Tiananmen and after: causes and consequences

By the end of the 1980s some leaders of the CCP were beginning to express concern about the rapidity of economic change, which threatened to unleash damaging forces within society, such as demands for democracy and a loosening of party control.

Tiananmen Square

The main square in Beijing where Mao declared the foundation of the PRC in October 1949 and where students protested against communist rule in the spring of 1989. The student movement was crushed on 3 June 1989 by units of the PLA.

As in the Cultural Revolution it was students who most publicly voiced these complaints. In April 1989 the death of a leading CCP moderate, Hu Yaobang, and a visit to Beijing by the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, inspired students' calls for greater democracy in China and a purging of the corrupt from the CCP. The centre of the protests was the student occupation of Tiananmen Square in Beijing, but demonstrations also took place in another twenty or so cities, and increasingly involved workers and other non-student groups. At first the party hesitated about how to react to this wave of dissent, but once it became clear that the movement would not dissipate of its own accord, a military clampdown was ordered. On 3 June units of the PLA entered the square and dispersed the demonstrators with some loss of life. In the aftermath mass arrests took place.

The violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protests naturally had an unfortunate effect on China's international image. Even before this the growth in the West of interest in human rights had led to some criticisms of Chinese behaviour, particularly in regard to Tibet, where it was seen as propagating a brutal

policy of assimilation that was intended to destroy Tibetan society and culture. After Tiananmen this criticism of the PRC's human rights record became a tide of disapproval which Western governments found difficult to ignore. In addition, China's position in the world was further damaged by a development beyond its control, namely the end of the Soviet-American Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire. The removal of Soviet communism from the international system left the PRC as the major surviving Marxist-Leninist state. This was not a desirable position to be in, particularly following Tiananmen, because it allowed Western critics to portray the PRC as a potential future hegemonic threat and to argue that a policy of containment should be adopted similar to that which had existed during the Cold War. China's discomfort was particularly evident in relation to the future of Hong Kong, where the long road towards the hand-over in 1997 became increasingly fraught owing to fears that the Chinese intended to extinguish human rights in the colony. China's belligerent rejection of criticism only heightened the impression that it intended to rule with an iron hand, but fortunately in the end the hand-over took place with little controversy and in the years that followed the legal framework that protected freedom of speech remained in place.

containment

The term coined by George Kennan for the American, and broadly Western, policy towards the Soviet Union (and communism in general).

The Clinton administration, while sharing some of these concerns, did not agree with the idea that the best solution was containment and argued instead that the best way to manage China was by promoting engagement rather than confrontation, on the grounds that the granting of respectability was likely to do more in the long term for human rights than constant pin-pricking. Thus, Clinton chose to promote the PRC's entry into the World Trade Organization and to encourage American investment in China's booming economy. However, despite Washington's adoption of this liberal line, Sino-American relations retained an air of tension. One of the main reasons was the issue of Taiwan. Repulsed by the PRC's behaviour in 1989, the island began to flirt with the idea of inde­pendence as a separate sovereign entity. The PRC reacted with fury every time Taiwan inched towards this status and in 1996 a new Taiwan Straits crisis briefly erupted following the visit by the Taiwanese president, Lee Teng-hui, to the United States. In response, in 1997 the Japanese and American governments agreed to expand the remit of the Security Guidelines that lay at the heart of their alliance and Japan reaffirmed its strategic interest in Taiwan and South Korea. In 1999 Sino-American relations were further strained when the Chinese embassy in Belgrade was bombed by NATO aircraft in the Kosovo conflict.

With the arrival of the highly ideological administration of George W Bush in 2001 there was some expectation that a tougher American line towards the PRC would ensue and this impression was soon strengthened when two American pilots were temporarily seized for allegedly infringing Chinese airspace. However, the start of America's ‘war on terror' led to a limited Sino-American rapproche­ment for both were concerned about the threat posed by militant political Islam and, in particular, were keen to ensure the survival of President Pervez Musharraf's government in Pakistan.

A permanent closer understanding, however, still proved difficult simply because China's economic, and thus also political and military, power continued to grow at such a rapid rate. China attempted to blunt the trepidation caused by this resurgence of power by describing itself as being engaged in a ‘peaceful rise' that would not dislocate or threaten international society. Many in the West hoped that this would be the case, but some aspects of Chinese policy did not inspire confidence. One particular area of concern for the West was that China's insatiable appetite for raw materials to power its economic growth led it to cultivate good relations with states that Western opinion saw as morally dubious. This was especially the case in regard to Sudan, where the PRC proved to be an implacable opponent of American efforts to enforce a solution of the Darfur crisis by intro­ducing tough UN sanctions against the government in Khartoum. Meanwhile in Asia, China's neighbours sought insurance policies in a variety of ways. For example, Vietnam joined ASEAN in 1995 in order to boost its security, while other ASEAN members embarked on a marked increase in military spending. For its part, in 2007 Japan pushed the idea of strategic co-operation with fellow democracies in Asia and the Pacific in the shape of a Quadrilateral Initiative with the United States, Australia and India.