dawning realities
fundamentally differing assumptions
John Pomfret unfurls the long-running Sino-U.S. relationship in The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom. The text ends with its 2016 publication but the only additional material Pomfret could add seven years later is further decline, recrimination, and distrust.
That mutual and equally powerful distrust is indisputably linked to the dawn of 4 June 1989 when the world realised the Chinese Communist Party sent the People’s Liberation Army to mow down the cream of the nation’s youth. The relationship between the government and its people never healed nor has the CCP’s defiance against the rest of the world condemning its decision. And the world distrusts the CCP.
American began showing fascination with China in the late Eighteenth Century as traders discovered the vast market of millions of consumers in a land central to the Asian continent. Anticipated lucrative sales were seductive as was the promise of bringing Christianity to the same millions of heathen in the Middle Kingdom. Roman Catholic priests and European Christian ministers were already there when we realised the potential for bringing into the fold. The end of the Eighteenth and early Nineteeth Centuries were a period of hopeful American proselytizing across heretofore unknown regions (James Michener’s American missionaries of Hawaii coincided with Protestant missionaries discovering China). Many Americans saw us as a Christian nation (regardless of immigrants from other faiths pouring in to our young country) with an obligation to spread that religion to the world.
The best known fictional coverage of China after a century of such activities sprang from the pen of an American child of missionaries, Pearl Sidenstricker Buck, in The Good Earth. Her father, about whom a small church commemorates him in the heart of Fairfax County, Virginia outside Washington, D.C., had gone to China at the end of the 1800s among the hundreds of families spread throughout the interior of China to bring the Gospel, education (especially for women), and medicine to a population isolated by the geography of a highly divided Qing Dynasty.
While U.S. government officials (some diplomats and others military protectors) joined traders and missionaries in expanding U.S. links to China, many small communities in the United States developed strong affinities to the people they believed we were saving with Christianity. Churches in Alabama and Iowa, for example, financially paid for the work of their hometown neighbours who chose to go out to China in a civilizing mission. We were taking our values, nurturing, protective, strong, and family-oriented, to an uneducated, overpopulated, somewhat Darwinian culture under a foreign dynasty (the Qing were not Han but a Manchurian dynasty from the borders of northeast China). Our role was thought benign and good. And these communities paying for these intrepid educators, nurses, and pastors saw China through the eyes of the letters they received in return.
This human to human connection gave us a belief that if we shared more of the good of America, China would become more like America. An unstated assumption was that the United States could lead China to a better future from what it had been pursuing. We ignored that much anti-foreign sentiment popped up repeatedly across the nation in various manifestations. We also tended to under appreciate how few converts the missionaries actually achieved, the Soong family of Shanghai aside.
The religious optimists chose to assume the violence of the early 20th Century, characterised by U.S. military personnel sent to protect Americans attacked during the Boxer Rebellion (an explicit Chinese movement, albeit relatively small, aimed at eradicating the missionaries of all countries between 1899 and 1901), as the country fell into war lord-controlled divisions upon the collapse of the Qing in 1911, and as the victorious Communists closed the country to proselytizing after 1949. (At least one of you reading this, knows your father was en route to the Middle Kingdom on a mission when the Communists’ prohibitions redirected his career—and your life—to a new part of Asia.)
The missionaries retained optimism against many indications that China did not welcome this foreign ‘help’, considering it instead yet another form of humiliation characterising western treatment of the Middle Kingdom for the prior century and a half. Indeed, between 1949 and 1972, U.S. and Chinese relations were both completely suspicious and unofficial as China feared we wanted to rewrite their victory in the civil war against the Guomindang.
Richard Nixon’s ‘reopened’ with a visit in February 1972. That choice resulted from the Quaker Nixon’s reconsideration of China’s future to thwart Soviet aggression by blocking them under better Sino-U.S. ties. His goals certainly were not religious or culture-altering as Nixon was a Cold Warrior bent on putting the Soviets in a position of weakness. It took another seven years until Jimmy Carter formally restarted diplomatic—and quietly religious—activities in China.
Between Carter’s shift diplomatic of recognition on 1 January 1979 and just over a decade later, missionaries went to the Middle Kingdom under the cover of teaching English, arms sales to fortify a pitifully weak PLA in case of Soviet aggression, and burgeoning economic interactions for thousands of businesses under the Four Modernisations led to optimism brimming that China was on a more western path. In retrospect, did we assume we were inevitably going to see a democratic China?
Sadly, many books tell the story of the horror of 3-4 June, including Pomfret. Other authors include surviving exiled student participants, journalists, government officials, ambassadors. The Tian’anmen massacre, as commonly known, occurred fully a generation of U.S. return to China. Chinese officials monitored student protests over corruption, the death of Hu Yaobang and how his former Party peers behaved, and inflation among other things.
Most relevant, the Party officials assumed they saw the possibility of the nation blaming them for allowing luan, or a breakdown in the social order and thus chaos. The Party elders, according to reports over the years, deferred to Deng Xiaoping’s and others’ demands for a harsh response brooking no rebuttals or negotiations once the protestors had the chance to acknowledge the central decision-making right and responsibility of the Party. They were losing ‘face’, appearing weak as the international press corps set up in the nation’s capital for Mikael Gorbachev’s long-planned visit earlier that month. The CCP, as true of other dynasties over the centuries, responded with decisive force to eradicate dissent. Yes, the students were educated and important to the future but they were challenging the future the Party sought to carry out.
I have a friend who walked the periphery of the Square on the morning of 4 June after the PLA unleashed the tanks for troops brought from outside the capital to end the students’ stand. I have heard him describe the horror of bodies strewn about. He had served in China for several years, subject to the weight of constant PRC surveillance of himself, his family, and his activities, so he was never naive about the nature of the CCP. Hearing this man describe what he saw after Tian’anmen was eye-opening bitterness that will never leave him nor the thousands of students who fled but survived that night.
Many Americans saw on television the tanks amassed as the networks were in Beijing that night. While we had fewer networks than we have today, CNN had inaugurated instantaneous news earlier that decade. I remember hearing as the evening of 3 June, because of the time difference, unfolded that the Square was blocked off and Beijing shut down. We heard by late evening the confusion of a city the Party was trying to control as reporters tried verifying what exactly was going on. I was home watching television the afternoon we saw the man stand defiantly in front of the tank a day or so later, knowing the tank might not run over him but he would never get away without harsh retaliation.
China’s leaders never acknowledged how many people they murdered. Tian’anmen is not a topic the regime discusses or allows in its history books. Rewriting history is a dangerous game for any and all regimes as foreigners remember but the CCP hopes we all forget. In 2002, a visiting Chinese scholar asked three of us at the National Defense University if something had occurred at Tian’anmen. We looked at each other because she honestly seemed unsure whether she should even ask. We provided her with a bootleg video from ‘NightLine’ which covered the massacre. I doubt she took it all the way back to Harbin where she worked.
A visiting Chinese delegation made a minor splash in 1996 during a public presentation at the National Defense University when a U.S. Navy student had the timerity to ask about the massacre. The response was that no one died in Tian’anmen that night. No, it seems the tanks forced them down side streets where geometry made it easier to limit fleeing as the Square itself is large and open.
Estimates are that probably 3,000 students and sympathetic workers lost their lives by the morning of 4 June 1989. Americans saw that the China they believed they were shaping did not exist if it ever hard. The China that sent in the tanks was not what we thought a westernising (Christianising ?) people would do. Congress passed sanctions against all sorts of economic activities along with cutting off assistance of any type that had previously helped the PLA. President George H.W. Bush, previously U.S. envoy to the Middle Kingdom before formal ties, tried to navigate the problems by telling Beijing we valued them as a nation but his words failed to satisfy either the Chinese or the U.S. population. His decision several weeks later to send the National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft and senior ambassador Larry Eagleburger on a covert mission led to howls regarding our weakness, in the face of the ‘Butchers of Bejing’ once the trip became public. Bilateral ties sagged dramatically and disillusionment exploded.
The CCP, on the other hand, saw that their assumptions the United States was like all foreigners was true: we did not respect China’s sovereignty or its decision-making. Human rights is an internal issue to every government in China so hearing about massacres was none of the Americans’ (or Europeans or anyone else’s) affairs. These states refused to recognise these issues link to the stability and continuity of the advancements the Party alone was bringing to China. The leadership seemed to assume it had given the students warnings and everyone should have understood. They stood in the way of national needs which the Communists, under Mao or Deng or Xi Jinping, understand and can execute best for the the people of China.
None of my remarks on China’s assumptions are a defense of their behaviour but I struggle to explain what thinking we saw at the time. it is consistent with other self-satisfying arguments that foreigners seek to humiliate and subjugate the Chinese nation. No wonder we are so different in our assumptions as they do not converge at all.
I don’t think anyone politically aware in 1989 ignored what happened; most people recall what they were doing that 4 June as the massacre became clear. I attended the only public protest I ever attended, at Daley Plaza in Chicago, a few days later registering my fury with Beijing. I remember a time when Congress was actually united, far more than even on Ukraine in late February 2022, in seeing a regime that killed the youth it was expecting to carry the nation forward into prosperity. It was a different era and a singular moment like 9/11 for many who cared about world affairs. Of course many in the United States do not care outside their home towns.
Thirty-four years later still no histories or self-reflection in the mainland about what occurred. Hong Kong, for decades the heart of huge remembrances, no longer hosts conversations nor protestors. Few in the CCP doubt that the United States seeks to overthrow the regime while they also seek the years since as a proud period for the decisions they made. International economic sanctions lasted a mere eighteen months so businesses rushed back for a toehold in the vast market, much as many did immediately after COVID restrictions ended. When I hear people say that China would not do anything about Taiwan for fear of economic effects by sanctions, I doubt it; they recall that the massacre only led to 18 months’ retreat in outside engagements.
China is a different nation than it was in early June 1989 but one consistency is crystal clear: the CCP remains a brittle, fearful entity ruling so many it does not trust. Today the CCP looks every bit as worried about its own citizens undermining it as 34 years ago.
The United States too is different yet with one overriding consistency that matters in global issues. We no longer have the confidence of our absolute power after 9/11 and the modernising PLA. We are far more divided as a society than we have been in 160 years; many people here don’t even see the appeal of democracy any longer. We see no chance that China is currently our friend. Some believe the Middle Kingdom’s problem is the CCP while others think it simply a rising China with conflicting objectives.
That consistency is our belief that we are only interested in supporting others with purely benign intentions, a concept outsiders don’t entirely buy.
In sum, the memories of Tian’anmen persist, creating a deep chasm between our two governments. It is possible to begin anew but the differences in assumptions and knowledge of history may make that hard to imagine.FIN
Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth (New York: John Day Books, 1931)
James Michener and Steven Berry, Hawaii (New York: Dial Press, 2013)
John Pomfret, The Beautiful Country and the Middle Kingdom: America and China, 1776 to the Present (New York: Henry Holt, 2016)