472 { China’s Quest
complexity to transition to democracy. China in the 1980s seemed to be on
the right course. The experiences of the other East Asian modernizers, Taiwan
and South Korea, seemed to give additional confirmation that developmental
authoritarianism would lead first to liberalization and then to democracy.
There was a lot of romanticism mixed in with the popular pre-6-4 American
notion that China would gradually progress under enlightened CCP tute-
lage to liberal democracy.^17 Yet these were powerful US perceptions that were
deflated by the Beijing Massacre.
The CCP’s choice of military repression on 6-4, combined with the purge
of top liberal leaders like Zhao Ziyang and several of his key followers, plus
the anathema placed on “bourgeois liberalism,” created for the United States
the prospect of long-term coexistence with an authoritarian and dictato-
rial, but also increasingly powerful, PRC. In a way, the events of 1989 set
in motion a new dynamic in PRC-US relations: an authoritarian, one-party
dictatorship living in an era of global democratic revolution found itself
threatened by the democratic confidence of the United States. Meanwhile,
an ever more powerful anti-democratic state would appear steadily more
threatening to the democratic powers. It would take two decades for Chinese
power to exacerbate this fear, but once that occurred, a profound sense of
American unease over the future of Chinese power would ensue. China’s
besieged Leninist state found deeply threatening the task of surviving in a
unipolar world dominated by America with its strong sense of democratic
mission and standing at the head of a broad coalition of democracies. In
retrospect, the Beijing Massacre was a turning point that took China away
from genuine partnership with the United States toward mutual suspicion,
rivalry, and occasional confrontation.Percent100806040200
1972 1975 1978 1981 1984 1987 1990July 1989February 1989F IGU R E 17-1 Positive US perceptions of China
Source: Harry Harding, A Fragile Relationship: The United States and China since 1972, (Brookings Institution: Washington,
D.C., 1992), p. 372.