480 { China’s Quest
broadcasts into China, dissemination of liberal democratic values was—and
remains, this author submits—one of the motives for that financial support.
It is also safe to say that most US leaders and officials hope that these and a
myriad other interactions will, over time, lead toward China’s evolution in
the direction of a more liberal and democratic political system. Contrary to
the MSS’s assertion and later CCP propaganda, US leaders harboring such
hopes did not imagine that this would make China weak or divided. More
typically, they imagined it would make China more stable and stronger, as
well as more attractive to the world—and eventually a better, closer, and less
prickly diplomatic partner for the United States. China’s political liberaliza-
tion would, Americans generally imagined, increase, not diminish, China’s
status in the world. But they certainly did imagine that the CCP would even-
tually have to give up its monopoly on political power.
There is also fragmentary evidence that United States policy did, in fact,
undertake covert operation to encourage China’s gradual “peaceful evolu-
tion” towards liberal, democratic capitalism. According to the deputy chief of
China operations in the Central Intelligence Agency in the early 1970s, that
agency then operated a covert action program designed to co-opt Chinese
intellectuals who were disenchanted by the excesses of the Cultural Revolution
and open to ideas of democracy and market economics.^30 These operations
were, apparently, conducted not inside China but in Chinese communities in
Southeast Asia, North America, and Europe. But as China opened and vastly
expanded the scope of freedom available to individual Chinese after 1978, it is
not unlikely that similar, but probably expanded, programs would have been
implemented.
US nongovernmental organizations also became quite active in China in
the 1980s. Some of these were, in fact, devoted to bringing about political lib-
eralization and democratization. One such was the organization supported
by the immensely wealthy international financier George Soros. Soros was a
major financier of anticommunist groups in East Europe. In the early 1980s,
he supported Poland’s underground Solidarity union. Soros’ activities in
Poland were, in fact, part of a mosaic of subversive anti-communist activi-
ties by the AFL-CIO and the Catholic Church, as well as the CIA. In 1984,
Soros set up an Open Society Institute in Hungary with a budget of $3 mil-
lion that, among other things, supported study at Western universities. Later,
Soros supported Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77, which became a germ seed of
that country’s reform movement. All of these efforts played a significant role
in the emergence of civil society in these countries, contributing significantly
to the 1989 revolutions.
Soros pursued similar activities in China. In 1987, Soros apparently took
advantage of the relatively liberal atmosphere in China at the time and hired
dissident writer Liang Heng to work with Chen Yizi, the head of the Research
Institute for Reform of the Economic Structure under the State Council, to