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set up an office of Soros’ Open Society Foundation in Beijing.^31 Chen Yizi
was an economist, and his Research Institute served Zhao Ziyang’s reform
efforts. The proposed foundation was to be dedicated to promoting interna-
tional exchanges and greater openness in government. The Soros–Chen Yizi
link-up was approved by Zhao Ziyang’s secretary Bao Tong, but rejected by
a higher-level meeting where conservatives came armed with an elaborate
dossier about Soros’ anticommunist activities and putative CIA links. Zhao
Ziyang in turn overrode this conservative move, but addressed conservative
concerns by shifting the institutional sponsor for the Institute from Chen’s
institute to the International Cultural Exchange Center, which was part of the
state security system. After 6-4, Soros’ Institute and other organizations like
it were shut down. Chen Yizi made his way clandestinely to Hong Kong and
then to exile in the United States. Bao Tong was arrested shortly before 6-4,
when Zhao Ziyang resigned his offices. Bao was among the highest-ranking
officials purged after 6-4. Imprisoned till 1996, he has been held under close
state supervision since then, but continues to press for political reform.
The notion that US students, professors, journalists, missionaries, and
nongovernmental organizations—and even more, “Western” but non-US
journalists, students, and governments—were agents of a US strategy of re-
gime change is questionable. Such a proposition reflects deep and perhaps
deliberate ignorance of how pluralistic Western societies, and relations be-
tween allied Western governments, work. Yet even here there were elements
of truth in the MSS vision. Most US citizens, along with those of most other
Western liberal democracies, did ardently believe that liberal democratic
values and institutions were better than those of Leninist one-party dicta-
torship. Citizens of those democratic countries had waged centuries-long
struggles to plant liberty and democracy in their own homelands, and did
indeed cherish these things, at least by a large majority. In the twentieth cen-
tury, citizens of democratic polities waged a seventy-year-long philosophical
and political struggle against communist tyranny. Mainstream opinion in
liberal democratic countries did believe that Marxism-Leninism would and
should someday be discarded, even in China, where the Chinese people would
someday step into the modern, enlightened world of freedom and democracy.
Given these views, it likely that most US students, professors, missionaries,
journalists, and businessmen, along with those of other Western countries,
who went to China in the decade after 1978 probably did disseminate liberal
democratic values and ideas in their own discrete and idiosyncratic ways.
At the broadest level, interaction with liberal democracies did, and does,
undermine the CCP monopoly on political power. China’s interaction with
capitalist democracies is required for China’s economic development, but car-
ries strong challenges to CCP rule. Inoculating the Chinese people against
“American” and “Western” ideals and arguments by attributing nefarious
motives to those ideas was the first step in waging what Li Peng called a