Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World after 1989

A friendly grip? Deng with Mikhail and Raisa

Deng and Gorbachev met for two hours in the Great Hall of the People on 16 May. The first few minutes were televised live so they could announce to the world the official normalisation of their relations. The catalyst, Deng said, had been when Gorbachev assumed power in 1985 and began to reassess Soviet foreign policy, moving away from the Cold War with the West and conflicts with other countries. He particularly praised Gorbachev’s speech at Vladivostok in July 1986, when the Soviet leader had made a major overture to China. ‘Comrade Gorbachev, all the people of the world, and I myself, saw new content in the political thinking of the Soviet Union. I saw that there might be a turning point in your relations with the United States and it might be possible to find a way out of the confrontation and transform the situation into one of dialogue.’ Since then, he added, Gorbachev had gradually removed or reduced the three big obstacles: Afghanistan, the Sino-Soviet border disputes, and then the war in Cambodia. As a result they had been able to normalise both state and party relations between the USSR and PRC.[133]

In public, therefore, all was sweetness and light. But once the TV cameras had left, Deng changed his tone. ‘I would like to say a few words about Marxism and Leninism. We have studied it for many years.’ Much of what had been said in the past thirty years had ‘turned out to be empty’, he observed. The world had moved on from the days of Marx, and Marxist doctrine must move as well. Gorbachev remarked that ‘Thirty years did not pass in vain … by contrast, we rose to a new level of comprehension of socialism’ and, he added, ‘now we study Lenin’s legacy more attentively’. But, Deng interjected, Leninism also had to move with the times, not least because ‘the situation in the world is constantly changing … he who cannot develop Marxism–Leninism taking into consideration the new conditions is not a real Communist’. Deng’s thrust seemed to be that ideology had to evolve in the light of changing national and international circumstances – ‘there is no ready-made model of any kind’ – but that a socialist ideological framework remained essential to avoid the chaos of pragmatism and mere experimentation.[134]

Here was a coded but clear critique of Gorbachev’s approach to reform in the ‘construction of socialism’, but the Soviet leader – seeking to remain deferential – chose to ignore it, agreeing instead with his Chinese counterpart that they ‘must now draw a line under the past, turning one’s sights to the future’. Yes, said Deng, ‘but it would be incorrect if I did not say anything today about the past’. Each side, he added, had ‘the right to express their own point of view’ and he would start the ball rolling. ‘Fine,’ said Gorbachev, only to be on the receiving end of a long and rambling monologue by the aged Chinese leader about the damage and indignities inflicted on his country over the course of the twentieth century. Deng listed in turn the territorial depredations by Britain, Portugal, Japan, tsarist Russia and then the USSR under Stalin and Khrushchev – and especially, after the Sino-Soviet split, the Soviet military threat along China’s own border. Though dismissing the ideological quarrels of the past, Deng conceded ‘We were also wrong.’ But he clearly laid overwhelming blame for their bilateral tensions at the Kremlin’s door: ‘the Soviet Union incorrectly perceived China’s place in the world … the essence of all problems was that we were in an unequal situation, that we were slighted and oppressed’.[135]

Eventually Gorbachev got his chance for a few words. He said that he saw things differently but did accept ‘a certain culpability and responsibility on our part’ for the very recent past. All the rest – especially the territorial shifts of the early twentieth century – belonged already to history. ‘How many states have disappeared, and new ones have appeared? … History cannot be rewritten; it cannot be remade anew. If we took the road of restoring past borders on the basis of how things were in the past, which people lived in which territory, then, in essence, we’d have to redraw the entire world. That would lead to a worldwide scuffle.’ Gorbachev stressed his belief in geopolitical ‘realities’ – the ‘principle of the inviolability of borders gives stability to the world’ – and reminded Deng that his own generation had grown up ‘in the spirit of friendship with China’.

These mollifying words seemed to snap the old man out of his historical reverie. ‘This was just a narrative,’ Deng muttered. ‘Let us consider that the past is over with.’ ‘Good,’ replied Gorbachev. ‘Let’s put an end to this.’ After some final vague words about the ‘development’ of their relations, the meeting came to a conclusion. It was as if they had settled the past, but without any clear sense of the future.[136]

This was indeed the case. When Gorbachev had tried to discuss Sino-Soviet trade and joint economic projects with Li Peng, he had made no progress. He could offer the USSR’s usual export staples – oil and gas – but the Chinese were not particularly interested. When asked for Soviet investment, Gorbachev was in no position to provide anything. And as for advanced technology, especially IT, Li made clear that China looked to the United States and also Japan. There were no other substantive talks.[137] In fact, on his last day in Beijing Gorbachev was largely marooned in a guest house on the outskirts – unable, as originally scheduled, to reach the Forbidden City or attend the opera because of the protests. After a short visit to Shanghai, he returned home on 19 May with very mixed feelings about the whole trip: real satisfaction about the normalisation of relations – ‘a watershed event’ of ‘epoch-making significance’ – but also profound uncertainty about the future not only of Sino-Soviet relations but of the People’s Republic itself.[138]

The moment Gorbachev had left Beijing, Deng turned his mind to sorting out the students. Their brazen refusal to leave Tiananmen voluntarily had humiliated the Paramount Leader but, while his Soviet guest was around, Deng’s hands had been tied. Now his anger boiled over. The Chinese capital had become virtually paralysed with over a million protestors sitting in the Square and marching down the boulevards. The students had been joined by workers, shopkeepers, civil servants, teachers, peasants – even recruits from Beijing’s police academy dressed in their uniforms.[139] Order was crumbling; the regime itself seemed in danger.

Over the weekend of 20 May, Deng declared martial law in Beijing. The government brought in thousands of troops armed with machine guns and backed by tanks, tear gas and water cannons.[140] It imposed tight media censorship and forced out Zhao, the liberal chief of the party, because of his conciliatory approach to the protestors. The hardliners were now in charge. But it would take another two weeks of heightened tension before the crisis was resolved. The mere presence on the streets of the People’s Liberation Army was not enough: the men had in any case been briefed not to cause bloodshed. The students, certainly, were not cowed and they used techniques of non-violence to keep the troops at bay. Even though their numbers had diminished by late May to perhaps 100,000, they continued to hold the Chinese communist leadership hostage, both politically and ideologically.[141]

State power and human vulnerability

What the protestors stood for was summed up, at least for the global media, in the ‘Goddess of Democracy’. This ten-metre-high white pâpier-mâché and styrofoam statue resembling New York’s Statue of Liberty was erected on 29 May at the heart of the Square in front of the Imperial Palace. Press photographs showed it as if eyeing defiantly the great picture of Mao. Democracy – on the US model – had become the celebrated symbol of the demonstrators’ demands. The Chinese government issued an official statement ordering the statue to be taken down, calling it an ‘abomination’ and declaring ‘this is China, not America’.[142]

Beside himself with frustration, Deng finally ordered the military to use force on those who, he said, were trying to subvert the nation. His justification was that China needed a peaceful and stable environment to continue along its reform path, to modernise and open up to the capitalist world. But reform, he insisted, did not mean doing away with four key principles: upholding socialism, maintaining the CCP’s leadership and party monopoly, supporting the ‘people’s democracy’, and adhering to Marxist–Leninist–Maoist philosophy. Pure ideology, enforced by autocratic party rule, was there to stay.[143]

At dawn on Sunday 4 June, tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers flooded Tiananmen Square and the surrounding streets, firing their sub-machine guns into crowds of men and women who refused to move out of the way. Scores of students and workers were killed and wounded. Several thousand on the edge of the mayhem left the Square peacefully, though still defiantly waving their university banners. Their encampment was then destroyed: armoured personnel carriers ran over the tents, ruthlessly driving over individuals who had chosen to stay put. When some of the protestors retaliated by toppling army vehicles and stoning the Great Hall of the People, the soldiers used tear gas and truncheons. Soon the city’s hospitals were inundated. ‘As doctors, we often see deaths,’ said one medic at the Tongren Hospital. ‘But we’ve never seen such a tragedy like this. Every room in the hospital is covered with blood.’[144]

The precise death toll remains impossible to establish: estimates vary from 300 to 2,600. Chinese state news on 4 June exulted in the crushing of a ‘counter-revolutionary rebellion’ and highlighted the casualties among police and troops. The demonstrators were soon airbrushed out of China’s official history. But what really mattered was that the country’s brief and traumatic battle for democracy had been immortalised by the world’s media. In addition to the reports of the carnage and the civilian deaths, images emerged of the crackdown that became truly iconic – fetishised by reformers around the world as symbols of China’s lost 1989. The two most notable icons were the photo of a lone man apparently defying a line of tanks, whose fate remains tantalisingly unknown. He would become the classic emblem of global 1989 – the power of the people. And the Goddess of Democracy captured in an eye-catching way what the protestors had struggled for. On the morning of 4 June the statue was quickly reduced to shards and then washed out of the Square by the clean-up troops amid the debris of a failed revolution. But the world would not forget.[145]

Tiananmen – The tanks take over

And so China reinvented communism – by force. In the process, as the tragedy was played out in real time on TV, the students became identified in the Cold War context with Western ideals of freedom, democracy and human rights. The Chinese government’s use of tanks against unarmed students also evoked memories of 1968, not just student protests around the world but the suppression of the Prague Spring by the Red Army – which had shaken European communism to its core. Deng was now widely seen as the villainous enemy of freedom and many asked whether Gorbachev would stay true to his UN speech, when he had renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine and championed ‘freedom of choice’. With unrest mounting in the Soviet bloc and the USSR itself, would Gorbachev go the way of Deng? Would the tanks now roll in Eastern Europe?

*

Five days later Moscow issued a limp statement of ‘regret’ over the bloodshed and expressed the ‘hope’ that common sense and continued reform would prevail in the PRC. Soviet government spokesman Gennady Gerasimov admitted that Soviet officials were surprised at the brutality with which the Chinese leaders put down the student demonstrators. ‘We hadn’t expected this.’[146] Privately, Gorbachev told Kohl that he was ‘dismayed’ by developments in China, but did not elaborate further.[147] For him the stand-off in Beijing corroborated his long-held view that Deng’s approach to reform was bound to create tensions and that political liberalisation was the only way to resolve such tensions without spilling blood. So the Soviet leader became ever more convinced that his strategy, aimed at avoiding violence and building a ‘mixed economy’ without the extremes of capitalist privatisation and social inequality, was the only sensible way forward. In short, for Gorbachev economic reform had to be complemented by political reform – whatever that would mean.[148]

Others in the Soviet Union wanted Gorbachev to openly condemn the Chinese government. The radical politician Boris Yeltsin and the human-rights advocate Andrei Sakharov decried Deng’s actions as ‘a crime against the people’ and drew parallels between the Chinese crackdown and the Soviet military’s ‘repression’ of demonstrations in Tbilisi, Georgia, in April, only weeks before Gorbachev went to Beijing. (Interestingly, Deng had cited that incident to his own people as an example of good discipline.) But Gorbachev had no intention of emulating Yeltsin and Sakharov. He was not about to sacrifice the hard-won gains of his personal diplomacy for the sake of abstract principles.[149] China was too important to the USSR to risk alienating Deng by what both sides would have agreed was ‘interference in internal affairs’.

Bush’s reaction to Tiananmen was similarly cautious. The Americans had not been surprised by the turn of events – James Lilley, the new US ambassador in Beijing, had been predicting a crackdown for weeks and the president himself had been careful not to make any encouraging noises to the demonstrators to avoid inflaming passions.[150] He told reporters on 30 May: ‘I’m old enough to remember Hungary in 1956, and I would want to do nothing in terms of statement or exhortation that would encourage a repeat of that.’[151]

In private the president had sent Deng a letter three days earlier appealing to him frankly as an old friend and warning against ‘violence, repression and bloodshed’, lest this damage Sino-American relations.[152] Deng took no notice. On 4 June Bush tried to reach him by phone but Deng simply refused to take the call. It was a blatant snub: even a lao pengyou had no clout when it didn’t suit China.[153]

Deng clearly believed he could risk the crackdown. He predicted that the West would soon forget, and in any case they knew that trade with China was too important to sever relations altogether. Indeed, Deng had been careful to reassure Washington about his deep concern for their mutual relations. The Chinese leader was not wrong in his assumptions. The signals from Washington were mixed. On the one hand, Bush ‘deplored’ Deng’s decision to use force against peaceful demonstrators[154] and suspended military sales and high-level official contacts with China. He also offered humanitarian and medical assistance to anyone who had been injured in the Tiananmen tragedy. But, on the other hand, he had no intention of severing diplomatic relations or pressing for tough sanctions, from which only ordinary people would suffer. Given his personal bond with Deng and his faith in the magnetic attraction of capitalism, Bush sought to avoid any confrontation that would jeopardise a blossoming Sino-American relationship in the long run. China in Bush’s eyes had come such a long way. If he acted too harshly, he might feed the anti-reformist, hard-line elements in Beijing and set the clock back – something he wanted to avoid at all costs. But if he was seen as acting too softly, the communist regimes in Eastern Europe including the USSR might feel encouraged to use force against their political opponents. The problem was that his room for manoeuvre was severely limited – especially at home where Congress was calling for stricter sanctions and the human-rights lobby wanted to punish the ‘butchers of Tiananmen’ and denounced Bush as the ‘appeaser’ of Beijing.[155]

Juggling these various pressures, and having publicly defended presidential pre-eminence in foreign policy against congressional encroachment, on 21 June Bush tried again to reach out to Deng. This time he sent a handwritten letter composed, he said, ‘with a heavy heart’. He appealed to their ‘genuine friendship’, stressed his respect for Deng personally, and even trumpeted his own ‘great reverence for Chinese history, culture and tradition’. He made it clear that he would not dictate or interfere but appealed to Deng not to ‘let the aftermath of the tragic recent events undermine a vital relationship patiently built over the past seventeen years’. Mindful of the 4 June snub, the president added, ‘I would of course welcome a personal reply to this letter. This matter is too important to be left to our bureaucracies.’[156]

This time personal diplomacy worked. Bush got a reply within twenty-four hours – sufficiently positive that at the beginning of July Bush asked Scowcroft to smuggle himself into China for talks with Deng and Li. It was an epic adventure story reminiscent of Kissinger’s Marco Polo visit to Beijing in July 1971. They set off at 5 a.m. on 30 June 1989 from Andrews Air Force Base, travelling on a C-141 military cargo plane ‘in which had been installed what was euphemistically called a portable “comfort pallet”, a huge box containing bunks and place to sit’. The aircraft could be refuelled in the air, avoiding the need to land anywhere en route, and their official destination was Okinawa but that was amended on the way. All USAF markings had been removed and the crew started in military uniforms but changed to civilian clothes before arriving in Beijing. The mission was so secret that Chinese military air defence had not been informed. Fortunately, when they saw an unidentified aircraft entering Chinese airspace near Shanghai and asked whether they should shoot it down, the call went right through to President Yang Shangkun who told them to hold their fire. The American party landed safely at lunchtime on 1 July and spent the rest of the day recovering from their ordeal at the State Guest House.[157]

Scowcroft’s conversation with Deng on 2 July in the Great Hall of the People set the parameters for future policy on both sides – so much so that it’s worth setting out their positions in detail.[158] Deng started by saying that he had ‘chosen’ Bush as a special friend because, ever since they first met, he had found him ‘trustworthy’. Of course, the problems in Sino-US relations could not be ‘solved by two persons from the perspective of being friends’, the Chinese leader said. So Deng was pleased that Bush had sent Scowcroft ‘as his emissary’. It showed that Bush understood the complexities of the situation. He had taken ‘a wise and cool-headed action – an action well received by us’. And so, ‘it seems there is still hope to maintain our originally good relations’.[159]

Nevertheless, in Deng’s view, the blunt truth was that ‘on a large scale the United States has impugned Chinese interests’ and ‘hurt Chinese dignity’. That for him was the ‘crux of the matter’. Some Americans who were keen for the PRC and its socialist system to be overthrown had helped stir up ‘counter-revolutionary rebellion’. And because the US had tied the knot, to borrow from a Chinese proverb, Deng insisted ‘our hope is that in its future course of action the United States will seek to untie the knot’. In other words, it was up to Bush to remedy the situation.

His government, Deng added, was determined to put down ‘the counter-revolutionary leaders’ in line with ‘Chinese laws’. And he insisted that ‘China will by no means waver in its resolution’. Otherwise, he asked rhetorically, ‘how can the PRC continue to exist?’ Deng left Scowcroft in no doubt that any interference in China’s internal affairs would not be tolerated and he warned Congress and the US media not to add more fuel to the fire. Indeed, he expected Washington to find a ‘feasible way and method’ to settle their differences regarding the events of Tiananmen.[160]

Scowcroft responded with the studied courtesy that always mattered in America’s relations with China. He spoke at length about the personal bond between Bush and China and his own depth of feeling for the country. He tried to underline the strong US investment in the steady ‘deepening’ of its relations with Beijing since 1972, from which both sides had benefited strategically and economically, as well as on a human level. He also stressed the significance of his visit. ‘Our presence here after a trip of thousands of kilometres, in confidence so as not to imply anything but an attempt to communicate, is symbolic of the importance President Bush places on this relationship and the efforts he is prepared to take to preserve it.’[161]

Having echoed Deng’s emphasis on the importance of personal friendship, Scowcroft then inserted the irreducible American agenda. ‘It is into this bilateral climate of deepening cooperation and growing sympathy that the events of Tiananmen Square have imposed themselves.’ He explained that the president had to cope with his electorate’s emotional reaction. This was America’s ‘internal affair’ – touching on its people’s fundamental values which Bush in turn shared to a significant degree. In other words, the president stood by his commitment to ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ that he had enunciated in his inaugural address. And, by thereby defending America’s stance on human rights, he could not be seen to visit Beijing in person because that would confer a legitimacy on Deng’s regime which the bloodshed in Tiananmen had removed. But, Scowcroft told Deng, Bush wanted to ‘manage events in a way which will assure a healthy relationship over time’. And he was ‘very sensitive to Chinese concerns’. Back-channel diplomacy was therefore the only way to ‘restore, preserve and strengthen’ the bilateral relationship.[162]

Deng did not reply directly. Instead, he emphasised three maxims that drove China. First, ‘I think one must understand history,’ Deng said. China had fought a twenty-two-year war costing 20 million lives – a conflict waged by the Chinese people under the leadership of the Communist Party. Indeed, he told Scowcroft, ‘if one should add the three-year war to assist Korea against US aggression then it would be a twenty-five-year effort’. Second, he underlined the sanctity of China’s independence: a country that would not allow itself to be directed by another nation ‘no matter what kind of difficulties should crop up in our way’. China would follow its own course for development regardless of the ‘macro international climate’. As for the third fundamental: there existed ‘no other force’ except the Chinese Communist Party that could represent China. This had been proved over ‘several decades’.[163]

Scowcroft had a similar discussion with Li. Reflecting later, he sensed a deep rift and a ‘clash of cultures’[164] which could not at the moment be bridged, but the clandestine trip had served its main purpose: to maintain channels of communication and thus quietly preserve economic ties. Bush noted in his diary, ‘I kept the door open.’[165]

The Kremlin and the White House therefore reacted cautiously to Tiananmen. But behind the scenes their thinking was now in flux. In different ways Gorbachev and Bush had focused on relations with China in the early months of 1989 – both making high-profile visits to Beijing – but there was little that could be done, at least for the foreseeable future, in view of the Chinese communist leaders’ hard-line response to revolution.[166] In mid-1989 Gorbachev and Bush were both recalibrating their policies.

The Soviet leader, it must be said, was still inclined to look east. Discussing Tiananmen with the Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, in Moscow on 15 July 1989, Gorbachev brushed aside emotive talk about the death toll, remarking ‘politicians have to be careful in these matters. Especially when we are talking about a country like China. About a country with a population higher than 1 billion people. This is a whole civilisation!’ Looking for positives, he even felt that China’s estrangement amidst world outrage about the ‘Tiananmen massacre’ had a silver lining: Beijing now needed friends and this might give Moscow and New Delhi a real opportunity at a time when Deng had become really fed up with Bush’s procrastination. ‘The Americans want everything to go badly here, or even worse than that. So we need to put hope mainly in ourselves.’ And also, he mused, perhaps in other sympathetic countries undergoing the tribulations of modernisation and development. ‘Yesterday we spoke to the minister of science and technology of the PRC. We talked about cooperation. He is well disposed.’ Gorbachev reminded Gandhi about their previous talks about ‘the triangle’ – a new framework of trilateral cooperation between the Soviet Union, India and China. ‘Perhaps now is the exact moment when they are truly interested in ties with you and with us?’[167]