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30 years ago I was staying with an Australian family in the Melbourne suburbs. No Internet in those days, just TV news & newspapers. Coverage of events in Beijing dominated the airwaves. Folks were struggling to discern what they meant.
Was it a power struggle? A local protest confined to students and residents of the capital? Was it related to Gorbachev and glasnost in the then-Soviet Union — a preoccupation of Americans at that time? Then....what were the Chinese doing sending tanks against demonstrators?
After the army had opened fire and the demonstrators scattered, I recall people saying Mao had died but had not left. Tiananmen was something he might have done. The regime in Mao’s lifetime had done much worse.
In retrospect, Tiananmen is perfectly comprehensible and utterly baffling. Of course the regime would exert itself to maintain the Communist Party’s monopoly on power; that’s what Communists did, and not just in China. Moreover, under Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese Communist Party
....had stepped on liberalizers before, though not with such violence. Yet at the same time, everyone in the Party leadership at that time, including Deng, had witnessed terrible things that happened precisely because power was monopolized by the Party.
Famines in which millions died; a political upheaval directed by the Party’s leadership that convulsed the entire country for years, ruined hundreds of thousands of lives, and left the nation backward and impoverished — that is what concentrated, arbitrary power had given China.
The demonstrators in Beijing offered a path of evolution for China away from arbitrary power. The Party leadership then, for all it had seen and suffered under Mao, wanted none of it. The Party leadership now feels the same way — & it has tools with which to impose its will...
...Mao never dreamt of. The lesson of Tiananmen was that for the Chinese Communist Party to win, others had to lose everything, to be killed or subjugated. China’s neighbors are bound to regard so large and powerful a nation, ruled in this way, as a menace.
Provided America someday recovers itself, this will be its greatest geopolitical advantage when competing against Beijing. China stands for the arbitrary, concentrated power capable of something like Tienanmen in its own capital. What can other nations expect?
