On China (55 page)

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:

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.

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

The contrary view argued that human rights progress is generally better reached by a policy of engagement. Once enough confidence has been established, changes in civil practice can be advocated in the name of common purposes or at least the preservation of a common interest.

Which method is appropriate depends in part on circumstances. There are instances of violations of human rights so egregious that it is impossible to conceive of benefit in a continuing relationship; for example the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, and the genocide in Rwanda. Since public pressure shades either into regime change or a kind of abdication, it is difficult to apply to countries with which a continuous relationship is important for American security. This is especially the case with China, so imbued with the memory of humiliating intervention by Western societies.

China would be a major factor in world politics, whatever the immediate outcome of the Tiananmen crisis. If the leadership consolidated itself, China would resume its economic reform program and grow increasingly strong. America and the world would then be faced with deciding whether to move to restore a cooperative relationship with an emerging great power or to seek to isolate China so as to induce it to adopt domestic policies in keeping with American values. Isolating China would usher in a prolonged period of confrontation with a society that did not buckle when the Soviet Union, its only source of outside help, withdrew assistance in 1959. The Bush administration, in its first months, was still operating on the premises of the Cold War, in which China was needed to balance the Soviet Union. But as the Soviet threat declined, China would emerge in an increasingly strong position to go it alone because the fear of the Soviet Union, which had brought China and the United States together, would recede.

There were objective limits to American influence on China’s domestic institutions, whether confrontation or engagement was pursued. Did we have the knowledge to shape the internal developments of a country of the size, mass, and complexity of China? Was there a risk that a collapse of central authority might trigger a recurrence of the civil wars that were at least compounded by nineteenth-century foreign interventions?

President Bush was in a delicate position after Tiananmen. As former head of the United States Liaison Office in Beijing, he had gained an appreciation for Chinese sensitivities about perceived foreign interference. With his long career in U.S. politics, he also had an astute understanding of American domestic political realities. He was aware that most Americans believed that Washington’s China policy should seek—as Nancy Pelosi, the then junior Democratic representative from California, termed it—“to send a clear and principled message of outrage to the leaders in Beijing.”
⁶
But Bush had also come to know that the United States’ relationship with China served vital American interests independent of the People’s Republic’s system of governance. He was wary of antagonizing a government that had cooperated with the United States for nearly two decades on some of the most fundamental security issues of the Cold War world. As he later wrote: “For this understandably proud, ancient, and inward-looking people, foreign criticism (from peoples they still perceived as ‘barbarians’ and colonialists untutored in Chinese ways) was an affront, and measures taken against them a return to the coercions of the past.”
⁷
Facing pressure for stronger measures from both the right and the left, Bush maintained that

Bush walked this tightrope with skill and elegance. When Congress imposed punitive measures on Beijing, he softened some of the edges. At the same time, to express his convictions, on June 5 and June 20, he suspended high-level government exchanges; halted military cooperation and sales of police, military, and dual-use equipment; and announced opposition to new loans to the People’s Republic by the World Bank and other international financial institutions. American sanctions dovetailed with comparable steps undertaken by the European Community, Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, and with expressions of regret and condemnation from governments around the world. Congress, reflecting popular pressure, pushed for even stronger measures, including legislative sanctions (which would be more difficult to lift than administrative sanctions imposed by the President, which were at the chief executive’s discretion) and a law automatically extending the visas of all Chinese students currently in the United States.
⁹