Why did the Western powers ease sanctions on China after the Tiananmen Incident?
This important essay by Terumasa Nakanishi examines the possibility of China’s democratization, the puzzling U.S.-China rapprochement, China’s WTO accession, and the “profound bond” that Japan must vigilantly watch.
It sharply addresses the core of the China question that Reiwa Japan must confront.

2019-06-05
Above all, if democratization does not advance over the next twenty to thirty years, the energy driving China’s economic growth will have no choice but to dry up naturally.

The following is an essay by Terumasa Nakanishi published in this month’s issue of the monthly magazine Seiron.
It is not only an essay that every Japanese citizen must read, but one that people all over the world must also read.
The following continues from the passage, “From interference in domestic affairs over the history textbook issue and the prime minister’s visits to Yasukuni Shrine, to the recent persistent acts of territorial encroachment against the Senkaku Islands, China’s violations of our sovereignty escalated throughout the Heisei era.”
The Possibility of Democratization Existed.
In looking back on the Tiananmen Incident today, and in considering the future of Japan-China relations, the most important point is the “possibility of China’s democratization.”
If China had abandoned its Communist Party dictatorship, we would not need to watch its course with this degree of tension.
At that time, the Chinese Communist Party responded to the students’ demands for democratization with armed force by the People’s Liberation Army and preserved the one-party dictatorship.
And now, under the Xi Jinping leadership, it is trying to strengthen its dictatorship still further.
That coercive posture is also directed outward, leading to major developments such as advances into surrounding seas including the South China Sea and East China Sea, and challenges to global hegemony through the Belt and Road Initiative.
When one sees its basic posture of using the economic and military strength that expanded rapidly during the Heisei era to compel not only its own people but also other countries to submit, one cannot help but ask even the “if of history,” namely, what if the Tiananmen Incident had been resolved differently, that is, what if democratization had advanced from that point onward, even gradually.
Looking into the background of the incident, the Cultural Revolution moved toward an end in 1976 with Mao Zedong’s death, and at the Third Plenary Session of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party in December 1978, Deng Xiaoping effectively seized the leadership of the state and launched the line of “Reform and Opening Up.”
This tends to be received as though it were merely a strategy for economic growth, but at the same meeting there was also a positive reevaluation of the “First Tiananmen Incident” of 1976, in which students held demonstrations before Tiananmen in demand of democratization following the death of Zhou Enlai.
In fact, the new Communist Party regime in China that embarked on “Reform and Opening Up” also implied that China would proceed, however gradually, toward democratization.
Entering the 1980s, the self-managed trade union “Solidarity” was formed in Poland in 1980, and in 1985 the Gorbachev government came to power in the former Soviet Union, beginning political reform under the name of “Perestroika.”
As a result, by the latter half of the 1980s, the possibility that the Soviet Union, which in the East-West Cold War was increasingly losing to the liberal camp, might lower the flag of communism and socialism, abandon totalitarianism, and democratize became a major theme of world discussion.
And this, too, became one of the fuses that ignited the Tiananmen Incident.
In fact, in China from 1986 onward, demonstrations by students demanding democratization broke out frequently in various places, and even in the top leadership of the Communist Party, two leaders, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, were at the forefront trying to push ahead with bold democratization.
However, a struggle over the line broke out within the leadership between them and the conservative faction centered on Party elders opposed to democratization, and Hu Yaobang was removed as General Secretary in 1987.
The death in April 1989 of the fallen Hu Yaobang triggered the rapid expansion of the students’ democratization movement to the occupation of Tiananmen Square.
Zhao Ziyang, the reformist successor to Hu Yaobang as General Secretary, defended the students, and as a result invited opposition within the Party and fell from power, and finally Deng Xiaoping decided to proclaim martial law and suppress the students by force.
From the night of June 3 into June 4, large units of the People’s Liberation Army were deployed, and according to one theory the death toll ran into the thousands, becoming a catastrophe in which so many students and citizens were massacred that even now the full extent remains unclear.
The turmoil did not remain in Beijing, but spread to Shanghai, Guangzhou, Xi’an, and elsewhere, and China for a time was in such a state that even airplanes did not fly, it was completely cut off from the outside world, and foreigners were unable even to leave the country.
China had truly reached the eve of civil war, with the Chinese Communist Party brought to the brink of “collapse.”
What is important here is the fact that in the two or three years preceding the incident, the possibility of China’s democratization was being seriously debated day and night within the Chinese Communist Party, including its top leadership, among establishment elite intellectuals and students, and also by many subleaders in positions of guidance in local organizations.
Indeed, the author himself, who visited many places in China around this time, witnessed and heard this in various places.
On the other hand, there had long been a strong view that such a gigantic state of 1.3 billion people could not in fact be held together by the system of modern democratic government, which is a system of dispersed power in which centrifugal force can also act upon the regime in the form of restraints upon the leadership, and that perhaps China could only be held together by a dictatorship.
Also, as will be mentioned later, China still today has deep-rooted cultural foundations that legitimize the absolute domination of power.
However, I for one cannot possibly believe that the Chinese Communist Party can maintain this same dictatorial system semi-permanently from here on, over spans of fifty or one hundred years.
The current Party leadership is using advances in electronic technologies such as IT and AI to strengthen dictatorship through surveillance of the people, but those technologies are also a double-edged sword that could, if circumstances changed even slightly, instead become a tailwind for democratization.
Above all, if democratization does not advance over the next twenty to thirty years, the energy driving China’s economic growth will have no choice but to dry up naturally.
That is because if macroeconomic policy is made to move only according to the “logic of dictatorship,” namely state control and management, the remaining capacity for economic growth must gradually, or sooner or later, be exhausted.
That this obstructs the development of a free market economy and falls into “great inefficiency” has been proven not only by the former Soviet Union but also by the stagnation of many middle-income countries under authoritarian systems.
If China is to pursue the “Chinese dream” of becoming by 2049 a “first-rate world power” surpassing the United States, then at some point China will inevitably have to embark on democratization.
To think about the Tiananmen Incident today is not merely to look back on history.
It also leads to reflection on the future possibility of China’s democratization.
And that, in turn, means knowing that this is an issue that affects the very survival of Japan in the Reiwa era.
The second point in considering the Tiananmen Incident in the context of modern history and civilizational history is the “irony of history,” namely that had China not experienced the Tiananmen Incident, it would not have been able to reach today’s height as the world’s second-largest economic power, challenging America’s technological hegemony.
When the former Soviet Union collapsed, Russia, which began reform from political democratization, entered a long period of confusion and stagnation in its economy.
To overcome that, Russia today requires “post-communist strongman politics,” and as a result the Putin regime was born.
However, dictatorial politics gives rise to a “rent-seeking economy,” a healthy market economy is not fostered, and by relying upon oil as its sole resource industry, the dictatorship is barely maintained, creating a negative spiral structure.
The failure of Soviet-style reform has dragged on, and as can be seen in the Putin system, political and economic stability can no longer be maintained unless the sprouts of the genuine developmental principles of a free economy are cut off.
In that sense, it can be said that without the Tiananmen Incident, China might have democratized, but would also have run into economic difficulties similar to those of Russia.
Why Did the Sanctions Network Against China Collapse?
However, here one collides with a question.
Regarding China, a country that went so far as to use its own regular army to commit the atrocity of “massacring” its own people, the Western nations led by the United States surely recognized clearly at that time that it was a country whose values were decisively incompatible with their own.
And yet, the question remains, why after that did the Western nations such as the United States treat China with such indulgence?
After the Tiananmen Incident, it is true that the Western nations, chiefly the G7 and other major developed countries of the time, imposed severe sanctions upon China.
But on the other hand, immediately after the incident, there began what seemed to be an unprincipled “re-approach to China” by the United States, which should have placed the highest value on such principles as freedom and democracy.
Incredibly, in July 1989, the month after the incident, the administration of George H. W. Bush sent to China Brent Scowcroft, one of the president’s close aides and Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, and in December of that same year dispatched him again together with Deputy Secretary of State Eagleburger as “special envoys.”
President Bush at that time already hinted at easing sanctions, and in November 1991 even Secretary of State Baker visited China, ignoring the international agreement that had banned visits to China by high officials as part of the sanctions.
There is no doubt that this posture of the United States, which can only be called puzzling, became one powerful trigger by which the sanctions network against China eventually broke down, and the historical path toward the superpower China of today, aiming at world hegemony, began.
In particular, we Japanese must keep firmly in mind that Mr. Scowcroft’s visit to China in the month after the incident was a top-secret visit that was not even disclosed to Japan, America’s ally.
Looking back, the same was true of Kissinger’s secret visit to China in July 1971 and the sudden announcement of President Nixon’s plan to visit China.
At that time too, America gave no prior notice whatsoever to its ally Japan, which, following the basic line of American diplomacy up to then, had not recognized the People’s Republic of China.
Panicked by this exactly “high-handed” American approach to China, Japan rushed headlong into the “normalization of diplomatic relations with China,” and Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka, who visited China in September of the following year, signed the Japan-China Joint Communiqué.
At the same time, by acceding to China’s demands, Japan unilaterally severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan, leaving a bitter legacy that continues to this day.
Even now, I believe that one thing that decisively changed the fate of postwar Japan was Kissinger’s visit to China, and another was the response of the Bush administration to China after the Tiananmen Incident.
And what these two things show is that there is some obscure and puzzling relationship between America and China that cannot easily be perceived from the outside.
One aspect of that “profound bond” has finally surfaced in recent years.
It was through the publication of Michael Pillsbury’s China 2049: The Hundred-Year Strategy Secretly Carried Out for World Hegemony (original title: THE HUNDRED-YEAR MARATHON, Nikkei BP, 2015), Mr. Pillsbury having long worked on the front lines of U.S.-China relations in American administrations and also being involved in the Trump administration’s hardline China policy.
This book has already been introduced in many places, but it was shocking in that, together with its overall conclusion that China has steadily been taking steps to seize “world hegemony” in place of America by 2049, the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic, and has often deceived and made use of America for that purpose, it also revealed that in the 1980s America engaged in secret military cooperation with China, including the provision of the most advanced weapons technology and the carrying out of joint military operations, as part of its anti-Soviet strategy.
However, even in Mr. Pillsbury’s explanation there are strange parts throughout the book that remain unconvincing.
The book reveals that, immediately after Deng Xiaoping launched the Reform and Opening Up line around 1980, experts from the World Bank, sometimes without making their intentions public, advised on and became deeply involved in China’s economic development policies as though they were “colluding” with China itself, but to begin with, World Bank involvement must have required arrangements by the U.S. government.
Mr. Pillsbury does not clarify who made such a policy decision, when, and for what reason, but one cannot help sensing in this the existence of a “profound bond” between America and China.
This also overlaps with the fact that the U.S. government rather easily approved China’s accession to the WTO in 2000.
Japanese people must always remain sensitive to this so-called “bond” of covert U.S.-China collusion.
In Japan it has been widely said that the “new Cold War between America and China” began in earnest with Vice President Pence’s “anti-China speech” last October.
Certainly, so far America has avoided easy compromises in trade negotiations, and the scope and rates of punitive tariffs have continued only to expand, so its hardline posture has not wavered.
However, we must not rashly assume that the current U.S.-China confrontation will continue until China raises a complete white flag, or until the Chinese Communist Party collapses.
The Tiananmen Incident teaches the Japanese people that it is necessary to continue holding a two-sided view of U.S.-China relations, one that recognizes that this “profound bond” between the two could raise its head again at any time.
To be continued.