Post Wall, Post Square: Rebuilding the World after 1989

By the end of the Reagan administration Washington viewed Beijing with almost a sense of triumph. Secretary of State George Shultz described China’s ‘long march to the market’ as a ‘truly historic event – a great nation throwing off outmoded economic doctrines and liberating the energies of 1 billion talented people’. When Bush took office, therefore, it seemed axiomatic that Deng’s economic reforms were fully embedded and would go from strength to strength. The question now in Washington was how soon economic change would generate political change – akin to the transformations in the Soviet bloc under Gorbachev. Like a succession of American leaders since the era of Franklin Roosevelt and Cordell Hull, Bush tended to assume that one form of change would lead to the other: democratisation in China therefore seemed not a question of whether but when.[62]

Yet the consequences of Deng’s economic reforms were double-edged. They stirred popular desire for a more open society but also provoked mounting discontent by the late 1980s. During Mao’s Cultural Revolution a whole generation had lost out on higher education, and when Deng set China on course to catch up with the developed and developing world, frustrated radicals turned Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan and other university cities into hotbeds of dissent. This occurred just when inflation hit unprecedented levels (8.8% in 1985) as the command economy was eased. The regime embarked on cautious political reforms and allowed intellectuals and academics a freer rein. Fang Lizhi, astrophysicist and vice chancellor of the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, became celebrated in the West for his advocacy of human rights and his support of student protest. And journalist Liu Binyan gained notoriety after he famously stated that ‘the economic reform is a very long leg in China, while the political reform is a very short one. One can’t proceed without being tripped up by the other.’ By way of explanation, he added: ‘The student movement […] exploded because political reform had hardly begun.’[63]

China’s leadership was not ready for democracy. Spasms of political openness were followed by harsh crackdowns when protests got out of hand. The problem wasn’t simply in the streets or on the campuses, it was also eating away at the party itself in a battle between hardliners and reformers. In a backlash against ‘bourgeois liberalisation’, conservative elders forced out the reformist party general secretary, Hu Yaobang, in January 1987.[64] There was a further challenge. The ageing Deng knew he had to hand over soon to the next generation. He ensured that Hu was replaced by another moderate, Zhao Zhiang, who in the autumn, at the CCP Congress, pushed through a watered-down programme of political reform. This resulted in the retirement of nearly half the Central Committee members – a major step in rejuvenating the party. Retirees included Deng himself who retained only the crucial post of chairman of the Military Affairs Committee. A temporary calm was established between the rival factions of the CCP and the Politburo’s vital Standing Committee, which hung in uneasy balance between reformists led by Zhao and conservatives headed by Li Peng.[65]

During 1988 the inflation rate rose to an unprecedented 18.5%[66] and student protests at price hikes, overcrowding and corruption hit new heights. Things got even worse in 1989. Media reports and images of the political transformation under way in the Soviet satellite states galvanised the protestors, and the impending seventieth anniversary of China’s fabled student uprising against the humiliations imposed on the country by the Versailles Treaty in 1919 – the Fourth of May Movement – also loomed large.[67] Deng – revealing that he worried more about the contagion of the Eastern European and Soviet reforms than Western political ideas – stated in a speech on 25 April 1989: ‘This is not an ordinary student movement but a turmoil … Those influenced by Yugoslav, Polish, Hungarian, and Soviet liberalism have destabilised our society with the objective of overthrowing the Communist leadership, which will endanger the future of our country and our nation.’ The CCP still had no intention of loosening its grip on society or allowing political pluralism in the manner of Gorbachev.[68]

This, however, did not seem to bother George Bush. He had faith in Deng as a progressive leader, whereas Gorbachev was still an unknown quantity and the Soviet Union much more of an existential threat to America and NATO. So, once he became president, there seemed no reason for any kind of ‘pause’ in Sino-American relations. On the contrary Bush, as he had told Brzezinski in November 1988, was keen to consolidate and advance his ‘special relationship’ with Deng and China as soon as possible.

There was also another pressing concern on Bush’s mind. Nothing about China could ever be considered without taking Sino-Soviet relations into account. Washington, Moscow and Beijing formed a strategic triangle whose dynamics were always in flux. Bush was well aware that, a year before he assumed office, Mikhail Gorbachev had already formally proposed a summit meeting with the Chinese leadership – the first since Khrushchev and Mao had met in 1959 on the brink of the Sino-Soviet split that brought the two countries to the verge of war ten years later.

Gorbachev’s overture reflected his desire for normal relations between the world’s two largest communist nations but it was also driven by the need for international stability so as to concentrate on reforms at home. Deng, in turn, had always been clear about China’s conditions for such a summit: 1) that Moscow reduce its military presence along the Sino-Soviet border; 2) that the Soviets withdraw their troops from Afghanistan; and 3) that the Kremlin end support for the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. By the end of 1988 the Chinese were sufficiently satisfied with Soviet concessions to issue a formal invitation for Gorbachev to come to Beijing in May 1989 for summit talks with Deng. The visit was intended to symbolise Sino-Soviet rapprochement after three decades of estrangement and even antagonism.[69]

Gorbachev did not know Deng personally. He had never been to China and was certainly not a lao pengyou. Twenty-seven years Deng’s junior, Gorbachev had few memories of Sino-Soviet relations before the split, which had occurred when he was only in his twenties. Nevertheless, like Bush, he had prioritised a breakthrough with China ever since becoming general secretary. Yet Deng was wary. Although he welcomed closer economic links with the USSR, he did not appreciate Gorbachev’s enthusiasm for political reforms and even spoke of him as an ‘idiot’ for putting politics before economics.[70] For his part, Gorbachev remained sceptical of China’s reform programme in the absence of a major political overhaul, which to his mind was required for a full and successful perestroika. And so he kept downplaying Chinese reforms and indeed prophesied their failure. He also dismissed the Chinese as mere imitators. ‘They all now claim they started perestroika before us,’ he scoffed. ‘They are adopting our approaches.’ Gorbachev’s lofty attitude reflected both a traditionally dismissive Soviet stereotyping of the PRC and also his own competitive, almost messianic, ambition that perestroika – as proclaimed on the title page of his book Perestroika – was not just ‘for our country’ but ‘for the entire world’.[71]

In fact Gorbachev appeared to see himself as the new Lenin. He claimed that his country was the leading state of the socialist system and, as his aide Georgy Shakhnazarov put it, one of the ‘greatest powers or superpowers of the modern world, upon which depends the fate of the world’. From this perspective, predominant among Kremlin policymakers and especially Gorbachev’s own entourage, China was still a secondary power, despite its remarkable recent rise from poverty and backwardness. Moscow itself had always craved recognition from the West to which it looked, at times neurotically, as the sole benchmark against which to measure its own successes. And in this bigger quest for international status, it was almost necessary to deride China’s experience and achievements.[72]

This was not, of course, the way the relationship was viewed in Beijing. Deng was adamant that China not be seen as Moscow’s ‘younger brother’ – as Stalin cynically treated Mao. And with a view to resetting Sino-Soviet relations, Gorbachev was at pains to assure the Chinese he did not harbour any such views: China, he said, had outgrown such a role. Their mutual edginess, however, was a reminder that thirty years of alienation could not be transcended overnight. And the Chinese leaders were quietly watching and drawing conclusions from what seemed to them an utterly chaotic Soviet situation.[73]

So Sino-Soviet relations were at a particularly delicate moment at the beginning of 1989, with the Gorbachev–Deng summit scheduled for May. In Washington, on the third point of the triangle, Bush and Scowcroft were keen to get to Beijing ahead of the Soviets. Even though the Cold War was on the wane, the old verities of Nixon-era competitive triangularity remained a strategic imperative. Bush and his advisers feared that the smooth-talking Gorbachev would be able to charm the Chinese, as he had done in Europe, ending conflict on their joint borders and burying the ideological hatchet. As Scowcroft put it: ‘We anticipated that he might attempt a rapprochement between Moscow and Beijing, and would have liked to be certain it did not come at our expense. There was no way, however, to justify a trip to China in the first quarter of the first year of the president’s term.’[74]

Then fate came to Bush’s aid. Hirohito, the emperor of Japan, died on 7 January 1989.

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The president’s attendance at Hirohito’s funeral in Tokyo on 24 February meant a great deal to the Japanese. Not only was Bush the head of state of Japan’s great ally and protector, he was also a veteran of the Pacific War in which Hirohito had been the official leader of one of America’s Axis enemies. The visit therefore symbolised the remarkable reconciliation between their two states since 1945. Yet it also mattered in other ways. The presence of the US president prompted other world dignitaries to come as well, further raising the profile of the occasion, and it gave Bush the chance to engage in funeral diplomacy. He held over twenty one-to-one meetings on the margins of the ceremonies, with figures such as François Mitterrand and Richard von Weizsäcker, the presidents of France and West Germany. Tokyo was a perfect opportunity for Bush to take the temperature of world politics without becoming entangled in the paraphernalia of high-profile summitry.[75]

Above all, the unforeseen trip to Japan offered an ideal pretext to visit China. As soon as Bush was inaugurated, Scowcroft met with Chinese ambassador Han Xu to start detailed planning. Time was too short to set up a full-dress state visit, so instead a ‘working visit’ was arranged – a trip without any specific agenda except for the president to reconnect with China’s senior leaders and to reaffirm his commitment to the Asia-Pacific region.[76] Just before Bush flew from Tokyo to Beijing, he and Japan’s prime minister Noboru Takeshita compared notes. It was ‘important for the US and Japan to help the modernisation of China’, Takeshita told Bush. And he stressed that improved Sino-Soviet relations were not expected to ‘pose any threat to Japan’. The president, for his part, sought to reassure Japan by emphasising that, when he eventually unveiled his policies on the USSR and arms control, they would not have any detrimental effect on Japan or China. Overall, Bush’s main message was: don’t worry, we remain a staunch ally of Japan.[77]

Happy returns: George and Barbara in the Forbidden City

On arriving in Beijing on the evening of 25 February, Bush was warmly received at the Great Hall of the People by Chinese president Yang Shangkun, who again highlighted Bush’s special stature as a lao pengyou. In a cordial forty-five-minute chat, Yang called Bush’s first presidential visit to Beijing (and his fifth trip to China since his serving as US envoy in 1974–5) ‘very significant’. There was plenty of personal flattery, of the sort that Chinese leaders lavished on their ‘special friends’. President Yang threw in lines like ‘you’ve made great contributions to the development of Sino-US relations and to cooperation between our two countries … I think this shows that you, Mr President, pay much attention to our bilateral relationship … Personally, as I have told Ambassador Lord many times, if I could vote, I would vote for Bush.’[78]

But behind all the sweet talk there was substance as well. Both sides made clear their commitment to deepening the bilateral relationship in and for itself – not just to counterbalance Soviet power. ‘I feel the relationship we have now is not based on some facet of Soviet relations,’ Bush declared, ‘but on its own merits. For example, we now have cultural, educational and trade relations. It is not just based on worry about the Soviets, although we still do to a degree.’ Yang agreed: ‘We are two big countries, located on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean. So the friendly cooperation between our two countries will promote cooperation in the Pacific region and in the world as well. This is most important for the maintenance of world peace, stability and security.’[79]

All this was a curtain-raiser to the meeting that Bush really wanted, with China’s diminutive Paramount Leader.[80] He talked with Deng for an hour on the morning of 26 February in a room off the Great Hall of the People. Bush was at pains to offer assurances that he had not rushed to Beijing in order to steal a march on Gorbachev, but the two leaders spent much of their time circling around the great imponderable of where the Soviet Union was going. Deng spoke at length about history, emphasising that the two countries which had caused China the most suffering and ‘humiliation’ over the last century and a half had been Japan and Russia. Even though Japan cost China ‘tens of millions of lives’ and ‘incalculable’ financial damage, the Soviet impact had been much more profound because they acquired 3 million square kilometres of Chinese territory. Given that background, Deng wondered, even if his summit with Gorbachev proved successful and relations were normalised, what would follow? ‘Personally, I think it is still an unknown quantity,’ he said. ‘The fact is there are many accumulated problems. What’s more they have deep historical roots.’[81]

Bush echoed Deng’s feeling that one man could not change history. ‘Gorbachev is a charming man, and the Soviet Union is in a state of change. But the byword for the US is caution … Our experience tells us that you cannot make broad foreign policy decisions based on the personality or aspirations of one man. You need to consider the trend of the whole society and country.’[82]

At the end, Deng brought this point much closer to home. ‘With regard to the problems confronting China, let me say to you that the overwhelming need is to maintain stability. Without stability, everything will be gone; even accomplishments will be ruined.’ Looking hard at Bush, he added: ‘We hope our friends abroad can understand this point.’ Bush did not blink: ‘We do.’ Deng’s message was clear. Whatever one thought about perestroika and glasnost, about freedom of choice in Eastern Europe and grand proclamations about universal values, there would be no Gorbachevs in China. Human rights and political reform were not appropriate subjects for discussion, even with a lao pengyou. Bush got the message and had no intention of challenging it. The two leaders understood each other. ‘All right,’ said Deng, ‘let’s go to lunch.’[83]

Bush left Beijing optimistic that important groundwork had been laid for what he called a ‘productive period’ in diplomatic relations, despite the turbulence in China’s domestic affairs. The president remembered appreciatively ‘the warm and genuine handshakes between old friends’. But more pragmatically he also felt that he had been able to speak frankly with the Chinese leadership[84] and that the two sides could develop a practical working relationship based on a ‘real level of trust’. Bush had no illusions that anything would be easy with Beijing and therefore lobbied for good communication on all issues, but he recognised that criticism should not be expressed in public, particularly about human rights. ‘I understood that strong words and direct views were best exchanged between us privately, as in this visit, not in press statements and angry speeches.’[85]

Returning to Washington from his first foreign trip as president, Bush reflected on what he had learned. Back at Andrews Air Force Base on 27 February he told the assembled press that his whirlwind tour of Japan, China and South Korea had underscored for him America’s stature as a present and future ‘Pacific power’. From those four days of intensive discussions, what stuck in his mind was that ‘the world looks to America for leadership’. This, he asserted, was ‘not just because we’re militarily strong, not just because we have the world’s largest economy, but because the ideas we have championed are now dominant. Freedom and democracy, openness, and the prosperity that derives from individual initiatives in the free marketplace – these ideas, once thought to be strictly American, have now become the goals of mankind all over Asia.’[86]

This was a striking ideological clarion call from a man who was not a natural rhetorician. Less than three months after Gorbachev’s grandstanding performance at the UN, the new US president was putting down his own markers. The Soviet leader liked to present his new socialism as the answer not only for Russia but also for the whole world. Now Bush was making a counterclaim for American values, almost as if the ideological Cold War was still raging. Although that February evening at Andrews he talked particularly about the USA in Asia, by the middle of April he was also speaking in similar tones about Eastern Europe.

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The president had already made clear to Weizsäcker in Tokyo on 24 February ‘we don’t want Gorbachev to win a propaganda offensive’. As Atlantic allies ‘we must stay together’.[87] Six weeks later, on 12 April, he developed his thinking when talking with NATO secretary general Manfred Wörner. He said he intended to strengthen the Alliance’s solidarity by taking a leading role. He was worried that ‘Gorbachev had dominated the headlines in Europe, causing strains over NATO defense issues’ – in particular undermining support in West Germany for short-range nuclear missiles. Now was the time, said the president, to ensure that NATO would not ‘unravel’. Wörner agreed: he saw the upcoming NATO summit in late May as a ‘unique opportunity’ in a truly ‘historic’ situation. The challenge was that ‘although we are successful, public perception is that Gorbachev is driving history’. It was up to Bush to ‘turn this public perception around’. NATO should not just challenge Moscow on arms control but ‘stress the political battleground’, pushing for ‘a Europe of self-determination and freedom, free of the Berlin Wall and the Brezhnev Doctrine’. In this endeavour NATO looked for American ‘ideas, concepts and cooperation’ because the other allies would not be able to ‘deliver much’. Bush concurred. Gorbachev had, ‘like a kind of surfer, caught a wave of public support’. It would be important at the upcoming NATO summit to find ‘agreement on a broad vision of our own’.[88]

The president was now ready for ‘the vision thing’. In a carefully planned series of major speeches during April and May, he gradually unveiled his grand scenario for a Europe emerging from the Cold War. The first speech was deliberately staged in Hamtramck, a predominantly Polish–American suburb of Detroit, on 17 April – twelve days after Poland had unveiled major constitutional reforms: the creation of the Senate and the office of the president, as well legalisation of the free trade union Solidarity. These major structural changes were the result of two months of round-table talks between the opposition movement and the communist regime under General Wojciech Jaruzelski. Democratic elections would follow later in the summer. The ‘ideas of democracy’, as Bush put it, were clearly ‘returning with renewed force in Europe’, with Poland in the vanguard – hence the otherwise unlikely venue of Hamtramck.

Picking up themes from his inaugural address, Bush reflected on the passing of totalitarianism, the spread of freedom and the right to self-determination. ‘The West can now be bold in proposing a vision of the European future,’ he declared. ‘We dream of the day when there will be no barriers to the free movement of peoples, goods, and ideas. We dream of the day when Eastern European peoples will be free to choose their system of government and to vote for the party of their choice in regular, free, contested elections … And we envision an Eastern Europe in which the Soviet Union has renounced military intervention as an instrument of its policy.’ Bush’s refrain about ‘dreams’ and ‘visions’ fleshed out his comments five days earlier to Wörner. He was driven by a growing conviction that America, as the leader of the West, now had an unprecedented opportunity to apply its statecraft to the reshaping of Europe. ‘What has brought us to this opening?’ he asked. ‘The unity and strength of the democracies, yes, and something else: the bold, new thinking in the Soviet Union, the innate desire for freedom in the hearts of all men.’ The president proclaimed that ‘if we’re wise, united, and ready to seize the moment, we will be remembered as the generation that made all Europe free’.[89]

Scowcroft called the Hamtramck speech the administration’s ‘first major step on Eastern Europe’. Although he admitted that it received ‘scarcely a glance’ in the US, Bush’s words attracted much greater attention in Europe and the USSR, where Pravda was indeed rather favourable, singling out the president’s positive evaluation of Soviet reforms and the prospects for better superpower relations.[90]

By May the administration’s sluggish review of Soviet policy was finally gathering pace. On the 12th Bush used the commencement ceremonies at Texas A&M University in his adopted home state to publicise something of the new strategy for superpower relations, which he summed up in the key concept ‘Beyond Containment’. In other words, the president wanted to transcend the defensive posture that had characterised US policy at the height of the Cold War. Here was a more assertive Bush: the cautious bystander on the margins of the Reagan and Gorbachev summit at Governors Island the previous December now had a clear sense of where he wanted to go:

We are approaching the conclusion of an historic post-war struggle between two visions: one of tyranny and conflict and one of democracy and freedom. The review of US–Soviet relations that my administration has just completed outlines a new path toward resolving this struggle … Our review indicates that forty years of perseverance have brought us a precious opportunity, and now it is time to move beyond containment to a new policy for the 1990s – one that recognises the full scope of change taking place around the world and in the Soviet Union itself. In sum, the United States now has as its goal much more than simply containing Soviet expansionism. We seek the integration of the Soviet Union into the community of nations.

Bush also set out the terms on which the USSR would be welcomed back ‘into the world order’. Fine rhetoric from Gorbachev was not sufficient – ‘promises are never enough’. The Kremlin must take some concrete ‘positive steps’. Top of the list were to reduce Soviet forces (proportionate to legitimate security needs), provide support for self-determination, ‘tear down the Iron Curtain’ and find diplomatic solutions with the West to resolve regional disputes around the world, such as in Afghanistan, Angola and Nicaragua. Taking these steps would make possible a qualitatively new relationship between the two superpowers.[91]

And yet, as Bush admitted, Soviet military capabilities remained ‘awesome’. So deterrence still remained vital and this demanded a strong NATO – the theme of Bush’s speech on 24 May in New London, Connecticut, to the US Coast Guard Academy. There he outlined future US military strategy and arms-control policy for the next decade. ‘Our policy is to seize every – and I mean every – opportunity to build a better, more stable relationship with the Soviet Union, just as it is our policy to defend American interests in light of the enduring reality of Soviet military power.’ He acknowledged that, ‘amidst the many challenges we’ll face, there will be risks. But let me assure you, we’ll find more than our share of opportunities … There’s an opportunity before us to shape a new world.’