The Penguin History of the World

Foreign disapproval was almost universal, and the damage to the CCP’s authority inside China was substantial, not least since the crackdown had split it right down the middle. Zhao Ziyang, who had opposed using military force, was placed under house-arrest in Beijing (he died, still under house-arrest, but without ever being tried, in 2005). Obviously Deng and many of the old guard felt they had faced down a grave threat. It is probable, too, that they acted in a way deplored and opposed by many of their fellow Chinese. There was disorder, some of it serious, in over eighty cities, and the army encountered resistance in some working-class districts of Beijing. Yet the masses did not rise to support the protesters, and most of China was entirely untouched by the protests. Much was to be made in future years of Tiananmen as evidence of the Chinese regime’s disregard of human rights. Still, it cannot be confidently asserted that China would have been bound to benefit if the Party had given way to the student movement. More Asian lives were shattered by banking fiascos in the 1990s than in China’s troubles in 1989.

Although the CCP and ruling hierarchy were somewhat in disarray, vigorous attempts to impose political orthodoxy followed. China, it was soon clear, was not going to go the way of eastern Europe or the USSR. But where was it going? Deng soon made it clear that economic liberalization was to continue unhindered, and even at a scale greater than anything seen prior to 1989. Soon Chinese and foreigners alike were wondering how much influence the Party really had on the rampant economic development. Some of it seemed very western. But it did not take much looking, behind company walls or in the smoke-filled rooms of power, to see more than a few traces of China’s long history and of the challenges and opportunities it provided its people.

5 Openings and Closures

Well before the collapse of the USSR, it was clear that very little of the world would remain wholly unaffected by what was happening in Europe. Immediately, the end of the Cold War re-awoke old questions of identity throughout that continent and beyond, as well as presenting new ones. Peoples began to see themselves and others afresh, in the light of what soon turned out to be for some a chilly dawn; some nightmares had blown away, but only to reveal troubled landscapes. Fundamental questions about identity, ethnicity and religion could again be asked, and some of these questions were disturbing. Once again new determining circumstances were emerging in world history.

Almost incidentally, not only had one half of Europe’s security arrangements disappeared with the Warsaw Pact, but the other half, NATO, had also been subtly changed. The collapse of the USSR, the major potential opponent, had deprived the alliance not only of its main role, but also of the pressure that had shaped it. Like a blancmange in a warm room, it began to sag a little. Even if, as some thought, a revived Russia were to emerge as a new threat at some future date, the disappearance of the ideological struggle would mean that potential opponents would have to think in new ways about it. There were soon ex-Communist countries seeking to join NATO. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic joined in 1999, and Slovenia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and the Baltic countries followed five years later. In total contravention of the promises the United States president George H. W. Bush had given Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990, NATO had expanded not just up to the borders of the old Soviet Union, but beyond them. The alliance had become an instrument for linking most of Europe (minus Russia) to the United States. But the purpose of its military power was by no means clear, even if in the mid-1990s the American government began to look to NATO as a machine for dealing with new European problems, notably in the former Yugoslavia, and for use outside the European area.