1989: The CCP’s Near Escape } 473
The US Strategy of “Peaceful Evolution”
Within China, the Beijing Massacre produced a powerful need to relegitimize
CCP rule among China’s youth, intellectuals, and the urban populace. The
result was a protracted ideological struggle waged by the CCP’s propaganda
apparatus against the dangerously attractive ideas of “bourgeois liberalism”
that challenged the CCP dictatorship. According to this new propaganda line,
the events in Beijing had been part of a US-led Western strategy to subvert and
overthrow China’s Communist Party in order to cast China once again into a
condition of weakness such as had been its lot before 1949. This imperative of
regime survival via protracted ideological struggle would lead to association
of liberal ideas with Western aggression against China. To accept liberal ideas
about such matters as the CCP’s monopoly on state power was to support and
participate in Western aggression against China. Liberal beliefs were, in fact,
a sort of treason to China. This required the demonization of the West, and
especially the United States, in China’s media and educational systems.
The CCP’s propaganda struggle against “bourgeois liberalism” and
“peaceful evolution” transformed Western actions intended to express em-
pathy with China and its people into malevolent actions intended to injure
China. But deeper, more subtle psychological forces were at work too. As
Lucian Pye explained in 1968, a key aspect of Chinese nationalism is a desire
to be respected by the international community. In 1989, as had often been
the case before, China’s internal political arrangements (in this case, the vio-
lence of the June 1989 repression) denied China the respect its people craved.
In a sense, responsibility for China’s loss of face was due to China’s own do-
mestic shortcomings. Yet recognition of this was difficult, because it called
into question the core Chinese idea that China deserved to be respected. If
China’s internal politics were indeed anachronistic (i.e., autocratic rule by
an unelected elite), it might not deserve the respect patriotic Chinese deeply
desired. Rather than recognize that China’s own failure to live up to mod-
ern political norms was at the root of foreign opprobrium of China’s political
ways, it was much easier psychologically for Chinese to attribute criticism of
China to foreign anti-China motives.^18
On June 1, shortly before the decision to authorize use of all necessary
means to achieve swift PLA control of Tiananmen Square, a report prepared
by the MSS at the direction of Li Peng and sent to all members of the Politburo
framed the challenge faced by the CCP in terms of a systematic offensive
waged by the Western capitalist countries against all socialist countries.^19 The
“Western capitalist countries headed by the United States” were seeking to
overthrow China’s CCP government, the report stated. “Each American ad-
ministration” had aimed at “overthrowing the Communist Party and sabo-
taging the socialist system” in China because it was a “big socialist country,”
the MSS report said. The “phraseology” used by various US administrations