From The Avoidable War (Kevin Rudd, 2022) pp 35-7
Deng saw China’s modernization not as any kind of political, let alone ideological, transformation but as a pragmatic economic move in the tradition of the various national self-strengthening movements from China’s imperial past. While opposed to the political and economic chaos brought about by Mao’s mass movements during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, Deng had no interest in any form of fundamental democratic reform. While Deng may not have seen the United States as a source of political reform, he did see it as a source of foreign trade, investment, technology, training, and modern financial and economic management. While not an orthodox Marxist, Deng remained a fully committed Leninist. Unsurprisingly, he was determined not to cede the party’s political power for the sake of American economic engagement or common strategic endeavor against the Soviet Union. Even as he began his reform and opening campaign in 1979, he vowed from the outset adherence to the Four Cardinal Principles and that China would forever “uphold the dictatorship of the proletariat” and “the leadership of the Communist Party.” In Deng’s words, while it was important for China to “open the windows wide to breathe the fresh air,” the party’s responsibility was to continue to “swat away the flies and insects that came with it.” For the party, that meant remaining ever vigilant against the importation of Western liberal-democratic ideas, ideals, and institutions.
The fact that most US administrations after Nixon did not see the relationship in the same brutally pragmatic terms as the CCP was not entirely naive. Indeed, it was broadly consistent with long-standing development theory that irrespective of what the party might want or say, market reforms would increase living standards and create, in time, a burgeoning middle class that would eventually demand a political voice of their own. According to this theory, over time, the resulting democratization of China would also cause Beijing to acquiesce, accept, and gradually become full participants in the overall fabric of the liberal international order led by the United States. At the outer reaches of this reasoning rested the view that if China eventually surpassed the United States in aggregate economic power, as the US had surpassed the UK a century before, this transition would again be peaceful because the shared values underpinning the global order would remain broadly constant.
The bilateral trade and investment relationship grew rapidly as Beijing imported advanced computer systems, aircraft, and automobiles from the US. China’s economic transformation to become the world’s factory was fueled by its access to a vast American consumer market and new sources of foreign direct investment. Military collaboration between Washington and Beijing reached its height during the 1980s, as American and Chinese forces worked together to arm the mujahideen in Afghanistan against the Soviet occupation. A joint listening station was also established near the Soviet border to help China monitor Soviet troop deployments. Indeed, the flow of American military hardware and intelligence steadily grew to assume the operational characteristics of a substantive strategic alliance.
However, in the decade following diplomatic normalization, the deep underlying tensions already at work across the wider fabric of the US-China relationship came to the surface. The political relationship during this period remained fraught as the Communist Party wrestled with the effects that the opening to America was having on Chinese students, intellectuals, and policy elites. Exposed to a wide range of heterodox ideas, many challenged various aspects of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy and one-party rule, including in art, literature, and film. In 1983, Deng authorized a “campaign against spiritual pollution.” Four years later, after the purge of leading reformist General Secretary Hu Yaobang, Deng launched another campaign against “bourgeois liberalization,” culminating in the removal of Hu’s replacement, Zhao Ziyang, just before Deng sent in the military to repress the Tiananmen protesters in 1989—a bloody crackdown that stunned the world and left Chinese citizens dead in the hundreds, if not thousands. I met both Hu and Zhao on a number of occasions during my time in the Australian Embassy in Beijing. Hu, despite having risen through the ranks of the Communist Youth League, had become a pioneering liberal reformer during the golden decade of Chinese reformist experimentation in the 1980s. Hu enjoyed the patronage and, importantly, the protection of Deng for nearly a decade against the powerful group of conservatives remaining in the party center. Like Deng, Hu was barely five feet tall. His native dialect was an almost impenetrable Hunanese, and he was a colorful, internationally active political live wire. We entertained him at the Australian Embassy before he embarked on one of his first visits abroad—to Australia. The embassy was overrun with official food tasters (an important legacy of both a Leninist and Confucian state) to ensure we were not about to poison the party’s senior leadership over lunch.
Zhao, in the many meetings I observed with him, was just as personable as Hu but was a more conventional politician from central casting of Chinese mandarins and more seasoned in dealing with foreign barbarians such as ourselves. Both, however, eventually fell, having pushed the reformist envelope too far even for Deng’s tastes, at a time when Deng still had to be mindful of the body of political opinion within the central leadership that was ever prepared to critique him from the left. Indeed, Tiananmen marked the end of China’s first phase of reform, when, at least for a season, all things seemed possible under heaven.
Until Tiananmen, successive US administrations by and large tended to avert their gazes from Deng’s politics and the enduring Leninist nature of the CCP. But even after 1989, American sanctions, to the extent they were applied, were only temporary. The larger consideration for the US was the continued strategic and economic relationship with Beijing, its continued utility against the Soviet Union, and an eternal American corporate optimism for the prospects of a burgeoning Chinese market.
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