Quest for Modernity and the Tides of History } 779
of the advanced capitalist countries. The inputs of the advanced capitalist
countries were to be harnessed to modernize socialist China. Persuading the
capitalist countries to agree to this arrangement required abandoning the
push for world revolution to overthrow capitalism around the world. Step
by step, China deradicalized its foreign relations, and one by one normalized
ties with its neighbors. Postrevolutionary China gradually entered the global
institutions set up and dominated by the Western countries. Perhaps most
important of all, as China’s economy “outgrew the plan,” the Chinese people
witnessed with their own eyes the wealth-generating power of the market-
based private initiative and entrepreneurship of capitalism. As the amazing
transformation wrought by markets was comprehended, belief in the superi-
ority of socialism over capitalism faded.
But the revolutionary dictatorship, the Leninist state—the political half
of the Lenin-Stalin model imported circa 1950—remained in place. That
party-state no longer used its powers to twist and torture Chinese into “new,
communist people.” It was satisfied if the people merely obeyed and sub-
mitted. But it was not a liberal state. This in a world increasingly swept by
demands for freedom, individual and collective. Expanding contact with cap-
italist countries, and comparison of the freedom of peoples in those countries
with conditions in China, made liberal ideals more attractive and communist
and Leninist ideas steadily less so. Secretary General Hu Yaobang also failed
to wage intense and sustained ideological struggle against liberal ideas infil-
trating the party.
The global upheavals of 1989–1991 ushered in a world that was profoundly
threatening to the CCP. The third act of PRC foreign relations, from 1989
to today (2015), has been a period in which powerful tides of liberal revo-
lution have swept the world. The CCP’s state is one of only four surviving
communist-party states.^29 The global tide of liberal revolution has been
powerful: South Korea, Taiwan, Indonesia, Thailand, and Myanmar in East
Asia; Eastern Europe; Russia; the “color revolutions” of Ukraine, Georgia,
Kyrgyzstan, and Azerbaijan; Nepal and Bangladesh in South Asia; Tunisia,
Libya, and Egypt in the Arab world; the struggles for democracy of the people
of Iran and in Hong Kong; even Afghanistan and Iraq, courtesy of US inter-
vention and regime change. China’s 1989 uprising was part of this global wave.
This is not to say the inculcation of liberal institutions in any or all of these
countries has been easy or even successful. Many, perhaps all, of these new
democracies will fail. Many countries, Germany for example, make demo-
cratic institutions work well only after several failed attempts.^30 The point,
rather, is that liberal ideas carried by modern technologies are extremely at-
tractive to people around the world. Twenty-four-hour cable news, beauti-
fully crafted and emotionally gripping Hollywood movies with special effects
and magnetic appeal, the Internet and World Wide Web, satellite telecom-
munications, jet travel and mass tourism, containerization and accelerated