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1989: The CCP’s Near Escape and Its Aftermath
Socialism in One Country: The Last Major Leninist Regime
1989 was a turning point in PRC relations with the advanced capitalist
countries.
In spring of that year, there emerged in Beijing with amazing speed a citi-
zen’s movement making a strong and increasingly nationwide demand for
political reform. That movement was ultimately repressed by brute force, but
only at great cost to both the domestic and international stature of the CCP.
The popular and nonviolent movements that toppled the communist party
states across Eastern Europe and then in Russia over the next thirty months
further underlined the threat to CCP rule, as well as confirming the belief
among the CCP elite that the decision to employ military repression in June
1989 had been correct. Had the CCP acted otherwise, the regime might have
disintegrated, as did the Leninist states in those other countries.
Out of the events of 1989–1991 emerged a new CCP elite consensus: the
“bourgeois liberal” ideas promulgated by the Western countries were danger-
ously seductive to China’s youth and intellectuals and needed to be resisted
by resolute ideological struggle. Failure to wage such struggle was one of the
key mistakes committed under Hu Yaobang. A key basis for waging struggle
against “bourgeois liberal” ideas was inculcation of a strong sense of Western
threat and hostility to China. China’s youth, especially, were to be taught that
foreign powers desired to weaken and injure China for all sorts of selfish rea-
sons; this was the real reason why these countries pressed liberal ideas on
China. The “bourgeois liberal” ideals those countries peddle in various ways
in China are, in fact, sugar-coated weapons designed to weaken and hurt
China. In sum, the world still dominated by the advanced capitalist countries
is a dark and threatening place for China, not primarily because of the threat
of Western military attack or intervention, but because of the seductive power
of “bourgeois liberal” ideas.^1