Authors: Odd Westad
Already during its first year in office, the Reagan administration offered China what it called a “strategic association” with the United States. It was in effect a de facto alliance. Reagan also declared himself willing to sell sophisticated weapons directly to Beijing. As the Cold War grew colder in the early 1980s, Sino-American security cooperation expanded. US anti-Communist campaigns in Afghanistan, Angola, and Cambodia were closely coordinated with the Chinese and intelligence sharing increased. China never became a big importer of US weapons, which were not needed to build China’s military prowess. What Beijing wanted was access to US weapons technology, and the Chinese got a lot of that in the 1980s, including aviation and missile technology. China then set out to produce its own weapons. Deng’s plan was to make China into one of the world’s top military powers within twenty years. That way, he calculated, a Soviet attack could be prevented or defeated, with a bit of luck and US assistance.
The Taiwan issue remained an irritant in Sino-American relations into the 1980s, but already in August 1982 the Chinese side achieved a breakthrough. Pushed by the increasing global confrontation with the Soviet Union, Washington agreed to issuing a joint statement with China on US weapons sales to Taiwan. The statement committed the United States to phase out its policy of arms supplies to the Guomindang regime:
the United States Government states that it does not seek to carry out a long-term policy of arms sales to Taiwan, that its arms sales to Taiwan will not exceed, either in qualitative or in quantitative terms, the level of those supplied in recent years since the establishment of diplomatic relations between the United States and China, and that it intends to reduce gradually its sales of arms to Taiwan, leading over a period of time to a final resolution. In so stating, the United States acknowledges China’s consistent position regarding the thorough settlement of this issue.
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At the same time, Deng attempted to get negotiations going to facilitate reunification across the Taiwan Strait, on conditions that were more favorable to Taibei than anything that had been offered before. Deng’s attempts failed, not least because of the continued US commitment to Taiwan. And the weapons compromise, the core part of which all later US presidents have ignored, still casts a shadow over Sino-American relations. But during the 1980s, as the Cold War first intensified and then moved toward its end, the joint communiqué on Taiwan contributed to a framework that ensured some form of stability in relations between Washington and Beijing.
None of the Chinese leaders at first gave much thought to what would happen if the Sino-American alliance actually succeeded in reducing or destroying Soviet power. This lack of strategic thinking originated in the uncritical acceptance of Mao’s dogmas and Deng’s own incomplete understanding of the international situation. By 1983, however,
it had started dawning on Beijing that some form of balance in the Cold War might actually be to its advantage. By that time it was much too late to secure any form of breakthrough with the Soviets, and in 1985—the year Gorbachev came to power in Moscow—the Soviet Union, strategically weakened by the Sino-American alliance, began seeking a settlement with its strongest opponent, the United States. By teaming up with the Americans, China had contributed to the death wounds of the
weaker
superpower while helping the
stronger
, the United States, achieve global hegemony. In the long run this transformation would not be to the benefit of Chinese foreign policy. But from the vantage point of the 1980s almost all contact with America seemed to be to China’s advantage.
I
N
1980 I
VISITED
S
HENZHEN
for the first time. Back then the area was a typical grouping of small and very poor Cantonese fishing villages in the Pearl river delta, tantalizingly close to Hong Kong. That year Deng decided to make this area the showcase in China’s new opening to the world. As a special economic zone (SEZ), Shenzhen would attract foreign investment to build new plants that would be foreign-owned and operated. Any surplus could be freely sent overseas, and the companies had duty-free privileges, concessionary tax rates, land made freely available, and the ability to set their own wage levels. In return, the foreign investors agreed to technology transfers and training programs, as well as long-term schedules of investment. Almost all the products were made for export. Shenzhen, so different from anything any Chinese could have imagined only a few years before, turned out to be a huge success. Today it is a city with more than fourteen million inhabitants, the fourth largest city in China in terms of economic output. Tens of thousands of people now commute from Hong Kong to Shenzhen for work each day.
More than 20,000 international partnerships with a total value of more than $26 billion were signed by China in the 1980s. They helped
the Chinese economy get going again, first in and around SEZs that sprang up all over the country, especially near where the foreign concessions had been in the early part of the century, and then elsewhere in the south and along China’s eastern seaboard. As property rights were gradually restored, private Chinese companies began to emerge, very often in the SEZs. Even some state-owned industries relocated to SEZs in the south. Together with the end of collectivization in agriculture, it was a remarkable transformation. Already by 1983 Chinese economic growth had hit double digits, and GDP almost quadrupled over the course of the decade. Deng told his critics: “It does not matter if it is a black cat or a white cat; if it catches mice it is a good cat.” Deng’s cat theory belonged to another universe than the empty Marxist theorizing of the 1970s. It symbolized a counterrevolution in economics and political orientation the likes of which the world had never seen.
The relationship with the United States stood left, right, and center in Communist China’s initial market revolution. Even though much of the capital came through Hong Kong, the experts, the methods, and the technology were often American. It was the United States, more than any other country, that lobbied for China’s entry into international institutions. It was also the United States that took the largest share of the PRC’s exports, on which China’s beginning prosperity depended. While many Americans worried about Japanese and European competition in the 1980s, very few worried about China. Most assumed that it would take generations before China’s economy got off the ground and believed, with the US government, that strengthening China was in the national security interest of the United States. As Western Europe, Japan, and Taiwan did at the beginning of the Cold War, China at the end of the Cold War benefited from the American security imperative in more senses than one.
Life in an SEZ, and increasingly in China’s cities, in the 1980s was a curious affair. Foreign experts and businessmen, often American, mingled with Chinese with very little mutual comprehension. The foreigners
had no way of understanding the dismal conditions that Chinese had got accustomed to living under, and most Chinese were too ashamed, or too afraid, to tell. Capitalist practices had to be cloaked in Marxist terminology. In these games of charade the Chinese had the advantage of being accustomed to using “correct” terms to cover widely varying practices. The cynicism that was the main legacy of late Maoist China served some of those who entered into the new economy well. The most cynical, always those with the right Communist Party connections, did get rich first. For the vast majority, however, the beginning change in the Chinese economy meant very little. They were mostly preoccupied with scraping a living out of the wreckage of the Maoist campaigns, and they were grateful that under Deng there were a few more ways of keeping their heads above water than there had been before.
As limited forms of private wealth in the cities increased, the taste for foreign consumer goods also rose. A number of American companies invested in China—Coca-Cola, Heinz, and General Foods were among the first. Others helped facilitate the remarkable rise in Chinese exports to the United States, which already by 1990 amounted to almost twenty percent of China’s total. The first foreign fast food restaurant inside China opened in 1987, a Kentucky Fried Chicken on a busy street corner in central Beijing. Tens of thousands of people walked slowly past, just to get a glimpse of what was going on inside. Almost nobody could afford to eat there, and over the first few weeks the Beijing authorities had to dole out special “foreign exchange certificates”—the only money foreign businesses were authorized to accept—to its senior cadre in order to ensure a minimum of trade. KFC became a symbol of the West in China, resented by some for its American brashness but admired by many more for its business acumen. Led mostly by Taiwan-born US executives, KFC’s Chinese expansion became hugely successful, and today there are 2,500 outlets in the PRC.
Some historians today exaggerate the changes that took place in China by the end of the 1980s. In economic terms, the vast majority
of workers were still employed in state-owned companies that functioned according to planned economy principles. After leaving school, people were assigned to a work unit where they were supposed to stay for life. Their wages were negligible, but all services, from housing to health care, from nurseries to care for the elderly, were supplied by the state-run work unit in which they were employed. There was no labor market. There was no capital market. Bank loans were out of reach for ordinary people. In Beijing, in the evening, if you walked past the new KFC toward the Forbidden City, you were looking toward the new neon lights at Wangfujing, the main shopping street. But the reason you were looking toward them was that everywhere else was dark. In a tiny speck of land in the center of the old imperial capital a new world seemed to be emerging, but it had so far done little except whet people’s appetite for a new kind of life.
A
S
C
HINA’S ECONOMY BEGAN
to change, ordinary people and some leaders within the party began to clamor for political change as well. The debates about China’s political system in the 1980s took place in a society still traumatized by the mass murder of previous decades and in a state still run according to tight Marxist-Leninist principles. Those most preoccupied with political reform were students and intellectuals, and some party officials who had glimpsed how people elsewhere were able to live their lives. But the old guard of the CCP did not favor such change. They were afraid of a return to the political chaos of the Cultural Revolution. They also believed that the massive process of economic reform needed their leadership (though it is hard to tell how a lifetime spent in the most extreme of Marxist-Leninist parties prepared them for this). More than a few were also worried about losing the privileges that their connections gave them, including the privilege of making their families very rich indeed. By the late 1980s no political reform was in sight. When in 1987 the CCP general secretary, Hu Yaobang, a man Deng Xiaoping himself had appointed, voiced support for a more open debate, Deng had him fired.
Many of the ideas of political reform were drawn from abroad and especially from the United States. China’s opening to the West occurred at the same time as the rise there of individualistic and personal rights–oriented thinking symbolized by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, and Chinese students abroad were influenced by these trends. The strength of the United States, Chinese liberals claimed, lay in its political system, and especially in how the rights of citizens were observed. If China wanted to get rich and strong, it also had to become free. The crises in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the late 1980s seemed to confirm this point of view: Marxism, in all its forms, was a thing of the past, and the CCP’s rule was therefore outdated. When the disgraced former general secretary Hu Yaobang died in the spring of 1989, many students felt that he had died a martyr to the cause of political freedom. Demonstrations broke out in the cities. The students urged the party to memorialize Hu properly and move toward opening up the political system. Deng Xiaoping feared that the demonstrations would turn to chaos and had the prime minister, Li Peng, impose martial law in Beijing and other cities where the students were organizing large rallies. But the attempts at sending soldiers into the cities increased popular support for the students and created a mass movement for democracy. In one of its key texts, Liu Xiaobo (who went on to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010) and his co-signatories drew their lineage back to the calls for democracy in the 1910s and 1920s:
For several thousand years, Chinese society has been living in a vicious cycle of a new emperor replacing an old emperor. History has proven than the stepping down of some unpopular leader and the assumption of power by some very popular leader cannot solve the essential problems of Chinese politics. What we need is not a perfect savior, but a perfect democratic system. . . . The whole society should use every means to establish legal and popular autonomous organizations, and gradually form popular political power to counter balance the government’s decisionmaking . . . because the essence of democracy is checks and balances. We would rather have ten mutually balancing devils than one angel with absolute power.
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The crackdown on 4 June 1989, in which several hundred demonstrators were killed around Tian’anmen Square, split the Communist Party and humiliated it before a global audience. A government shooting unarmed students in the center of its capital is never a popular image abroad, and the Beijing killings came just as Communism elsewhere seemed headed for either political reform or oblivion. The demonstrators in Tian’anmen Square had erected a thirty-three-foot-tall papiermâché effigy, the Goddess of Democracy, which looked remarkably similar to the Statue of Liberty. They placed it facing Mao’s portrait. A tank knocked it over and crushed it. For the army, the Goddess was a symbol of foreign influence. Walking through town a few days later, I came across a figure of Colonel Sanders from outside the Beijing KFC. It had been “executed” with a single bullet through the head. The Tian’anmen crackdown was very much about what kind of relationship China should have with foreigners, foreign ideas, and foreign products.