Deng would, he explained, now move from economic to political structural reforms. It would be much more complicated than economic reform because “it would involve the interests of millions of people.” The divisions of work between the Communist Party and government would change. Many Party members would have to change jobs when professional managers took over for Party Secretaries.

  But where was the line that separated policymaking from administration? Deng replied that ideological issues would be for the Party, operational policy for managers. Asked for an example, Deng indicated that a shift of alliance toward the Soviet Union would be clearly an ideological issue. From my many conversations with him, I concluded that this would not be a frequent subject. On further reflection, I wonder whether by merely broaching such a previously unthinkable concept, Deng was not serving notice that China was weighing tacking back to greater freedom of diplomatic maneuver.

  What Deng was proposing politically had no precedent in Communist experience. The Communist Party, he seemed to suggest, would maintain an overall supervisory role in the nation’s economy and political structure. But it would steadily withdraw from its previous position of controlling the detailed aspects of Chinese daily life. The initiatives of individual Chinese would be given wide scope. These sweeping reforms, Deng maintained, would be carried out “in an orderly manner.” China was stable now, and “must remain so if it is to develop.” Its government and people “recall [ed] the chaos of the Cultural Revolution,” and they would never allow it to recur. China’s reforms were “unprecedented”; this would inevitably mean that “some mistakes will be made.” The vast majority of people supported the current reforms, he said, but “courage” and “prudence” would be required to ensure their success.

  As it turned out, these were not abstract issues: Deng would soon be forced to confront the tensions inherent in his program of “orderly” reform. While most of the world was marveling at the surging Chinese economic growth rate, the tens of thousands of students being sent abroad, and the changes in the standard of living inside the country, there emerged significant indications that new currents were churning within.

  The early stages of the reform process tended to merge the problems of planning with those of the market. The attempt to make prices reflect real costs inevitably led to price increases, at least in the short term. Price reform caused a run on savings to buy up goods before prices went even higher, creating a vicious cycle of hoarding and greater inflation.

  In a September 1987 meeting, Zhao Ziyang outlined a shift toward reliance on market forces for about 50 percent of GDP. Beyond the technical economic issues, this required a substantial recasting of the command system. There was to be greater emphasis, as in European states, on indirect control of the economy through manipulation of the money supply and intervention to forestall depression. Many central institutions in China would have to be dismantled and the functions of others redefined. To facilitate this process, a review of Party membership and a streamlining of the bureaucracy was ordered. Since this involved thirty million individuals and was carried out by the very people whose activities needed to be modified, the review faced many obstacles.

  The relative success of economic reform produced constituencies at the core of the later discontent. And the government would face declining loyalty from the political cadres whose jobs the reforms threatened.

  Administering a two-price system opened many avenues for corruption and nepotism. The shift to market economics actually increased opportunities for corruption, at least for an interim period. The fact that two economic sectors coexisted—a shrinking but still very large public sector and a growing market economy—produced two sets of prices. Unscrupulous bureaucrats and entrepreneurs were thus in a position to shift commodities back and forth between the two sectors for personal gain. Undoubtedly some of the profits in the private sector in China were the result of widespread graft and nepotism.

  Nepotism is a special problem, in any event, in a culture as familyoriented as the Chinese. In times of turmoil, Chinese turn to their families. In all Chinese societies—whether it is mainland China, Taiwan, Singapore, or Hong Kong—ultimate reliance is placed on family members, who in turn benefit in ways determined by family criteria rather than abstract market forces.

  The marketplace created its own discontent. A market economy will, in time, enhance general well-being, but the essence of competition is that somebody wins and somebody loses. In the early stages of a market economy, the winnings are likely to be disproportionate. The losers are tempted to blame the “system” rather than their own failure. Often they are right.

  On the popular level, economic reform had raised Chinese expectations about living standards and personal liberties, while at the same time creating tensions and inequities that many Chinese felt could only be redressed by a more open and participatory political system. The Chinese leadership was also increasingly divided about China’s political and ideological course. The example of Gorbachev’s reforms in the Soviet Union raised the stakes of the debate. To some in the Chinese leadership, glasnost and perestroika were dangerous heresies, akin to Khrushchev’s throwing away the “sword of Stalin.” To others, including many in China’s younger generation of students and Party officials, Gorbachev’s reforms were a possible model for China’s own path.

  The economic reforms overseen by Deng, Hu, and Zhao had transformed the face of Chinese daily life. At the same time, the reappearance of phenomena eradicated during the Mao years—income disparities, colorful and even provocative clothing, and an open celebration of “luxury” items—prompted traditional Communist cadres to complain that the People’s Republic was succumbing to the dreaded “peaceful evolution” to capitalism once projected by John Foster Dulles.

  While Chinese officials and intellectuals often framed this debate in terms of Marxist dogma—such as a high-profile campaign against the threat of “bourgeois liberalization”—the split ultimately went back to the questions that had divided China since the nineteenth century. By turning outward, was China fulfilling its destiny, or was it compromising its moral essence? What, if anything, should it aim to learn from Western social and political institutions?

  In 1988, the debate crystallized around a seemingly esoteric television miniseries. Broadcast on Chinese Central Television, the sixpart documentary River Elegy adopted the metaphor of China’s turbid, slow-moving Yellow River to argue that Chinese civilization itself had grown insular and stagnant. Blending indictments of traditional Confucian culture with a veiled critique of more recent political developments, the film suggested that China needed to renew itself by looking outward to the “blue ocean” of the outside world, including Western culture. The series catalyzed a national debate, including discussion at the highest levels of China’s government. Traditional Communists considered the film “counterrevolutionary” and succeeded in having it banned, albeit after it had first been broadcast.21 The generations-long debate over China’s destiny and its relationship with the West was active again.

  CHAPTER 15

  Tiananmen

  CRACKS IN THE Soviet monolith began to emerge in Eastern Europe at the start of 1989, leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall in November and the eventual dissolution of the Soviet Union itself. But China seemed stable, and its relations with the rest of the world were the best since the Communist victory in 1949 and the proclamation of the People’s Republic. Relations with the United States especially had made major progress. The two countries were cooperating in thwarting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan; the United States was selling significant levels of arms to China; trade was increasing; and exchanges, from cabinet members to naval vessels, were flourishing.

  Mikhail Gorbachev, still presiding over the Soviet Union, was planning a visit to Beijing in May. Moscow had met to a significant extent the three conditions put forward by Beijing for an improvement in Sino-Soviet relations: withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan; redeployment of Soviet forces away from the Chinese border; and a Vietnamese withdrawal from Cambodia. International conferences were routinely scheduled for Beijing—including a meeting that April of the board of directors of the Asian Development Bank, a multilateral development organization that China had joined three years earlier, which unexpectedly provided a backdrop for the unfolding drama.

  It all began with the death of Hu Yaobang. Deng had overseen his rise in 1981 to General Secretary, the highest leadership post of the Communist Party. In 1986, when conservative critics blamed Hu for indecisiveness in the face of student demonstrations, he was replaced as General Secretary by Zhao Ziyang, another protégé of Deng, while remaining a member of the ruling Politburo. During a Politburo meeting on April 8, 1989, the seventy-three-year-old Hu suffered a heart attack. His stunned colleagues revived him and rushed him to the hospital. He suffered another heart attack there and died on April 15.

  As with Zhou Enlai’s passing in 1976, Hu’s death was the occasion for politically charged mourning. However, in the intervening years, the restrictions on permissible speech had been relaxed. While Zhou’s mourners in 1976 had veiled their criticisms of Mao and Jiang Qing in allegorical references to ancient dynastic court politics, the demonstrators over Hu in 1989 named their targets. The atmosphere was already tense due to the upcoming seventieth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, a 1919 campaign by nationalist-minded Chinese protesting the weakness of the Chinese government and perceived inequities in the Treaty of Versailles.1

  Hu’s admirers laid wreaths and elegiac poems at the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square, many praising the former General Secretary’s dedication to political liberalization and calling for his spirit to live on in further reforms. Students in Beijing and other cities took the opportunity to voice their frustration with corruption, inflation, press restrictions, university conditions, and the persistence of Party “elders” ruling informally behind the scenes. In Beijing, seven demands were put forward by various student groups, which threatened to demonstrate until the government had implemented them. Not all the groups supported every demand; an unprecedented confluence of disparate resentments escalated into upheaval. What had started as a demonstration evolved into an occupation of Tiananmen Square challenging the authority of the government.

  Events escalated in a manner neither observers nor participants thought conceivable at the beginning of the month. By June, antigovernment protests of various sizes had spread nationwide to 341 cities.2 Protesters had taken over trains and schools, and main roads in the capital were blocked. In Tiananmen Square, students declared a hunger strike, attracting widespread attention from both local and international observers and other nonstudent groups, which began to join the protesters. Chinese leaders were obliged to move Gorbachev’s welcoming ceremony from Tiananmen Square. Humiliatingly, a muted ceremony was held at the Beijing airport without public attendance. Some reports held that elements of the People’s Liberation Army defied orders to deploy to the capital and quell the demonstrations, and that government employees were marching with the protesters in the street. The political challenge was underscored by developments in China’s far west, where Tibetans and members of China’s Uighur Muslim minority had begun to agitate based on their own cultural issues (in the Uighur case, the recent publication of a book claimed to offend Islamic sensibilities).3

  Uprisings generally develop their own momentum as developments slide out of the control of the principal actors, who become characters in a play whose script they no longer know. For Deng, the protests stirred the historical Chinese fear of chaos and memories of the Cultural Revolution—whatever the stated goals of the demonstrators. The scholar Andrew J. Nathan has summed up the impasse eloquently:

  The students did not set out to pose a mortal challenge to what they knew was a dangerous regime. Nor did the regime relish the use of force against the students. The two sides shared many goals and much common language. Through miscommunication and misjudgment, they pushed one another into positions in which options for compromise became less and less available. Several times a solution seemed just within reach, only to dissolve at the last moment. The slide to calamity seemed slow at first but then accelerated as divisions deepened on both sides. Knowing the outcome, we read the story with a sense of horror that we receive from true tragedy.4

  This is not the place to examine the events that led to the tragedy at Tiananmen Square; each side has different perceptions depending on the various, often conflicting, origins of their participation in the crisis. The student unrest started as a demand for remedies to specific grievances. But the occupation of the main square of a country’s capital, even when completely peaceful, is also a tactic to demonstrate the impotence of the government, to weaken it, and to tempt it into rash acts, putting it at a disadvantage.

  There is no dispute about the denouement, however. After hesitating for seven weeks and exhibiting serious divisions within its ranks over the use of force, the Chinese leadership cracked down decisively on June 4. The General Secretary of the Communist Party, Zhao Ziyang, was dismissed. After weeks of internal debates, Deng and a majority of the Politburo ordered the PLA to clear Tiananmen Square. A harsh suppression of the protest followed—all seen on television, broadcast by media that had come from all over the world to record the momentous meeting between Gorbachev and the Chinese leadership.

  American Dilemmas

  The international reaction was stark. The People’s Republic of China had never claimed to function as a Western-style democracy (and indeed had consistently rejected the insinuation). Now it emerged in the media of the world as an arbitrary authoritarian state crushing popular aspirations to human rights. Deng, heretofore widely lauded as a reformer, was criticized as a tyrant.

  In this atmosphere, the entire Sino-U.S. relationship, including the established practice of regular consultations between the two countries, came under attack from across a wide political spectrum. Traditional conservatives saw themselves vindicated in their conviction that China, under the leadership of the Communist Party, would never be a reliable partner. Human rights activists across the entire political spectrum were outraged. Liberals argued that the aftermath of Tiananmen imposed on America the obligation to fulfill its ultimate mission to spread democracy. However varied their objectives, the critics converged on the need for sanctions to pressure Beijing to alter its domestic institutions and encourage human rights practices.

  President George H. W. Bush, who had assumed the presidency less than five months earlier, was uncomfortable with the long-range consequences of sanctions. Both Bush and his National Security Advisor, General Brent Scowcroft, had served in the Nixon administration. They had met Deng when they were in office; they remembered how he had preserved the relationship with America against the machinations of the Gang of Four and on behalf of greater scope for the individual. They admired his economic reforms, and they balanced their distaste of the repression against their respect for the way the world had been transformed since the opening to China. They had participated in the conduct of foreign policy when every opponent of the United States could count on Chinese support, when all the nations of Asia feared a China isolated from the world, and when the Soviet Union could conduct a policy of pressure against the West, unrestrained by concerns over its other flanks.

  President Bush had served in China as head of the American Liaison Office in Beijing ten years earlier during tense periods. Bush had enough experience to understand that the leaders who had been on the Long March, survived in the caves of Yan’an, and confronted both the United States and the Soviet Union simultaneously in the 1960s would not submit to foreign pressures or the threat of isolation. And what was the objective? To overthrow the Chinese government? To change its structure toward what alternative? How could the process of intervention be ended once it was started? And what would be the costs?

  Before Tiananmen, America had become familiar with the debate about the role of its diplomacy in promoting democracy. In simplified form, the debate pitted idealists against realists—idealists insisting that domestic systems affect foreign policy and are therefore legitimate items on the diplomatic agenda, realists arguing that such an agenda is beyond any country’s capacity and that diplomacy should therefore focus primarily on external policies. The absolutes of moral precept were weighed against the contingencies of deducing foreign policy from the balancing of national interests. The actual distinctions are more subtle. Idealists, when they seek to apply their values, will be driven to consider the world of specific circumstance. Thoughtful realists understand that values are an important component of reality. When decisions are made, the distinction is rarely absolute; often it comes down to a question of nuance.

  With respect to China, the issue was not whether America preferred democratic values to prevail. By a vast majority, the American public would have answered in the affirmative, as would have all the participants in the debate on China policy. The issue was what price they would be prepared to pay in concrete terms over what period of time and what their capacity was, in any circumstances, to bring about their desired outcome.

  Two broad operational policies appeared in the public debate over the tactics of dealing with authoritarian regimes. One group argued for confrontation, urging the United States to resist undemocratic behavior or human rights violations by withholding any benefit America might afford, whatever the price for America. In the extreme, it pressed for change of offending regimes; in the case of China, it insisted on an unambiguous move toward democracy as a condition for any mutual benefit.5