They were right — and the strategy is still mostly working.
It’s June 4. According to FamousBirthdays.com, it’s Angelina Jolie’s birthday, as well as Justin Bieber’s dad’s birthday. The Alliance for American Manufacturing’s blog wishes a happy birthday to both Angelina and the elder Bieber.
As demonstrated by the very existence of FamousBirthdays.com, the Internet can inform you of all sorts of useless stuff. But if you avoid the junk, and don’t connect nonsensical dots to confirm your own prejudices, it’s a great way to stay informed. The news is right there at your fingertips, like today’s news: The world is marking the 30th anniversary of the June 4 protests in China.
But it will be difficult to hear about what happened at decades ago on June 4 in China, because the Chinese government censors the news there.
If you get on your phone or laptop and search for “June 4 protests” outside of China, you’ll find article after article about the Chinese military’s 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy activists in Beijing and elsewhere across the country.
Estimates vary of how many people were killed. But they’re just estimates, because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has suppressed discussion of what it did to counter demonstrations against its authoritarian rule.
Its official line is they were student-led protests hijacked by “black hands” working on behalf of foreign powers, and brooks no arguments otherwise. It’s stamped out public discussion of them so well that there has never been a public reckoning in China on the mass violence the government inflicted on its own citizens.
That’s not to say Chinese people don’t know about the June 4th Incident. Plenty of people know about it, but it’s discussed in private, and the real story of what happened there is effectively fragmented, because that how the country’s rulers want it: Something that happened that’s easier to forget or dismiss. And this suppression resulted in a national bargain, as one knowledgeable observer describes it:
“Many Chinese, consciously or unconsciously, accepted what amounted to a grand compromise after 1989: You stay out of politics, and we’ll give you tremendous economic opportunity and allow considerable personal freedoms.”
With this understanding, the CCP doesn’t have to account for what it did in 1989 or what it does today; it can just point to the country’s incredible economic growth since then and say it’s holding up its end of the deal. It managed to do this by turning the Chinese economy into the true workshop of the world, leveraging its massive population and market to rapidly industrialize and modernize – and often lying, cheating and stealing in dealings with its trading partners to achieve its economic goals.
The U.S. government – the world’s lone superpower after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 – abetted all of this through successive presidential administrations, Republican and Democrat alike. In 1989, it looked upon the crackdown with dismay, then doubled down on its own bet first made by President Richard Nixon all the way back in 1972: China’s economic opening would inevitably lead to political reform and China joining the American-led world order.
Washington consensus figured what was good for business (or rather, billionaires like the Waltons) but clearly bad for American manufacturing workers would bring about Chinese democracy.
Well, the Guns ’n Roses album arrived over a decade ago. Real democracy in China remains a long way off.
And China continues to bet that the world will ignore its human rights abuses so long as it remains an economic powerhouse. So far, the strategy has worked.
But there also is no doubt that there has been a recent shift. It’s been three decades since the Chinese government shot students and workers who challenged even a little bit of its rule, and the Trump administration is the first to taking significant steps away from economic engagement with Beijing. The word “decoupling” is getting thrown around a lot.
Let’s be honest: President Trump’s not at all doing this out of a concern for human rights in China. Remember when he touched that orb shortly before enthusiastically selling American weapons systems to a Middle Eastern tyrant? No, he’s doing this because he thinks the Chinese government isn’t trading with the American government fairly, and on this point he’s largely right.
Better 30 years late than never. But another very smart China-watcher recently wrote this for the Wall Street Journal:
“Today’s trade problems—with President Donald Trump imposing tariffs on Mr. Xi’s increasingly resistant China—are just one small expression of a far wider and less tractable clash of systems and values. This antagonism is the logical and inevitable result of China’s assertively autocratic policies over the past 30 years.”
So Happy Birthday, Angelina and Mr. Bieber! Read about what kicked those problems off in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. This is recent history that we can freely access. And they often can’t do that in China.