The Foreign Service Journal, June 2021

32 JUNE 2021 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL things that we felt make life meaningful. As Americans, we were eager to share; and the Chinese seemed eager to learn. It was exhilarating to be part of it all. Yet today we find ourselves in very different circumstances. There is a general bipartisan consensus in Washington, D.C., that China’s unbalanced trade, suppression of political free- doms and human rights, and advocacy of authoritarian govern- ment requires a new and less-engaging approach. Some Things to Remember Consider some of the things that occurred along the way. 1. Tiananmen Square. Dial back to 1989. Thousands of students and everyday workers in Beijing, including frommany government offices, were peacefully protesting. They sought an end to corruption and reforms in governance. While there was no U.S. government involvement in the protest itself, America’s influence was evident in the construction of the protesters’ symbolic “Goddess of Democracy,” an obvious takeoff on the Statue of Liberty. That influence was possible because in 1979 the United States and China had re-established diplomatic relations, and communication between the two societies was rapidly expand- ing. The head of the Communist Party, Zhao Ziyang, was sym- pathetic to the protesters and arranged for a meeting between their leaders and the full top national leadership. That meeting could have gone well. The protest could have ended peacefully, and China could have embarked on a path that involved some political, as well as economic, liberalization. The meeting, however, did not go well. And the rest—the tragic killing in Beijing on the night of June 3—is history. 2. Examples in the Neighborhood. There was more his- tory going on among China’s neighbors. In the 1980s and 1990s, two bastions of Confucian culture—South Korea and Taiwan—transformed themselves from authoritarian regimes that brooked no political opposition into vibrant democratic societies. It seemed that this change was facilitated by economic growth, in particular a rise in per capita GDP. It made sense that once people were well enough off economically, they would seek a greater say in how they were governed. Again, the U.S. government was not directly involved in these dramatic political transformations; but the United States did promote the development of civil society, and the example of U.S. political openness and stability was a shining light. It was a good bet that China, also rooted in Confucian values, would fol- low a similar path once there was a sufficient level of economic prosperity. 3. WTO and the Belgrade Bombing. In the late 1990s, Chi- nese Premier Zhu Rongji was boldly dismantling the centrally planned Chinese economy and breaking the “iron rice bowl”— the socialist system that was famously egalitarian but kept the nation mired in poverty. In its place, private enterprise would drive China to decades of phenomenal economic growth, fueled in part by foreign investment; and U.S. companies with the best business prac- tices were particularly sought after. Following years of intense international negotiations, during which no one was more tough on China than the United States, the PRC got the green light to become a member of the World Trade Organization in December 2001. As a WTO member, China agreed to subject itself to global trade rules and allow other nations to sue it for unfair trade practices. Since that time, China has sued and been sued many times and has won and lost cases. What a tragedy of history that in the buildup to this remark- able engagement, U.S. planes participating in the war in Bosnia mistakenly bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. To a man, the top Chinese leadership believed that the bombing on May 7, 1999, had to have been intentional. And ever after it would prove difficult for American interests and values to gain traction in Chinese leadership deliberations. 4. An Explosion of Communication and Exchange. As technology, especially the internet, developed rapidly in the 2000s, China was not far behind the United States in the growth of social media and an explosion of information exchange. This was accelerated by the exposure of hundreds of thousands of Chinese students studying abroad, nowhere more than in the U.S., to political, social and cultural ideas they never would have encountered back home. International journalists began reporting from China in droves as Chinese journalists spread around the world and began educating their compatriots on what was going on In the late 1990s, Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji was boldly dismantling the centrally planned Chinese economy.