WASHINGTON – This week marked the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, in which hundreds or perhaps thousands of students and prodemocracy dissidents were killed by the Chinese military. It was an event that profoundly shaped not only modern China but also the U.S.-China relationship.
It is the odd anniversary that will pass virtually unobserved in the place where it had the greatest impact. Each year, around the anniversary, the government mobilizes an army of censors and trolls — both human and robotic — to stamp out any discussion of Tiananmen online.
Yet for the world outside China, revisiting the Tiananmen Square massacre — a misnomer in that nearly all of the deaths actually occurred outside Tiananmen Square itself, as the troops forced their way into central Beijing — is crucial, for two reasons. The bloody crackdown should remind us of the most fundamental political differences at the heart of today’s U.S.-China competition. And it helps us understand the intimate connection between how China is governed at home and how it behaves on the global stage.
First, although it happened three decades ago, Tiananmen highlights the ideological core of the U.S.-China rivalry. Tensions would eventually have emerged between a hegemonic America and a rising China even if the latter were a liberal democracy. But what Tiananmen demonstrated — and what remains true today — is that China is not just any rising power, and the United States is not just any hegemon.
Rather, China was — and is — a rising power ruled by a dictatorial regime with few compunctions about brutalizing its citizens. (If one needs proof that this is still the case, consider the vast network of concentration camps Beijing has created to persecute between 1 and 3 million Uighurs for their religious beliefs.) It is a Leninist party-state whose leaders view the struggle for power as an all-encompassing, zero-sum contest. And it is ruled by a government that is committed to bringing about a global environment in which authoritarianism is protected and the influence of democratic values, as championed by America, is weakened.
The U.S.-China competition, then, is a clash between geopolitical rivals driven by fundamentally different conceptions of how a state should interact with its citizens. And in retrospect, Tiananmen was the early notice that the Chinese government was determined to resist the seemingly inexorable tide of global democratization — and the early warning that a rising China would eventually seek to shape a world vastly different than the one America prefers.
Tiananmen is also worth remembering for a second reason: It underscores the links between China’s domestic politics and its foreign policy. Socialism was already losing its ideological grip on the population by the 1980s, a result of the economic and humanitarian cataclysms of the Mao Zedong era and then the decidedly non-socialist economic liberalization initiated by Deng Xiaoping. The Tiananmen massacre essentially finished off the Chinese regime’s old model of legitimacy, by showing that the government was determined to thwart the political aspirations of so many of its inhabitants.