Every child in China grows up hearing the parable of a wise old man living in the frontierland. One day, his family horse runs off into barbarian territory. Whilst the neighbours come to offer their condolences, the old man argues that the renegade horse might instead offer good luck. Indeed, the horse came back months later, leading a group of noble barbarian horses. Yet, the man cautioned against this supposed sign of good fortune, subsequently validated by his grandson’s leg injury when practising equestrianism. The neighbours offered their thoughts and prayers again, but the grandson eventually survived the barbarian invasion, as the army of able-bodied draftees suffered severe casualties. This story is told not to glorify tragedy or misfortune, but to remind us of history’s inherent ambiguity: that clarity about what is desirable only arrives long after the fact. We rarely know what disasters have been overturned, because we cannot see the disasters that never came to be. History offers consequences, not counterfactuals. This lesson is just as valuable in times of upheaval as in those of serendipity.
At daybreak on 19 May 1989, General Secretary Zhao Ziyang of the Communist Party of China (CPC) arrived at Tiananmen Square with a red megaphone. Escorted by members of the Central Office and student leaders, Zhao, a liberal reformist with a conciliatory attitude towards the hunger-striking student protesters, delivered an emotional address. In his signature Henan accent, Zhao proclaimed: ‘We came too late… students, I know that your hunger strikes are aimed at obtaining the most satisfactory answer from the government and the Party… but it will have been too late. You are still young, and there is a long future ahead of you.’ This speech turned out to be Zhao’s last public appearance, as he would spend the rest of his life in house confinement. That same evening, CPC hardliners would announce martial law which authorised an armed assault on the encampments. Two weeks later, despite fierce opposition from senior military commanders, the violent ‘restoration of order’ – in the words of the Command of the Martial Law Forces in Beijing – horrified the world.
Whilst the students on Tiananmen Square protested against a range of social ills, ranging from bureaucrat profiteering to widening economic inequality, Western historiographies now remember them mainly as martyrs for China’s political liberalization. This claim is not without its merits, as the symbol of the protesters was a ten-meter ‘Goddess of Democracy’ erected opposite of Mao Zedong’s portrait on the Forbidden City’s entrance gate. Within the United States, the Bush 41 administration, alongside Henry Kissinger, adopted what domestic observers described as a “kowtowing” attitude towards Beijing, privately conveying to paramount leader Deng Xiaoping that their opposition to China’s atrocious human rights record was merely symbolic. The tanks rolling along Chang’an Avenue, only momentarily stopped by a man in a white shirt carrying grocery bags, became emblematic of the dashed hope of liberal democracy within the People’s Republic of China (PRC). The U.S. business community, arguing against a policy of economic isolation targeting the ‘Butchers of Beijing’, was subsequently cast by human rights advocates as self-interested sycophants, standing up for tyranny in exchange for quick bucks. Again, this claim has been contested – in a 1992 letter from the Coalition of New England Companies and Trade, American businesses urged the Senate to drop punitive tariffs linked to human rights against the PRC as they would, allegedly, ‘“close the door” on the Chinese people’s exposure to Western values’ such as ‘choice’ and ‘democracy’.
Zhao, portrayed in CPC internal documents as ‘China’s Mikhail Gorbachev’, was only able to express his views privately after 1989. What happened to his political career and the students towards whom he was sympathetic was an unmitigated tragedy. Some still lionise Zhao, while others have not stopped condemning him. If the Henanese had prevailed in 1989, the CPC might have relinquished control over the Chinese state, and China would have embarked on a journey followed by other post-Communist regimes. The disaster at Tiananmen might have been overturned, and the PRC would have united with the Western ‘family of nations’ and integrated both economically and politically. History might not end everywhere, but it would certainly end in a China that was sweeter than fiction.
One need not be an apologist of CPC hardliners to see how this logic demands interrogation. Unlike the political disaster that struck in Beijing, another catastrophe of similar proportions was avoided in Moscow. Twenty-seven months after Zhao’s red-megaphone speech, state television in Moscow suddenly announced that President Gorbachev, who had been on a vacation in the southern edge of Crimea, was sick and unable to act in his official capacity. As it turned out, a coalition of eight putschists, all hardliners within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), had seized power from the General Secretary in hopes of slowing, if not ending, his radical perestroika and glasnost. The putschists, having formed the State Committee on the State of Emergency (SCSE), also halted the Novo-Ogaryovo process that would finalise the New Union Treaty and turn the USSR into a voluntary association of sovereign republics. Despite the outpouring of international sympathy towards a now incapacitated Gorbachev, not least from Bush and Margaret Thatcher, the putschists could have acted with resolution and cruelty, and turned the clock back in the USSR.
Indeed, emulating Beijing’s moves, CPSU hardliners mobilised tanks of Moscow garrisons. The Tamanskaya Division, one of the most decorated Soviet formations, was tasked to guard the House of Soviets of Russia where the parliament of Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (SFSR) convened. The hero of the USSR’s liberal democratic movement on 19 August 1991 would turn out not to be Gorbachev. Instead, it was Boris Yeltsin, the democratically elected President of the Russian SFSR, who seized the opportunity. As a master of political theatre, he walked out of the parliament, climbed on a Tamanskaya tank that had switched allegiance to him, and shook hands with the commanders. ‘The peoples of Russia are becoming masters of their destiny,’ declared Yeltsin, ‘we appeal to citizens of Russia to give a fitting rebuff to the putschists and demand a return of the country to normal constitutional development.’
His speech received substantial media coverage. Over the next day, the SCSE demonstrated remarkable restraint and indecisiveness. Even whilst the mobilised Moscow garrisons remained largely loyal to the usurped USSR, the planned assault of the Russian parliament and the arrest of Yeltsin never materialised. The coup fell apart in days, and a reinstated, and arguably very healthy, Gorbachev furiously discovered that organisational elements of the CPSU were collaborators of the SCSE. Unlike Zhao, Gorbachev survived the internal turmoil of the CPSU, but he resigned as General Secretary on 24 August, effectively ending Communist rule in the Soviet Union. Four months later, the USSR officially collapsed. Zhao lost, but neither did Gorbachev’s gambit succeed.
Yet, no one can deny that the swift resolution of the 19 August coup was a disaster overturned. World leaders and those in support of liberal democracy celebrated Yeltsin’s victory and the demise of the CPSU. Ironically, in late 1993, the same Tamanskaya Division loyal to Yeltsin would open fire on the very parliament building it once defended. Yeltsin, the president now involved in a self-coup, dissolved the Supreme Soviet of Russia by military force, and led the nascent Russian Federation towards a political system dominated by the executive. And with that, any hope that a democratised superpower headquartered in Moscow would bring peace and stability to Europe turned out to be fanciful. Cheered on by the West at the time, Yeltsin’s presidential authority was then transferred to Vladimir Putin, a geopolitical irredentist whose invasion of Ukraine turned into both a catastrophe for the Ukrainian people, and a blow to his own personalist regime. Yet, unlike what amateur pundits have claimed, Putin seems entirely uninterested in reviving the Soviet Communist project; instead, he built his macho personality cult upon the very Russian nationalism that killed the Soviet Union. The SCSE’s oligarchic rule was a near-miss, but it would be an oversight to only view the 19 August coup in isolation. As the old man of the frontier warned, what makes us the best judge of good fortune?
Zhao’s failed appeal, and the brutal repression of Tiananmen protesters in 1989 directly led to the elevation of Jiang Zemin to the seat of CPC General Secretary. An unimposing mayor from Shanghai, and a self-proclaimed polyglottic electric engineer, Jiang was initially shocked by his appointment. Disaster had struck, reformists faced political witch-hunts, and the demise of Communist regimes around the world made it seem like the CPC was on the brink of collapse. It was under Jiang – though not without Deng’s urging – that China’s economic reforms picked up steam. PRC propaganda suggests that, as Russia stagnated in a chronic economic crisis, China went on to become the world’s second-largest economy. Regardless of whether one supports the authoritarian regime with its long list of human rights abuses, it is hard to overlook China’s economic achievements under the CPC’s iron fist. These parallel anecdotes reveal a historical paradox: Russia embraced openness, only to become a global pariah, whereas the CPC elders who ‘rescued’ Chinese socialism gave birth to a centralized, technocratic, and pro-trade system – a system with the second most billionaires in the world.
To be cautiously pessimistic about the degree of social progress we have made is not to undermine the suffering that would be endured by victims of bankrupt ideologies – it is to recognise that not every apparent breakthrough leads to liberation. To cite Nuno Monteiro, ‘the ironic saying “may god protect us from answered prayers” [equally] applies to the U.S. global position after the demise of the Soviet Union.’ As the Donald Trump fiasco over the past decade has shown, the United States seemed woefully unprepared to champion the ‘unipolar moment’, and this mercantilist administration has in fact eroded the cohesion of U.S. alliances, and turned towards self-imposed isolation. Likewise, the PRC’s economic miracle has lifted – as per World Bank figures – 800 million people above the international poverty line, but the same prowess also emboldened the ambition of a personalist leader who fully entrenched himself within the patrimonial system he inherited. One could say that thanks to those who outmanoeuvred Zhao, China beat the capitalists at their own game. But the party-state has not, and likely will not, choose change over survival. We are obsessed with analysing what would happen if things went wrong, but we rarely pay the same attention to what would happen if things went right. A regime change in China seems to be a preferable endgame for Trump’s senior policymakers, but we have little reason to believe that they would be careful with what they wish for.
The old man’s horse returned. The boy’s leg broke. The barbarians came. The news cycle invites us to draw conclusions too soon. A disaster deferred may reappear in new form, and the triumph of the Freikorps gave us Hitler. Unexpected reversals are never without their side-effects. If the God of History anointed Zhao to stay on, and Gorbachev to step down, would we find a Chinese ultranationalist invasion at its Western frontier to be unthinkable?
More ironically, the PRC, having already outlasted the USSR, since 2023 also spends more resources to study the collapse of the USSR than Moscow and Washington, and is still drawing lessons from what it sees as an avoidable mistake. Zhao’s fall, like the boy’s injury, looked tragic. Yet the ruthless CPC hardliners preserved the very structure, no matter how morally reprehensible, that would consolidate China’s position as the world’s factory. Gorbachev’s survival, like the horse’s return, seemed auspicious to liberal democrats everywhere in the world – until the empire unravelled under the same brand of Russian nationalism that we, only too belatedly, problematise. In an age where strongmen rise and liberal democracies stumble, perhaps the old man’s parable is less a comfort than a warning – that what feels like deliverance may only be the beginning of the next test.
Works Consulted: Julian Gewirtz, Never Turn Back: China and the Forbidden History of the 1980s (2022); Vladislav M. Zubok, Collapse: The Fall of the Soviet Union (2022); Archie Brown, The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan, and Thatcher, and the End of the Cold War (2022); Nuno P. Monteiro, Theory of Unipolar Politics (2014); Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China (2011).