WASHINGTON, DC – China’s progress toward an open society ended when the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) slaughtered at least hundreds, if not thousands, of peaceful demonstrators in and around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square on June 3-4, 1989. The crackdown left a lasting stain on the ruling Communist Party of China (CPC), despite the regime’s unrelenting efforts to whitewash history and suppress collective memory.

Three decades later, the consequences of the CPC’s decision to crush the protest have become even harder to escape. Looking back, it is clear that the tragedy altered the course of Chinese history decisively, foreclosing the possibility of a gradual and peaceful transition to a more liberal and democratic political order.

It is worth remembering that the decade before the Tiananmen massacre was filled with a sense of possibility. China had a choice. It could revert to the more orthodox Stalinist – but not Maoist – model that had prevailed in the 1950s, a path favored by the regime’s conservatives. It could embrace gradual reforms to develop a market economy, the rule of law, and a more open political process, as moderate liberals wanted. Or it could emulate Taiwan and South Korea’s neo-authoritarian model by modernizing the economy under one-party rule, as Deng Xiaoping had long advocated.

These three factions – conservatives, reformers, and neo-authoritarian modernizers – were in a stalemate before the PLA’s tanks and troops entered the square. The massacre, the fall of the Berlin Wall later that year (by sheer coincidence), and the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 changed that: only the neo-authoritarian option remained. While the political purge following the Tiananmen crackdown had decimated the liberals, the conservatives – demoralized and panicking after the fall of communism – could offer no viable survival strategy.

And yet, while the stage had been cleared for the neo-authoritarians, by early 1992, when an 87-year-old Deng embarked on his historic tour of southern China in an effort to save the regime and redeem himself for the crackdown, the neo-authoritarians and the conservatives had merged. While no single label accurately describes the post-1989 order, its defining features were pragmatism, crony capitalism, and strategic restraint.

Pragmatism, in particular, served the CPC well in the years after Tiananmen. At home, a flexible approach to policy allowed the regime to pursue pro-growth experiments, co-opt social elites, and respond to challenges to its authority, while Deng’s dictum to keep a “low profile” became the guiding principle of China’s foreign policy. The CPC continued to view the West as an existential ideological threat, which it countered by ceaselessly nurturing nationalist sentiment. But China’s leaders knew that they were free-riding on the liberal international order, and thus studiously avoided any real conflict with the United States.

Meanwhile, on the economic front, the CPC pursued aggressive market reforms and opened up the country even more than it had in the 1980s, but without loosening its grip on critical levers of the economy, such as finance and state-owned enterprises.

For about two decades, Deng’s survival strategy was wildly successful. The so-called Chinese economic miracle boosted the CPC’s legitimacy and soon made China the world’s second-largest economy. But that post-Tiananmen order suffered an abrupt and premature death in late 2012, when Xi Jinping became the CPC’s general secretary. By restoring strongman rule, reviving Leninism, re-imposing authoritarian social control, and, above all, directly challenging the US, Xi has done away with the pragmatism, elite power-sharing, and strategic restraint that defined the post-1989 era.

In fairness, though, Deng’s neo-authoritarian model always had fatal flaws that made its demise inevitable. Deng’s own aversion to political reform left the regime bereft of mechanisms to prevent the return of a Mao-like figure. In a way, the CPC simply got lucky with Deng’s two immediate successors, Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao, who were checked by strong rivals and couldn’t revive personalistic rule even if they had wanted to. Because economic development had spawned a virulent form of crony capitalism, most elites presided over murky patronage networks within the regime, and were thus vulnerable to “anti-corruption” purges.

Under Xi, the political gulf between China and the West has continued to widen, even as economic integration has deepened. The CPC’s method of stoking Chinese nationalism to burnish its own legitimacy proved spectacularly effective, and its bulging coffers underwrote the development of a vast repressive apparatus, including the infamous Great Firewall. If China had not acquired so much wealth and power, these other developments might not have mattered. But by reverting to hard authoritarianism, doubling down on state capitalism, and giving free rein to its geopolitical ambitions, the CPC has finally turned the West against China.

In many ways, today’s China is starting to resemble that of the 1950s: the CPC is led by a strongman who openly calls on the party “not to forget its original commitment” (buwang chuxin). Ideological indoctrination has returned with a vengeance; the US has again become the enemy, while Russia has re-emerged as a friend. After a 30-year detour, China is headed in the direction that those responsible for the Tiananmen Square crackdown would have wanted. The country is in the grip of a hardline Leninist regime that is fortified by a hybrid economy and bent on ruthless repression. That is the lasting tragedy of Tiananmen.

NEW YORK – China’s massive protest movement in the spring of 1989, centered in (but not confined to) Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, seems to have been the anti-Communist revolt that failed. As the brutal crackdown on and following June 3-4 played out, political freedom was being won in Central Europe – first in Poland and Hungary, and then, beginning that fall, in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and, albeit violently and rather undemocratically, Romania. Within the next two years, the Soviet Union, cracked open by Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms, finally imploded.

These democratic revolutions followed the “People Power” rebellions a few years earlier in Northeast and Southeast Asia. Bliss it was to be alive in those days. Francis Fukuyama was not the only American who believed that liberal democracy had triumphed forever. There was no alternative to what was widely seen as a natural symbiosis between capitalism and open societies. One couldn’t exist without the other. Once the middle classes had their economic freedom, true democracy would surely follow.

Such was the sense of liberal post-Cold War triumph at the time that many Western countries, especially the United States, saw no reason any longer to contain the animal spirits of free enterprise with much government regulation. This was also the message brought to post-communist Europe by various evangelists of neoliberalism.

China appeared to be the outlier. Apart from such backwaters as Cuba and North Korea, only there had Communist rule prevailed. China continued to be ruled by the Communist Party of China. But was that really a victory for communism? In fact, what emerged intact from the massacre of defenseless students and other citizens was not really communism at all, but Deng Xiaoping’s version of authoritarian capitalism.

Deng had been praised in the West for renouncing decades of Maoist autarky and opening China for global business. He unleashed capitalist enterprise with the words “Let some people get rich first,” a phrase that gained currency as “To get rich is glorious.” This was the ideology that needed to be defended from students protesting against corruption and demanding political reforms. That is why People’s Liberation Army tanks were used to crush the revolt. It was a savage response, but as one of the Party leaders said: “As for this fear that foreigners will stop investing, I’m not afraid. Foreign capitalists are out to make money and they’ll never abandon a big market for the world like China.”

China never looked back (literally as well as figuratively, because the events of June 3-4 are unmentionable). The economy soon steamed ahead. And the educated urban classes, from which most of the student protesters in 1989 sprang, benefited enormously. They were offered more or less the same deal as the better-off citizens of Singapore, or even Japan, even though neither of these countries are dictatorships: stay out of politics, don’t question the authority of the one-party state, and we’ll create the conditions for you to get rich.

Even educated young Chinese now have little or no knowledge of what happened 30 years ago. And when they do, they often react to foreigners who broach the subject with prickly nationalism, as though talking about it were a sign of anti-Chinese animus. One suspects that this defensiveness might be the result of a slightly guilty conscience: many people have benefited from a shabby deal.

In 2001, a year after Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia, I traveled from Beijing to Moscow and wrote an article comparing Russia favorably to China. I assumed that Russia was well on its way to becoming an open democracy. I was wrong. In fact, Russia became more like Deng Xiaoping’s China, albeit a less successful version. Some people became immensely wealthy. Parts of Moscow give the impression of a new gilded age.

Something similar has happened in Central European countries. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, has been most the most vociferous ideologue of “illiberal democracy,” a system of oppressive one-party rule in which capitalism can still thrive. It looks as if the right-wing populist demagogues of Western Europe, and even the US, would like to follow this example. Like Donald Trump, they are all more or less unreserved admirers of Putin.

Of course, this was not the way it was supposed to happen. The assumption was too strong, especially in America, but also in most other Western countries, that liberal democracy and capitalism were inseparable. We now know that this is not true. It is perfectly possible to be a rich entrepreneur, or even just a well-off middle-class consumer, in a one-party state where basic political freedoms are stifled.

We should actually have known this all along. Singapore offered a perfect example of authoritarian capitalism. It was dismissed, because Singapore was too small, or because “Asians” were not interested in democracy, as Singapore’s rulers never ceased to point out. The Chinese protest movement in 1989 proved that this was not the case, either. Democratic reforms that would guarantee freedom of speech and assembly were of great interest to the students in Tiananmen Square.

What happened in China after the protests were crushed points to another truth. China was not an outlier in 1989 at all. Illiberal capitalism has since emerged as an attractive model to autocrats all over the world, including in countries that succeeded in throwing off communist rule 30 years ago. The Chinese just got there first.

HONG KONG – The 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre of at least 10,000 people is significant for several reasons. For one thing, the deadly assault on student-led demonstrators remains a dark and hidden chapter in China’s communist narrative. For another, the Chinese government’s arbitrary exercise of power against its own citizens has not only continued since the massacre, but has become more methodical, sophisticated, and efficient, with the country’s internal-security budget now officially surpassing its mammoth defense spending. Yet at the same time, this reliance on brute force carries an ominous message for the Communist Party of China (CPC) itself.

In a night of carnage on June 3-4, 1989, the Chinese authorities crushed the pro-democracy protests with tanks and machine guns. In Eastern Europe, the democratization push led to the fall of the Berlin Wall just five months later, heralding the end of the Cold War. But the West recoiled from sustaining its post-Tiananmen sanctions against China, thereby paving the way for the country’s dramatic rise.

The West not only glossed over the massacre, but also ignored China’s subsequent excesses and unfair trade practices. US President Donald Trump recently lamented how the United States had aided China’s rise and spawned a “monster”: “[China] took advantage of us for many, many years. And I blame us, I don’t blame them,” Trump said. “I don’t blame [Chinese] President Xi [Jinping]. I blame all of our presidents, and not just President [Barack] Obama. You go back a long way. You look at President [Bill] Clinton, [George W.] Bush – everybody; they allowed this to happen, they created a monster.”

Yet, after a long post-massacre boom, China – the world’s largest, strongest, wealthiest, and most technologically advanced autocracy – is entering a period of uncertainty just as it prepares to celebrate a record 70 years of communist rule. (The longest-lasting autocratic system in the modern era, the Soviet Union, survived 69 years.)

China’s many anniversaries in 2019 are making this a politically sensitive year. The Tiananmen Square protests in 1989 were inspired by the watershed May 4, 1919, student demonstrations against Western colonialism at the same site. But whereas Xi recently extolled the May Fourth Movement in a speech marking the centenary of that event, he and the CPC are edgy about the Tiananmen anniversary.

This year also marks the 60th anniversary of a failed uprising in Tibet against Chinese occupation. And it is ten years since a Uighur revolt killed hundreds in the Xinjiang region, where more than one million Muslims have now been incarcerated as part of a Xi-initiated effort to “cleanse” their minds of extremist thoughts. Then, on October 1, the People’s Republic of China will celebrate its 70th birthday.

But the anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown is the most portentous for the CPC’s continued monopoly on power. The massacre was carried out because the party has relied on brute force since its inception, including to seize power. During the rule of the PRC’s founder, Mao Zedong, tens of millions died in the so-called Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and other state-engineered disasters.

Adolf Hitler was responsible for an estimated 11-12 million civilian deaths, and Joseph Stalin for at least six million. But Mao, with some 42.5 million, was the undisputed champion butcher of the twentieth century. And his blood-soaked rule influenced his successor, Deng Xiaoping, who ordered the savage assault on the Tiananmen demonstrators.

The CPC’s survival in power reflects not only its willingness to deploy massive violence, but also its skill at distorting reality with propaganda and snuffing out dissent. But how long can the world’s oldest autocracy continue to sustain itself? By dispensing with collective leadership and orderly succession, Xi has already undermined the institutionalism that made post-Mao China resilient to the forces of change that helped to unravel the Soviet empire.

Until Xi’s lurch to despotism, it seemed that history was by and large going China’s way. Its economy was booming, its control of the South China Sea was steadily expanding, and its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) of transnational infrastructure projects was progressing smoothly. But China is now facing strong international headwinds at a time when its economy has noticeably slowed. BRI partner countries are increasingly concerned about becoming ensnared in sovereignty-eroding debt traps. China’s influence operations in democratic countries – and the Trojan horse of Confucius Institutes at foreign universities – are now meeting increased resistance. And, more fundamentally, the paradigm shift in US policy toward China under Trump is altering the geopolitical landscape for Xi’s government.

Meanwhile, China’s growing economic risks – such as rising local government debt, higher US trade tariffs, and Western pushback against its technological expansion and trade and investment practices – are compounding the CPC’s concerns about social unrest. By prompting some multinationals to move production from China to Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and elsewhere, Trump’s tariffs are further intensifying the party’s anxiety.

As a result, China’s triumphalism has ceased, and Xi has warned that the country faces major new risks at home and abroad that could escalate and ignite turbulence. The CPC fears that it could meet the same fate as its Soviet counterpart, especially if it fails to prevent small incidents from spiraling into major defiance of its authority. This explains Xi’s emphasis on enforcing strict Leninist discipline. Yet Xi himself is undermining the CPC by building a cult of personality around his one-man rule and by inviting international pushback through his overemphasis on China’s strength and power.

The anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre is a reminder that the free ride China has enjoyed internationally over the past 30 years is ending. It should also serve as a warning to the CPC that its continued reliance on brute power to keep China’s citizens in line could eventually leave it on the ash heap of history.

LONDON – Thirty years ago this month, I was in Beijing as a British development minister for the annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank. But what took place at that gathering – including the seating for the first time of a delegation from Taiwan – was overshadowed by what was happening across the city. And what happened in China in 1989 continues to resonate deeply today, not least in Hong Kong.

The big event in Beijing in late May of that year was supposed to be a state visit by the Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev; the Chinese leadership was keen to show him how an orderly communist regime ran a great country, in comparison to the dissolution occurring in the Soviet Union under perestroika. But like an enormous unexpected firework display, an almost festive explosion of yearning for freedom greeted both sides.

Prompted by student demonstrations, much of Beijing’s population seemed to turn out in the streets to call for greater liberty and more democratic accountability. The show of people power spread to other cities. It was exuberant and spontaneous. And no one – neither the regime nor the demonstrators – seemed to know what to do next.

As a delegation of development ministers, we met the Communist Party general secretary – the charming, reform-minded Zhao Ziyang. He expressed sympathy with some of the demonstrators’ arguments and grievances, and later went to Tiananmen Square to say much the same to the students. As often happens in mass protest movements, they were divided between those who regarded compromise with the authorities as surrender, and those who believed that choosing freely to return to work or studies would secure them the moral high ground for the future.

We know what happened next. The elderly hardliners in the communist leadership were terrified that they were losing their grip, as indeed they were. They brought in the tanks, and the People’s Liberation Army massacred the people they were supposed to protect. No incident better demonstrates the crucial distinction between the Communist Party of China (CPC) – no longer particularly communist, but increasingly Leninist – and China’s great civilization.

To hear Chinese communist leaders tell it, the party embodies that 4,000-year-old civilization. It does not. Who was responsible for the murder of landowners after the 1949 communist revolution? Who was to blame for the Great Leap Forward and the Great Chinese Famine? Who instigated the Cultural Revolution, with its accompanying mass violence?

It is not surprising that the CPC has worked so hard to extirpate the Tiananmen Square massacre from public memory. History – including the horrors of Mao Zedong’s rule – is too volatile a substance for the Chinese dictatorship. China’s leaders hold up their system of government as a model for other countries. But how can a regime be confident in the sustainability of its values and methods if it is afraid of its own past?

Many of us used to think that China, growing richer and resuming a central role in world affairs, would slowly but inevitably embrace the same aspirations as most other societies: greater accountability, freedom to speak one’s mind, and a rule of law to which all, including the mightiest, were subject.

President Xi Jinping, however, has been trying to bury that idea by reasserting party control over every aspect of government, jailing lawyers and human-rights activists, cracking down on religious groups, incarcerating hundreds of thousands of Uighurs in “re-education” camps in China’s Xinjiang region, and issuing increasingly bellicose threats against Taiwan. And we have seen the same reversal in Hong Kong.

Communist China signed an international treaty to respect Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy, freedom, and rule of law for 50 years after it resumed sovereignty over the city in 1997. For more than a decade after this handover, things went pretty well, although China retreated from some of its promises about democratic development.

But with Xi’s consolidation of absolute power, things have changed. Most recently, out-of-date public-order charges have been used to pursue democracy campaigners in Hong Kong and silence dissent. The local government increasingly seems to take instructions from the Beijing regime and its local United Front communist activists. The Chinese government’s ham-fisted approach has fueled misguided calls – never heard when the city was ruled by a distant colonial power – for Hong Kong independence.

The latest blow to Hong Kong’s freedom and identity is the local government’s proposed legislation to allow extradition to China – a possibility that I would have ruled out just a few months ago. The government claims, spuriously, that it simply wants to close a loophole. But Hong Kong’s refusal until now to extradite people to mainland China has been a crucial firewall between a city subject to the rule of law and a country subject to rule by law, with no real distinction between the courts, the party leadership, and the security services.

This threatened change to the law on extradition has led to protests by lawyers, chambers of commerce, and a number of governments. One danger, already highlighted in the US Congress, is that if Hong Kong is treated like Shenzhen or Shanghai in this respect, then it will be treated that way in terms of economics and trade, too. And Hong Kong should do all it can to avoid being sucked into trade wars between China and the United States.

Yet Hong Kong is different from the mainland. On the night of June 4, as has happened every year since 1990, more than 100,000 people will attend a candlelight vigil to mark the anniversary of the brutal suppression of the 1989 demonstrations in Beijing. In this still-free city, at least, the Tiananmen massacre has not been forgotten. Let us hope that the Hong Kong government does not try to prosecute the vigil’s organizers for conspiracy.

NEW HAVEN – This is a big year for anniversaries in China. On May 4, the People’s Republic will commemorate the centennial of the May Fourth Movement, the student-led protests in front of Beijing’s Tiananmen Gate in 1919 that marked the birth of Chinese nationalism. And then, one month later, on June 4, will come the 30th anniversary of the violent suppression of pro-democracy student protests on the same site. This milestone, by contrast, will not be officially acknowledged, much less commemorated, in China.

The 1919 demonstrations are immortalized in stone on the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square. Referring to the same ideals of science and democracy, the protesters in 1989 also presented themselves as loyal to the nation. But the 1989 movement ended in what is known outside China as the Tiananmen Square massacre, and within China as the “Tiananmen incident.” The events of three decades ago are a taboo subject in China, scrubbed by the authorities from the Internet and largely unknown to the country’s younger generation.

It is a persistent contradiction that the Chinese state claims the mantle of May 4 while repressing the memory of June 4. The students of 1919 are celebrated as outspoken patriots, in keeping with a long Chinese tradition that places the intellectual in a role of social responsibility. The ideal scholar of imperial times took great risks to speak truth to power, in order to expose official corruption and spur reform.

Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square. Photo by Puck Engman.

University students in the early twentieth century inherited this legacy. In fact, the Communist Party of China (CPC) has its roots in the May Fourth Movement: student periodicals spread Marxist ideas, a Marxist study group was founded at Peking University, and Mao Zedong himself embraced Marxism-Leninism as a student worker in the library.

Because May Fourth has broad and popular resonance in China, the student protesters of 1989 – sporting long hair and blue jeans rather than long gowns and pleated skirts – consciously referred to it. And, like their predecessors, they emphasized their patriotism, pointing out official corruption and the economic inequalities that had resulted from the post-Mao economic reforms.

Yet the Chinese state branded the 1989 Tiananmen protest a “counterrevolutionary riot,” and blamed a handful of conspirators for misleading the people. Despite the world’s attention, the movement ended in a crackdown, followed by official silence and a public amnesia that deepens by the year.

The June 4 anniversary nonetheless remains politically sensitive, and the Chinese state always goes into high alert in the lead-up to it. In what has become an annual ritual, foreign journalists in China are blocked from covering the anniversary – as Louisa Lim, a former BBC and National Public Radio Beijing correspondent, has pointed out.

Since 1989, the CPC has made every effort to bind young people to the Chinese state and its priorities. Children take lessons in “patriotic education,” fidelity is cultivated through the Young Pioneers and the Communist Youth League, and universities have developed elaborate systems to guard against political deviance and reward political loyalty with jobs. To a large extent, such efforts have made Chinese youth apolitical. The May Fourth legacy has effectively been divided, with patriotism cleaved apart from protest.

But the state has not entirely succeeded in coopting China’s students. In 2018, students who support the CPC’s own Marxist ideology became the latest generation of protesters to run afoul of the authorities. Last summer, groups began organizing factory workers in southern China, calling attention to abuses and helping workers to form an independent labor union. Presenting themselves as loyal to Chinese President Xi Jinping, the students launched campaigns in the field and on their university campuses.

The state has detained dozens of them. Videos show Peking University officials attempting to block student organizations, and witnesses have confirmed the disappearance of Marxist student leaders at the hands of plainclothes police.

The irony is that China is repressing leftist students whose words and deeds embody the CPC’s original ideals. Just like the party’s earliest leaders, including Mao, they champion exploited workers and seek to organize them, sometimes even engaging in factory work themselves. As their classes in Marxism and Mao’s writings have taught them to do, they investigate social conditions and question China’s deep inequalities. And, like their May Fourth forebears, today’s young Marxists see themselves as loyal students speaking truth to power.

This year’s anniversaries of the 1919 and 1989 movements will therefore carry particular weight.

The May Fourth legacy is one of patriotism and enlightenment. Born of those claims, Tiananmen in 1989 ended in violence and silence. Foreign observers will doubtless point to the Chinese authorities’ contradictory attitudes toward May 4 and June 4, and conclude that China now has the power to shape its own historical narrative.

But the case of the Marxist students last year highlighted the continued potential for a loyal opposition. As the People’s Republic looks ahead to the 70th anniversary of its founding this October, it must continue to reckon with its own history.