History of China/Chapter 22

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Chapter 22: Reform and Opening — Deng Xiaoping and the Economic Miracle (1978–1989)

1. Introduction: The Second Revolution

The decade from 1978 to 1989 was one of the most transformative periods in Chinese history — a period in which the People's Republic of China abandoned the revolutionary utopianism of the Mao era and embarked on a program of economic reform and opening to the outside world that would, over the next four decades, produce the most rapid and sustained economic growth in human history. The architect of this transformation was Deng Xiaoping (邓小平) — a diminutive, chain-smoking pragmatist who had been purged twice during the Cultural Revolution and who emerged from Mao's death to become the most consequential Chinese leader since Mao himself.

Deng's reform program was not a coherent blueprint designed in advance but an evolving set of pragmatic adjustments — a process of "crossing the river by feeling the stones" (摸着石头过河, mozhe shitou guohe), as the reformers described it. The reforms were driven by a simple but revolutionary insight: that the Maoist model of development — centralized planning, collective agriculture, ideological mobilization, isolation from the world economy — had failed catastrophically, and that China could develop and modernize only by introducing market mechanisms, incentivizing individual initiative, and engaging with the global economy. Deng's famous maxim — "It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice" (不管黑猫白猫，抓到耗子就是好猫, buguan hei mao bai mao, zhuadao haozi jiushi hao mao) — captured the spirit of an approach that prioritized practical results over ideological purity.

The reforms of 1978–1989 transformed every aspect of Chinese life — the economy, society, culture, education, and China's relationship with the outside world. They also created tensions and contradictions — between economic freedom and political control, between the coast and the interior, between the winners and losers of reform, between the party's claim to absolute authority and the aspirations of an increasingly educated and sophisticated population for political participation and individual rights — that would culminate in the tragedy of Tiananmen Square in June 1989.

2. The Third Plenum: China's Turning Point (December 1978)

The Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, held in Beijing from December 18 to 22, 1978, is universally regarded as the turning point in the history of the People's Republic — the moment at which China decisively broke with the Maoist past and committed itself to the program of "reform and opening" (改革开放, gaige kaifang) that would define its development for the next half-century.

The path to the Third Plenum was not straightforward. After Mao's death in September 1976 and the arrest of the Gang of Four the following month, power was held by Hua Guofeng (华国锋), Mao's designated successor, who attempted to consolidate his position by wrapping himself in Mao's mantle — famously proclaiming the "two whatevers" (两个凡是, liangge fanshi): "Whatever policy Chairman Mao decided, we will resolutely uphold; whatever directives Chairman Mao issued, we will continue to follow." This formula, which effectively precluded any reform of Maoist policies, was unacceptable to the reform-minded faction led by Deng Xiaoping, who had been rehabilitated in July 1977 and was determined to chart a new course.

The intellectual preparation for reform was provided by a remarkable national debate on the question "Practice Is the Sole Criterion of Truth" (实践是检验真理的唯一标准, Shijian shi jianyan zhenli de weiyi biaozhun) — an essay published in the Guangming Daily on May 11, 1978, that challenged the "two whatevers" by asserting that the validity of ideas should be judged by their practical results rather than by their conformity to any particular authority's pronouncements. The essay, which was sponsored by reformers within the party and provoked a fierce debate, was a thinly veiled argument for abandoning Maoist orthodoxy and embracing pragmatic reform.

The Third Plenum itself was preceded by a month-long "central work conference" (中央工作会议, zhongyang gongzuo huiyi) at which the key debates were conducted and the crucial decisions were made. The plenum's official communiqué announced a shift in the party's "central task" from "class struggle" (阶级斗争, jieji douzheng) to "socialist modernization" (社会主义现代化, shehui zhuyi xiandaihua) — a seemingly bureaucratic formulation that was, in fact, a revolutionary change in the party's fundamental orientation. The communiqué also called for the correction of past errors, the rehabilitation of victims of political campaigns, the expansion of agricultural production through new policies, and the opening of China to foreign investment and technology.

The Third Plenum did not formally remove Hua Guofeng from power — that process took several more years — but it established Deng Xiaoping as the paramount leader and committed the party to a program of reform that would transform China beyond recognition. The significance of the Third Plenum can hardly be overstated: it marked the beginning of what the Chinese themselves call the "new period" (新时期, xin shiqi) — a period of reform, growth, and engagement with the world that has made China the second-largest economy on earth and one of the most powerful nations in history.

3. Rural Reform: The Household Responsibility System

The most important and successful of Deng's reforms began not in the cities but in the countryside — and not as a policy designed in Beijing but as a spontaneous innovation by desperate peasants that the central leadership, after initial hesitation, chose to endorse and promote.

In the autumn of 1978, in Xiaogang village (小岗村, Xiaogang Cun) in Fengyang County, Anhui Province — one of the areas most severely affected by the Great Famine — eighteen peasant families secretly agreed to divide the collective land among individual households, with each family responsible for meeting its state procurement quota and keeping any surplus for itself. The agreement was made in secret because it was, under the prevailing political system, illegal — a violation of the collective farming system that had been in place since the 1950s. The families signed a document pledging to care for the children of any member who was imprisoned for the act.

The results were dramatic. In the first year of the experiment, the village's grain output reportedly increased by several times — a transformation that attracted the attention of provincial officials and, eventually, of the central leadership. The Xiaogang experiment was not unique — similar arrangements were emerging spontaneously in other areas of China, driven by the peasants' desire to escape the inefficiency and coercion of collective farming. What made Xiaogang significant was that it became the symbolic origin story of rural reform — a narrative that the reformers used to legitimize a transformation that was already underway.

The system that emerged from these experiments became known as the "Household Responsibility System" (家庭联产承包责任制, jiating lianchan chengbao zerenzhi) — a cumbersome name for a simple concept: collective land was divided among individual households on long-term contracts, each household was responsible for meeting a fixed quota of production to be delivered to the state, and any production above the quota belonged to the household to consume or sell as it wished. The system preserved the fiction of collective ownership — the land still belonged to the collective, and the contracts were theoretically temporary — but in practice, it restored individual farming and individual incentive.

The Household Responsibility System was introduced gradually — first as an experiment in a few provinces, then as an option for "poor" areas, and finally, by 1983, as the universal system of agricultural organization. The speed of its adoption testified to its popularity: by 1983, over 98 percent of rural households had adopted the system, and the collective farming structures of the Mao era had effectively ceased to exist.

The results were extraordinary. Agricultural output increased by approximately 47 percent between 1978 and 1984 — an increase that was due partly to the new incentive structure, partly to increases in state procurement prices, and partly to other reforms such as the liberalization of rural markets. Grain production increased from 305 million tons in 1978 to 407 million tons in 1984. For the first time since the founding of the People's Republic, China's peasants had enough to eat — and many began to prosper. The increase in agricultural productivity also released surplus labor from farming, creating the workforce that would power China's later industrial revolution.

The success of rural reform had broader significance. It demonstrated that market incentives and individual initiative could produce results that decades of collectivization and political mobilization had failed to achieve. It vindicated the reformers' pragmatic approach and weakened the position of those who opposed reform on ideological grounds. And it provided a model for the urban and industrial reforms that would follow — the principle that decentralization, market mechanisms, and individual initiative could coexist with state ownership and party control.

4. Special Economic Zones and Opening to the World

The most symbolically powerful of Deng's reforms was the "opening" (开放, kaifang) of China to foreign trade, investment, and cultural exchange — a reversal of the Maoist policy of self-reliance that integrated China into the global economy and ultimately transformed the country's position in the world.

The institutional innovation that embodied this opening was the Special Economic Zone (经济特区, jingji tequ) — designated areas in which foreign investment was encouraged through tax incentives, reduced regulations, and the creation of infrastructure and business conditions that contrasted sharply with the rigid planned economy of the interior. The first four SEZs were established in 1980 in Shenzhen (深圳), Zhuhai (珠海), Shantou (汕头), and Xiamen (厦门) — all located on China's southeastern coast, close to Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan, and chosen for their proximity to overseas Chinese capital and their distance from the political center in Beijing.

The SEZs were, in effect, capitalist enclaves within a nominally socialist economy — zones in which market forces, private enterprise, and foreign capital were allowed to operate with a degree of freedom that would have been unthinkable in the rest of China. The most dramatic example was Shenzhen, which in 1979 was a fishing village of approximately 30,000 people across the border from Hong Kong. Within a decade, Shenzhen had been transformed into a booming city of over a million people, with gleaming skyscrapers, modern factories, and an economy growing at annual rates of 40 percent or more. Shenzhen's transformation became the most visible symbol of the reform era — proof that the policies of opening could produce prosperity on a scale that the planned economy had never achieved.

The opening to the outside world extended far beyond the SEZs. Foreign trade was liberalized, with the state monopoly on foreign trade gradually relaxed and trading rights extended to a growing number of enterprises. Foreign investment was actively encouraged, and by the late 1980s, billions of dollars in foreign capital were flowing into China — much of it from Hong Kong and Taiwan, channeled through ethnic Chinese networks that connected the mainland to the global economy. Thousands of Chinese students were sent abroad to study at Western universities — a flow that would, over the following decades, transform China's scientific and technological capabilities.

The opening also brought cultural change. For the first time since 1949, Chinese citizens had access to foreign films, music, literature, and ideas. The "culture fever" (文化热, wenhua re) of the 1980s produced an explosion of artistic, literary, and intellectual creativity — a ferment of ideas and experimentation that was, for many Chinese, the most exciting and liberating aspect of the reform era. Chinese intellectuals debated the merits of Western democracy, engaged with contemporary Western philosophy and social science, and produced works of literature, art, and film that explored the traumas of the Mao era and the possibilities of the new age.

The reforms were not without critics within the party. Conservative leaders — particularly Chen Yun (陈云), the elder statesman who served as a counterweight to Deng Xiaoping — warned that uncontrolled opening would lead to "spiritual pollution" (精神污染, jingshen wuran) — the corruption of socialist values by bourgeois Western culture — and called for a more cautious approach that preserved the dominant role of the planned economy. The tension between reformers and conservatives was a recurring theme of the 1980s, with the balance of power shifting back and forth as the economic and political consequences of reform became apparent.

5. Urban and Industrial Reform

The reform of China's urban and industrial economy was a more complex and politically contentious process than the reform of agriculture. The agricultural reforms had been relatively straightforward — restoring individual farming and market incentives — and their results had been immediately and spectacularly positive. Urban and industrial reform, by contrast, involved the restructuring of a vast system of state-owned enterprises, central planning, and administered prices that employed hundreds of millions of people and constituted the institutional foundation of the Communist Party's power in the cities.

The approach adopted by the reformers was characteristically pragmatic: rather than dismantling the planned economy and replacing it with a market economy — the "shock therapy" approach that would later be attempted, with mixed results, in the former Soviet Union — they chose to grow the market economy alongside the planned economy, allowing market forces to expand gradually while the planned economy continued to function. This approach, which Barry Naughton has aptly described as "growing out of the plan," had the advantage of avoiding the social disruption and political resistance that a rapid transition would have provoked.

The key reform measures included the expansion of enterprise autonomy — giving state-owned enterprises greater control over production decisions, pricing, hiring, and the retention of profits — and the introduction of a "dual-track pricing system" (双轨制, shuangguizhi) in which enterprises could sell above-plan production at market prices while still meeting their plan quotas at state-set prices. This system created powerful incentives for enterprises to increase production and efficiency, since the marginal revenue from above-plan sales was far higher than the revenue from plan sales. It also created opportunities for corruption, as officials who controlled the allocation of goods at low state prices could profit enormously by diverting them to the market — a practice that generated widespread public resentment and became a major source of social tension in the late 1980s.

The reforms also permitted — and encouraged — the growth of a non-state sector that had not existed under the Maoist system. Township and village enterprises (乡镇企业, xiangzhen qiye) — collectively owned rural industries that operated largely outside the planned economy — grew explosively during the 1980s, producing consumer goods, processing agricultural products, and creating employment for the surplus labor freed by agricultural reform. By the late 1980s, the non-state sector accounted for a growing share of industrial output, employment, and exports — and was becoming the most dynamic element of the Chinese economy.

The results of the reform program as a whole were impressive. China's GDP grew at an average annual rate of approximately 9.5 percent during the decade from 1978 to 1988 — a rate of growth that was among the highest in the world and that was transforming the lives of hundreds of millions of Chinese. Per capita income roughly doubled. Consumer goods that had been scarce or unavailable under Mao — televisions, refrigerators, washing machines, bicycles — became widely available. The urban landscape was changing as construction boomed, shops and restaurants multiplied, and the drab uniformity of the Mao era gave way to a more varied and colorful urban life.

But the reforms also produced new problems and new sources of discontent. Inflation, which had been virtually nonexistent under the planned economy, became a serious concern in the late 1980s, reaching annual rates of 18–20 percent in 1988 and eroding the purchasing power of urban workers on fixed salaries. Corruption — the exploitation of the dual-track system, the use of official connections for private gain, the abuse of power by party cadres — became pervasive and was a source of intense popular anger. Income inequality, both between urban and rural areas and between the prosperous coast and the lagging interior, grew rapidly. And the contradiction between economic liberalization and political authoritarianism — the question of whether economic freedom could coexist indefinitely with political dictatorship — became increasingly acute.

6. The Four Modernizations and the Democracy Wall Movement

The intellectual framework for the reform era was provided by the concept of the "Four Modernizations" (四个现代化, Sige Xiandaihua) — the modernization of agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology. The concept had originally been articulated by Zhou Enlai in 1964 and was revived by Deng Xiaoping as the programmatic foundation of the reform era. The Four Modernizations defined the party's priorities for the post-Mao period: economic development and technological advancement, rather than class struggle and ideological purity, would be the central tasks of the party and the state.

But the emphasis on economic modernization raised a question that Deng and the party leadership were reluctant to address: did China also need political modernization — democracy, the rule of law, freedom of expression, and institutional checks on the power of the party? This question was posed with remarkable directness in the Democracy Wall movement (民主墙运动, Minzhu Qiang Yundong) of 1978–1979 — a brief period of political liberalization during which ordinary citizens posted essays, poems, and political commentaries on a stretch of wall near Xidan Street in central Beijing.

The most famous of these writers was Wei Jingsheng (魏京生), a young electrician who, in December 1978, posted an essay entitled "The Fifth Modernization: Democracy" (第五个现代化：民主, Di Wuge Xiandaihua: Minzhu). Wei argued that the Four Modernizations could not succeed without political democratization — that a system in which power was concentrated in the hands of a single party and a single leader, without accountability, transparency, or the protection of individual rights, would inevitably produce the kind of catastrophic errors that had characterized the Mao era. Wei's essay was a direct challenge to Deng Xiaoping's authority — and Deng's response was swift and unequivocal. In March 1979, Deng proclaimed the "Four Cardinal Principles" (四项基本原则, Sixiang Jiben Yuanze) — the socialist road, the people's democratic dictatorship, the leadership of the Communist Party, and Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought — as the non-negotiable boundaries of political debate. Wei Jingsheng was arrested in March 1979, tried on charges of "counter-revolution," and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. The Democracy Wall was closed, and the brief experiment in political openness was terminated.

The suppression of the Democracy Wall movement established a pattern that would characterize the entire reform era: economic reform would be permitted and encouraged, but political reform — particularly any reform that challenged the CCP's monopoly on power — would not be tolerated. This asymmetry between economic liberalization and political authoritarianism was not merely a pragmatic compromise but a deliberate strategy. Deng and the reform leadership were convinced that political liberalization would lead to instability, that China's priority must be economic development, and that only the CCP had the authority and the organizational capacity to manage the process of reform. The question of whether this formula was sustainable — whether a modern, educated, and increasingly prosperous society could be governed indefinitely by a one-party dictatorship — would be posed with dramatic force a decade later, in Tiananmen Square.

7. Political Reform and Its Limits

Despite the suppression of the Democracy Wall movement, the question of political reform did not disappear. Throughout the 1980s, there was a genuine — if constrained — debate within the CCP about the need for political reform to accompany and support economic reform. The most prominent advocate of political reform within the party leadership was Hu Yaobang (胡耀邦), who served as General Secretary of the CCP from 1982 to 1987.

Hu Yaobang was a reformer of conviction and energy — a man who had risen through the ranks of the CCP as a protege of Deng Xiaoping and who brought to the position of General Secretary a genuine commitment to intellectual freedom, political transparency, and the rehabilitation of victims of past political campaigns. Under Hu's leadership, the party carried out the rehabilitation of millions of people who had been wrongly classified as "rightists" during the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 or persecuted during the Cultural Revolution — a process that represented a partial reckoning with the injustices of the Mao era and that won Hu enormous respect among intellectuals and the general public.

Hu also encouraged a more open intellectual and cultural environment. The 1980s were a period of remarkable cultural and intellectual ferment in China — a "new enlightenment" (新启蒙, xin qimeng) in which Chinese intellectuals engaged with Western philosophy, political theory, and social science on a scale not seen since the May Fourth Movement of 1919. Writers like Liu Binyan (刘宾雁) produced investigative journalism that exposed corruption and injustice. Filmmakers like Chen Kaige (陈凯歌) and Zhang Yimou (张艺谋) created works of stunning artistic ambition. Intellectuals like Fang Lizhi (方励之), an astrophysicist and vice-president of the Chinese University of Science and Technology, openly advocated democracy and human rights — drawing on Western political philosophy to argue that the CCP's monopoly on power was both illegitimate and counterproductive.

The limits of political reform were demonstrated in January 1987, when Hu Yaobang was forced to resign as General Secretary after student demonstrations in several Chinese cities in December 1986. The demonstrations, which called for greater democracy and political freedom, were modest in scale and peaceful in character, but they alarmed conservative leaders, who blamed Hu for having created an atmosphere of "bourgeois liberalization" (资产阶级自由化, zichanjieji ziyouhua) that had emboldened the students. Deng Xiaoping, who was sympathetic to economic reform but implacably opposed to political liberalization, sided with the conservatives. Hu was replaced as General Secretary by Zhao Ziyang (赵紫阳), another reformer but one who was initially more cautious in his approach to political issues.

The fall of Hu Yaobang was a turning point. It demonstrated that political reform had reached its limits — that the CCP would not tolerate any challenge to its monopoly on power, even from within its own ranks. It also created a powerful symbol of injustice — the wrongful dismissal of a good man — that would become the catalyst for the Tiananmen protests two years later.

8. The Crisis of 1989: Background and Causes

The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 were the product of multiple, intersecting crises — economic, political, social, and generational — that converged in the spring of that year to produce the largest and most serious challenge to CCP rule since 1949.

The immediate trigger was the death of Hu Yaobang on April 15, 1989. Hu's death — from a heart attack suffered during a Politburo meeting — created an outpouring of public grief that rapidly transformed into political protest. Students from Beijing's universities, who regarded Hu as a champion of reform and a victim of conservative intransigence, began to gather in Tiananmen Square to mourn him — just as the public had gathered in the same square to mourn Zhou Enlai in 1976. The mourning quickly evolved into demands for political reform — freedom of the press, an end to corruption, accountability for government officials, and dialogue between the government and the students.

But the protests were fueled by deeper grievances. The economic reforms of the late 1980s had produced severe inflation — consumer prices rose by 18.8 percent in 1988, and the prices of basic necessities were rising even faster — that eroded the living standards of urban workers and created widespread economic anxiety. Corruption — the exploitation of the dual-track pricing system by well-connected officials and their families, the abuse of power for personal gain, the growing wealth gap between ordinary citizens and the party elite — was a source of intense popular anger. The contrast between the party's rhetoric of socialist equality and the reality of privilege and corruption fueled a deep cynicism about the party's legitimacy.

There was also a generational dimension. The students who led the protests were the children of the reform era — a generation that had grown up with greater access to education, information, and contact with the outside world than any previous generation of Chinese. Many had been exposed to Western ideas of democracy and human rights, and they were impatient with a political system that denied them any meaningful voice in the governance of their country. They were inspired by the democratic movements that were sweeping the communist world — particularly the reforms in the Soviet Union under Mikhail Gorbachev, whose visit to Beijing in May 1989 provided the international media with a dramatic backdrop for the protests.

The protests quickly spread beyond the student population. Workers, civil servants, journalists, professionals, and even some soldiers joined the demonstrations, which expanded from Tiananmen Square to cities across China. At their peak, the protests in Beijing involved an estimated one million people — a cross-section of urban society united by anger at corruption, anxiety about the economy, and a desire for a more open and accountable political system. The protests were remarkable for their discipline and restraint — the students maintained order in the square, organized their own security, and repeatedly expressed their loyalty to the country and the constitution, even as they demanded reform of the political system.

9. The Tiananmen Massacre (June 3–4, 1989)

The CCP leadership was deeply divided in its response to the protests. The reformist General Secretary, Zhao Ziyang, advocated dialogue with the students and opposed the use of force, arguing that the party should acknowledge the legitimacy of the students' concerns and respond with political reform. The conservative faction, led by Premier Li Peng (李鹏) and supported by the elder statesmen — particularly Deng Xiaoping himself — regarded the protests as a fundamental threat to the party's power and insisted on a decisive crackdown. The decisive moment came on May 20, when martial law was declared in Beijing — a decision made by Deng Xiaoping over the objections of Zhao Ziyang.

Zhao Ziyang visited the students in Tiananmen Square on May 19, in what would be his last public appearance. Speaking through a megaphone, with tears in his eyes, he told the hunger-striking students: "We came too late" (我们来得太晚了, Women lai de tai wan le). It was an extraordinary moment — a senior leader of the Communist Party openly expressing sympathy with the protesters and implicitly acknowledging the failure of the system he served. Zhao was immediately removed from power, placed under house arrest, and never appeared in public again. He spent the remaining fifteen years of his life under virtual imprisonment, dying in January 2005 without ever being formally charged or tried.

The military crackdown came on the night of June 3–4, 1989. Units of the People's Liberation Army — drawn from outside Beijing to ensure that they had no personal connections with the capital's population — advanced on Tiananmen Square from multiple directions, firing on civilians who attempted to block their path. The heaviest fighting and the most casualties occurred not in Tiananmen Square itself but along the major avenues leading to the square — particularly Chang'an Avenue, where citizens erected barricades of buses and trucks and were met with automatic weapons fire from advancing troops and armored vehicles.

The exact number of people killed during the Tiananmen massacre has never been established and remains one of the most sensitive topics in Chinese politics. The Chinese government initially claimed that approximately 200 civilians and several dozen soldiers died in the violence, later revising the figure to suggest that "no one died" in Tiananmen Square itself — a claim that was technically accurate in a narrow sense (most of the killing occurred on the surrounding streets) but was widely and correctly regarded as a cynical evasion. The actual death toll is estimated by most scholars and journalists at between several hundred and several thousand, with the most commonly cited estimates falling in the range of 500 to 2,600. A declassified British diplomatic cable estimated a death toll of approximately 10,000, though many scholars consider this figure too high. The Chinese Red Cross initially reported 2,600 deaths before being forced to retract the figure. The true number may never be known.

The aftermath of the massacre was a period of intense repression. Thousands of people were arrested, tried, and imprisoned. The most prominent leaders of the student movement — including Wang Dan (王丹), Wuer Kaixi (吾尔开希), and Chai Ling (柴玲) — were placed on "most wanted" lists; some were captured and imprisoned, while others escaped abroad through underground networks. The "most wanted" lists were broadcast on national television, and informants were encouraged to report the whereabouts of protest leaders. Intellectuals, journalists, and workers who had participated in or supported the protests were purged from their positions. The cultural and intellectual openness of the 1980s was abruptly curtailed, and a new emphasis on "patriotic education" (爱国主义教育, aiguo zhuyi jiaoyu) was introduced to ensure that future generations would not repeat the "mistakes" of 1989.

The international reaction was one of shock and condemnation. Western governments imposed sanctions, suspended military sales, and expressed outrage at the use of lethal force against unarmed civilians. The image of a lone man standing in front of a column of tanks on Chang'an Avenue — the "Tank Man" — became one of the most iconic photographs of the twentieth century and a universal symbol of individual courage in the face of state power. But the sanctions were gradually relaxed over the following years, as the economic imperatives of engagement with China's vast market reasserted themselves, and the Tiananmen massacre receded from the center of international attention.

10. Conclusion: The Unfinished Revolution

The Tiananmen massacre of June 1989 was a defining event in the history of the People's Republic — a moment that revealed, with brutal clarity, the fundamental contradiction at the heart of the reform era: the CCP's determination to maintain its monopoly on political power, even as it transformed the economy and opened the country to the world. The massacre demonstrated that the party was willing to kill its own citizens — in large numbers and in full view of the world — to preserve its rule. And it established the parameters of the post-Tiananmen political settlement: economic reform would continue and even accelerate, but political reform was off the table, and any challenge to the party's authority would be met with overwhelming force.

The decade from 1978 to 1989 had been a period of extraordinary transformation — perhaps the most consequential decade in Chinese history since the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1911. The economic reforms launched at the Third Plenum had lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, doubled the nation's per capita income, and begun the process of integrating China into the global economy. The cultural and intellectual openness of the 1980s had produced a flowering of creativity and debate that rivaled the May Fourth era. And the Tiananmen protests themselves, whatever their immediate failure, had demonstrated that the desire for freedom, dignity, and political participation was not a Western import but a deeply felt aspiration of the Chinese people.

But the promise of the 1980s — the hope that economic reform would eventually be accompanied by political reform, that China would gradually evolve toward a more open and accountable system of governance — was extinguished by the events of June 1989. The post-Tiananmen settlement — economic liberalization without political liberalization, prosperity without freedom, growth without accountability — would define China's development for the next three decades and beyond. Whether this settlement is sustainable in the long run — whether a modern, educated, and globally connected society can be governed indefinitely by a one-party dictatorship — remains the central question of Chinese politics in the twenty-first century.

The decade of reform and opening had demonstrated both the extraordinary achievements of which the Chinese people were capable when given the opportunity and the extraordinary ruthlessness of which the Communist Party was capable when its power was threatened. This paradox — achievement and repression, prosperity and control, reform and violence — would continue to define China's path in the decades that followed.