The Crisis Deepens } 507
By 1988, Soviet pressure on the GDR communist party, the Socialist
Unity Party (SUP), to liberalize was already strong. The SUP tried to
counter that pressure by reaching out to China and the CCP. PRC-GDR
and CCP-SUP relations had been normalized in the early 1980s, but in 1988
East Berlin added a new dimension by reaching out to the CCP for sup-
port to counter Gorbachev’s increasing pressure for political reform. In
April 1988, SUP Politburo member Herman Axen visited China for political
talks during which the two sides exchanged views on the reform process in
socialist countries and “questions concerning the international communist
movement.” Qiao Shi, who had responsibility for relations with foreign fra-
ternal parties, lauded the achievements of the GDR and the SUP in building
socialism.^1 During talks with Axen, Qiao Shi and Zhao Ziyang both endorsed
the principle that socialist countries have the right to independently define
their own path to socialism, and that no socialist country should impose its
own “experience” on another.^2 In the context of 1988–1989, that meant that
the USSR should not impose its perestroika on the SUP. Securing firm CPSU
agreement to the validity of multiple roads to socialism and nondictation by
one fraternal party to another were high-ranking Chinese objectives during
Gorbachev’s May 1989 visit to China. In this, Beijing was successful. In a tele-
vised review of his just-completed meeting with Deng, Gorbachev said:
We regard this process [of perestroika] as our national one, and do not
intend in any way to foist it on anyone else. It was precisely the foisting
or copying of one model ... that in the past was the cause of many com-
plications in the development of world socialism. We have learned that
lesson well, and we build our relations with all other socialist states on
the basis of complete respect for their independence and sovereign right
to choose the forms and methods of their social development... on just
such a strictly equal basis have we and our Chinese comrades agreed to
develop the links between the CPSU and the CCP.^3
From the CCP’s perspective, Gorbachev’s mounting pressure on East
European governments to follow the path of reformed and liberal commu-
nism contradicted the principles of nondictation by one fraternal party (espe-
cially the old big-brother party, the CPSU) to other fraternal parties. Having
secured firm Soviet agreement not to dictate to fraternal parties, and hav-
ing just survived the upheaval in China, in June the CCP began supporting
SUP efforts to resist ever stronger Soviet pressure to reform. The SUP was the
first fraternal party to send a message of support to the CCP over the use of
force on 6-4 to suppress opposition. That message arrived the very day the
PLA occupied Tiananmen Square. A week later, the GDR legislature issued a
statement justifying the CCP action in the same terms that were used by the
CCP itself: the matter was China’s internal affair, and the GDR opposed any
foreign interference in the matter.^4