermingled with a lot of corruption, more Chinese - many millions more - are living far better than they ever have in history. Because these individuals have cars and private houses and TV sets and laptop computers, they are better able to make personal choices than all but a few high mandarins could ever do throughout the centuries of Chinese history.

Moreover, China commands the world's attention in a way it hasn't done since - just about - Marco Polo's day. From Bill Clinton to Jean Chrétien, visiting dignitaries jostle for invitations to Beijing and there, after muttering a few words about human rights in order to silence their own dissidents back home, get right down to the real stuff about exports and sales contracts.

In fact, China's reality is a good deal less impressive than all of this makes it seem. Its economic output is still smaller than Italy's and only about a third more than Canada's. On a per capita basis, its 1.3 billion people are poorer than those in Papua New Guinea. Militarily, it is a minor power, with obsolete equipment. Its international weight is insubstantial: It has no allies, except North Korea, and stays silent at the United Nations except occasionally to argue against the U.N. interfering with the sovereignty of this or that country for humanitarian reasons.

China's real failure, though, is neither economic (after all, it's doing better than India), nor geo-political (it's so big, it doesn't need any allies). Rather, the failure of 50 years of communism is a moral one.

Beijing's rulers said so little on their anniversary to avoid drawing attention to the fact that a half-century of communism has created a one-dimensional society. Money, greed, making it, is the only measure of achievement in contemporary China.

The collective effort, and the summoning to sacrifice that communism once espoused, is now marginalized and scorned. Confucianism, that intricate and subtle ethic of obligation and deference and hierarchy, was trashed by Mao's Cultural Revolution as students turned on their teachers and children denounced their parents for deviation.

The China of today is thus a society without a moral compass. The success of the Falun Gong sect, until the authorities repressed it, illustrates the way many ordinary Chinese are searching for some belief structure, beyond communism and amid the ruins of Confucianism. In turn, that the authorities should have crushed Falun Gong illustrates the way they cannot abide anyone who believes in anything, whether a cultural conviction like that of the Tibetans, or a religious conviction like that of the Falun Gong and the underground Roman Catholic Church.

There is another reason why the Beijing authorities have said so little. If they talked out loud they would open up debate about themselves - about the massacre in Tiananmen Square, about the madness of the Cultural Revolution, about the millions who starved because of Mao's Great Leap Forward.

Better to chant meaningless slogans.