History of China/Chapter 23

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History of China

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Chapter 23: From Tiananmen to Xi Jinping — China as Global Power (1989–present)

1. Introduction: The Rise of a Superpower

The three and a half decades following the Tiananmen massacre of June 1989 constitute one of the most remarkable chapters in the history of any nation — a period in which the People's Republic of China rose from a traumatized, internationally isolated, and still overwhelmingly poor country to become the world's second-largest economy, its largest manufacturer, its largest trading nation, and one of its two most powerful states. The speed, scale, and consequences of China's rise are without historical precedent: no nation has ever developed so fast, lifted so many people out of poverty, or so rapidly shifted the global balance of power.

This transformation was accomplished under the continuing — and indeed strengthening — rule of the Chinese Communist Party, which emerged from the crisis of 1989 not weakened but ultimately more powerful than ever, having demonstrated its willingness to use any means necessary to maintain its monopoly on power and having subsequently delivered decades of economic growth that gave its rule a degree of popular legitimacy that coercion alone could never have achieved. The post-Tiananmen settlement — economic reform without political reform, prosperity without democracy, engagement with the world economy under the iron control of a one-party state — proved far more durable and successful than most observers in 1989 had predicted.

The period divides naturally into several phases, each associated with a particular leader: the post-Tiananmen consolidation under Deng Xiaoping's continued paramount leadership (1989–1997); the era of Jiang Zemin and the integration of China into the global economy (1989–2002); the era of Hu Jintao and the search for "harmonious society" (2002–2012); and the era of Xi Jinping, which has seen the most dramatic concentration of personal power since Mao and the emergence of China as a rival to the United States for global supremacy (2012–present).

2. Post-Tiananmen Consolidation: Deng's Final Act (1989–1992)

The immediate aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre was a period of political retrenchment and economic uncertainty. The reformist General Secretary Zhao Ziyang had been replaced by Jiang Zemin (江泽民), the mayor and party secretary of Shanghai, who had handled student protests in his city without violence and who was regarded by Deng Xiaoping as a reliable loyalist. The party launched a campaign of ideological tightening, emphasizing political stability, "patriotic education," and the dangers of "bourgeois liberalization" and "peaceful evolution" (和平演变, heping yanbian) — the supposed Western strategy of undermining communist rule through cultural and ideological influence.

Economic reform slowed dramatically. Conservative leaders, emboldened by the crisis, argued that the reforms had gone too far and that the market-oriented policies of the 1980s were responsible for the inflation, corruption, and social instability that had produced the Tiananmen protests. Investment was cut, credit was tightened, and the non-state sector came under increased scrutiny. For two years, China's economic growth rate declined sharply, and it appeared that the reform project might be in jeopardy.

The decisive intervention came from Deng Xiaoping himself. In January and February 1992, the eighty-seven-year-old paramount leader — who held no formal position of power but whose authority derived from his personal prestige and his control of the military — undertook his famous "Southern Tour" (南巡, nanxun), visiting the Special Economic Zones of Shenzhen and Zhuhai and delivering a series of speeches that reasserted the primacy of economic reform. "Development is the hard truth" (发展是硬道理, fazhan shi ying daoli), Deng declared, and he warned that anyone who opposed reform would be removed from power. The Southern Tour was a masterstroke of political leadership — it broke the conservative resistance to reform, relaunched the process of economic liberalization, and set China on the path of accelerated growth that would continue for the next three decades.

The message of the Southern Tour was clear: the post-Tiananmen political settlement would consist of accelerated economic reform combined with unyielding political control. The CCP would deliver prosperity, and in return the population would accept the party's monopoly on power. This implicit social contract — growth in exchange for obedience, prosperity in exchange for political quiescence — became the foundation of the post-1989 order and has remained the CCP's fundamental source of legitimacy to the present day.

3. The Jiang Zemin Era: China Joins the World (1993–2002)

The decade following Deng's Southern Tour was a period of extraordinarily rapid economic growth and deepening integration into the global economy. Jiang Zemin, who served as General Secretary of the CCP from 1989 to 2002 and as President from 1993 to 2003, presided over a transformation that turned China from a peripheral participant in the world economy into its central factory floor.

The economic reforms of the 1990s went far beyond those of the 1980s. State-owned enterprises, which had been gradually reformed but never fundamentally restructured in the 1980s, were subjected to a sweeping program of privatization, merger, and closure beginning in the mid-1990s under the slogan "grasp the large, release the small" (抓大放小, zhua da fang xiao). Smaller state enterprises were sold to their managers or closed outright, while larger enterprises were corporatized and, in some cases, listed on newly established stock exchanges in Shanghai and Shenzhen. The reform of the state sector was accompanied by an explosion of private enterprise — the constitutional amendment of 1999 recognized private enterprise as an "important component" of the socialist market economy, and the number of private businesses grew exponentially.

The social cost of state enterprise reform was enormous. An estimated 40 to 60 million workers were laid off from state-owned enterprises during the 1990s — losing not only their jobs but the entire system of social services (housing, health care, education, pensions) that had been provided by the "iron rice bowl" (铁饭碗, tie fanwan) of state employment. The "laid-off workers" (下岗工人, xiagang gongren) became one of the most significant social groups of the reform era — millions of people, many of them middle-aged and with skills suited only to the obsolete industries in which they had spent their careers, who were cast adrift in a rapidly changing economy with inadequate social protection.

The crowning achievement of the Jiang era was China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in December 2001, after fifteen years of negotiations. WTO membership represented China's full integration into the rules-based international trading system and committed the country to a comprehensive program of trade liberalization, market opening, and institutional reform. The immediate effects were dramatic: foreign investment surged, exports boomed, and China rapidly became the "workshop of the world" — the primary manufacturer of consumer goods for the global market. Between 2001 and 2010, China's share of global manufacturing output grew from roughly 6 percent to over 19 percent, making it the world's largest manufacturer and displacing the United States from a position it had held for over a century.

Jiang Zemin's principal ideological contribution was the "Three Represents" (三个代表, Sange Daibiao), formally adopted in 2002, which declared that the CCP represented "the development trend of China's advanced productive forces, the orientation of China's advanced culture, and the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people." The practical significance of the Three Represents was that it opened the CCP to private entrepreneurs and business people — a dramatic departure from the party's historical identity as the vanguard of the working class and a recognition that the party's survival depended on co-opting, rather than opposing, the new capitalist elite that the reforms had created.

The Jiang era was also marked by significant events in China's relationship with the wider world. The handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China on July 1, 1997, under the "one country, two systems" (一国两制, yiguo liangzhi) framework, was a moment of intense national pride — the end of what the CCP portrayed as the last vestige of Western colonial humiliation. The handover of Macau from Portugal followed in 1999. Relations with the United States were periodically turbulent — the accidental NATO bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in May 1999 and the collision between a Chinese fighter jet and an American surveillance aircraft near Hainan Island in April 2001 produced serious diplomatic crises — but the overall trajectory was toward increasing economic interdependence and cautious diplomatic engagement.

4. The Hu Jintao Era: Growth, Inequality, and "Harmonious Society" (2002–2012)

Hu Jintao (胡锦涛), who succeeded Jiang Zemin as General Secretary in 2002 and as President in 2003, inherited a China that was growing at breathtaking speed but was also generating social tensions and environmental destruction on an equally breathtaking scale. Hu's response was the concept of "harmonious society" (和谐社会, hexie shehui) — an acknowledgment that the relentless pursuit of GDP growth had produced unsustainable levels of inequality, environmental degradation, corruption, and social discontent, and that the party needed to devote greater attention to equity, sustainability, and social welfare.

The economic achievements of the Hu era were staggering. China's GDP grew from approximately $1.5 trillion in 2002 to over $8 trillion in 2012 — an increase of more than fivefold in a single decade. China surpassed Germany to become the world's third-largest economy in 2007, then surpassed Japan to become the second-largest in 2010. Chinese exports grew from $326 billion in 2002 to over $2 trillion in 2012. Foreign exchange reserves — the accumulation of trade surpluses — reached $3.3 trillion, the largest in the world. Hundreds of millions of people were lifted out of poverty — the World Bank estimates that China's poverty reduction between 1981 and 2012 accounted for over 80 percent of the global total.

But the growth model was generating increasingly serious problems. Income inequality, measured by the Gini coefficient, rose to levels comparable to those of the most unequal countries in Latin America and Africa. The gap between the prosperous coastal provinces and the lagging interior, and between the booming cities and the stagnant countryside, widened dramatically. Environmental destruction — air pollution, water contamination, soil degradation, deforestation — reached levels that threatened public health and economic sustainability. In the cities, the cost of housing rose to levels that priced ordinary families out of the market, while in the countryside, the expropriation of agricultural land by local governments for development projects generated millions of protests and "mass incidents" (群体性事件, quntixing shijian) each year.

The showcase events of the Hu era were the 2008 Beijing Olympics and the 2010 Shanghai World Expo, both of which were designed to display China's emergence as a modern, confident, and globally significant power. The Beijing Olympics, in particular, were a triumph of organization and spectacle — the opening ceremony, directed by Zhang Yimou, was widely regarded as the most impressive in Olympic history, and China topped the gold medal table for the first time. The games were also accompanied by a massive security operation, the forced relocation of hundreds of thousands of Beijing residents, and a crackdown on dissent that illustrated the party's determination to present a controlled and curated image to the world.

The most consequential event of the Hu era, however, was the global financial crisis of 2008, which had profound effects on both China's economy and its international position. The crisis devastated the economies of the United States and Europe, while China's economy, insulated by its closed capital account and its massive foreign exchange reserves, weathered the storm relatively well — aided by a massive stimulus package of approximately $586 billion that sustained growth but also created a legacy of debt, overcapacity, and wasteful investment that would haunt the economy for years afterward. The crisis reinforced the Chinese leadership's conviction that the Western model of development — liberal democracy and free-market capitalism — was fundamentally flawed, and that China's own model — party-led, state-directed economic development — was superior. This conviction would become a central element of the ideology of the Xi Jinping era.

5. Xi Jinping and the "New Era" (2012–present)

Xi Jinping (习近平), who became General Secretary of the CCP in November 2012 and President of the PRC in March 2013, has proven to be the most consequential Chinese leader since Deng Xiaoping — and, in terms of the concentration of personal power, the most powerful since Mao Zedong himself. Xi has fundamentally reshaped China's political system, its economy, its foreign policy, and its relationship with the outside world, inaugurating what the party officially calls the "New Era of Socialism with Chinese Characteristics" (新时代中国特色社会主义, Xin Shidai Zhongguo Tese Shehui Zhuyi).

Xi's first and most visible initiative was the anti-corruption campaign (反腐败运动, fan fubai yundong), which he launched within weeks of taking power and which has become the most extensive and sustained political purge in the history of the PRC. The campaign has resulted in the investigation and punishment of over 4.6 million officials at all levels of the party and government, including some of the most senior figures in the CCP — among them Zhou Yongkang (周永康), a former member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo and the country's former security chief; Bo Xilai (薄熙来), the charismatic former party secretary of Chongqing; and Xu Caihou (徐才厚) and Guo Boxiong (郭伯雄), both former vice-chairmen of the Central Military Commission. The campaign has been popular with the public, which has long regarded corruption as one of the most serious problems facing the country, but it has also been used to eliminate Xi's political rivals and to create a climate of fear and submission within the party apparatus.

Xi has concentrated power to a degree not seen since Mao. He has assumed personal leadership of a vast array of policy-making bodies — "leading small groups" and commissions covering everything from economic reform to cybersecurity to Taiwan affairs — that have marginalized the State Council and the normal governmental apparatus. The collective leadership system that Deng Xiaoping had established after the Cultural Revolution — designed to prevent the kind of one-man rule that had produced the disasters of the Mao era — has been effectively dismantled. In 2018, the National People's Congress amended the constitution to abolish presidential term limits, removing the last formal constraint on Xi's tenure and opening the way for him to rule indefinitely. At the Twentieth Party Congress in October 2022, Xi was appointed to an unprecedented third term as General Secretary, surrounded by loyalists in the Standing Committee, and confirmed as the undisputed supreme leader of China.

The ideological framework of the Xi era is the "Chinese Dream" (中国梦, Zhongguo Meng) — the "great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation" (中华民族伟大复兴, Zhonghua minzu weida fuxing) — a nationalist vision that presents China's rise as the restoration of the country's historical greatness after the humiliations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The Chinese Dream subsumes economic development within a broader project of national power, cultural confidence, and global influence — a vision that is explicitly competitive with Western models and that presents the CCP not merely as the manager of China's economy but as the guardian of Chinese civilization itself.

6. Belt and Road, Military Modernization, and Global Ambition

The most ambitious expression of China's global aspirations under Xi Jinping is the Belt and Road Initiative (一带一路, Yidai Yilu), announced in 2013 — a vast program of infrastructure investment, trade development, and diplomatic engagement spanning more than 140 countries across Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America. The BRI encompasses ports, railways, highways, power plants, telecommunications networks, and industrial zones, financed primarily through Chinese state-backed lending. By the mid-2020s, China had committed hundreds of billions of dollars to BRI projects, creating a network of economic relationships and infrastructure dependencies that has dramatically expanded China's influence in the developing world.

The BRI has been accompanied by a comprehensive program of military modernization that has transformed the People's Liberation Army from a large but technologically backward force into a modern, increasingly capable military with power-projection capabilities that extend far beyond China's borders. The PLA Navy has expanded from a coastal defense force to the world's largest navy by number of vessels, equipped with aircraft carriers, advanced submarines, and anti-ship ballistic missiles designed to deny the U.S. Navy access to the Western Pacific. China has established its first overseas military base in Djibouti, has built and militarized artificial islands in the South China Sea, and has developed advanced weapons systems — including hypersonic missiles and anti-satellite weapons — that challenge American military supremacy in the Indo-Pacific region.

In the South China Sea, China has asserted expansive territorial claims — demarcated by the controversial "nine-dash line" (九段线, jiuduanxian) — that overlap with the claims of Vietnam, the Philippines, Malaysia, Brunei, and Taiwan, and that were rejected by an international arbitral tribunal in 2016. China has ignored the ruling and has continued to build military facilities on artificial islands, creating facts on the ground (or rather, on the sea) that have transformed the strategic landscape of Southeast Asia.

China's growing assertiveness has also been evident in its approach to Hong Kong and Taiwan — the two most sensitive issues in Chinese politics. In Hong Kong, the imposition of a sweeping National Security Law in June 2020 — in response to the mass pro-democracy protests of 2019 — effectively ended the "one country, two systems" framework that had governed Hong Kong since 1997, silenced the pro-democracy movement, and brought the city under the direct political control of Beijing. In Taiwan, Xi Jinping has repeatedly declared that "reunification" is a "historical inevitability" and has refused to rule out the use of force, while the PLA has conducted increasingly provocative military exercises — including large-scale exercises simulating a blockade and invasion following U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's visit to Taiwan in August 2022.

The relationship between China and the United States has deteriorated dramatically under Xi Jinping — evolving from a complex mixture of cooperation and competition to what many observers describe as a new Cold War. The Trump administration imposed tariffs on hundreds of billions of dollars of Chinese goods, restricted Chinese access to American technology, and designated China as a "strategic competitor." The Biden administration largely maintained these policies and added new restrictions on semiconductor exports and investment in Chinese technology firms. The competition extends beyond trade and technology to encompass military posturing, diplomatic rivalry, ideological contestation, and competition for influence in the developing world. The management of this rivalry — and the avoidance of military conflict — has become the defining challenge of twenty-first-century international relations.

7. Domestic Society: Surveillance, Censorship, and Social Control

Under Xi Jinping, the Chinese party-state has constructed the most comprehensive system of social surveillance and information control in human history. The "Great Firewall" (防火长城, fanghuochangcheng) — the system of internet censorship that blocks access to foreign websites, social media platforms, and search engines — has been complemented by an increasingly sophisticated system of domestic internet monitoring that censors politically sensitive content, tracks online activity, and identifies dissidents.

The social credit system (社会信用体系, shehui xinyong tixi), which has been under development since 2014, aims to assign a score to every individual and business based on their economic and social behavior — including their financial transactions, legal record, social media activity, and compliance with government regulations. While the system remains fragmented and unevenly implemented, its ambition is totalitarian in scope: a comprehensive system of surveillance, evaluation, and control that would use data and algorithms to enforce social conformity and punish nonconformity.

The most extreme manifestation of the surveillance state has been in Xinjiang, where the Uyghur Muslim population has been subjected to a comprehensive program of repression that includes mass detention in "re-education camps" (再教育营, zai jiaoyu ying), pervasive surveillance using facial recognition technology and mobile phone tracking, restrictions on religious practice and cultural expression, forced labor, and coercive birth-control measures that have dramatically reduced the Uyghur birth rate. International human rights organizations, Western governments, and the United Nations have characterized these policies as constituting crimes against humanity and, in the assessment of some, genocide — charges that the Chinese government has vehemently denied, describing its policies in Xinjiang as counter-terrorism and vocational training measures.

Religious and ethnic minorities more broadly have faced increasing pressure. The Tibetan population continues to face restrictions on religious practice and cultural expression, the demolition of religious sites, and the imposition of "patriotic education" in monasteries. Christians — both Catholic and Protestant — have faced a crackdown that includes the demolition of churches, the removal of crosses, and the detention of clergy. The party under Xi has emphasized that religion must be "Sinicized" (中国化, Zhongguohua) — subordinated to Chinese culture and, in practice, to party control.

The media environment has been comprehensively tightened. Independent journalism has been effectively eliminated, with all media required to serve as "the tongue and ears of the party" (党的喉舌, dang de houshe). Social media platforms are subject to real-time censorship, and citizens who post politically sensitive content risk arrest and prosecution. The "zero COVID" policy of 2020–2022, which subjected hundreds of millions of people to prolonged lockdowns, mandatory testing, and quarantine — and which triggered rare mass protests in November 2022 — demonstrated both the party's capacity for social control and the limits of that capacity in the face of widespread popular frustration.

8. The Economy: Achievement and Uncertainty

China's economic achievement since 1989 is, by any historical standard, extraordinary. GDP has grown from approximately $350 billion in 1989 to over $17 trillion in the mid-2020s — an increase of roughly fiftyfold in thirty-five years. Per capita income has risen from approximately $300 to over $12,000, lifting over 800 million people out of extreme poverty — the most successful poverty-reduction program in human history. China has become the world's largest manufacturer, the largest exporter, the largest holder of foreign exchange reserves, and the second-largest economy. It has built the world's largest high-speed rail network, the world's largest fleet of electric vehicles, and some of the world's most advanced technology companies.

But by the mid-2020s, the Chinese economy faces significant structural challenges. The real estate sector, which had been a primary driver of growth and constituted as much as 30 percent of GDP, has experienced a severe downturn — with the near-collapse of major developers like Evergrande and Country Garden, falling property prices, and a crisis of confidence among homebuyers. Youth unemployment has risen to alarming levels — officially exceeding 20 percent among urban 16-to-24-year-olds before the government stopped publishing the data in June 2023. The population is aging rapidly — the working-age population began shrinking in 2012, and the total population began declining in 2022, creating demographic challenges that will constrain growth for decades. Local government debt, much of it accumulated through opaque "local government financing vehicles," has reached levels that threaten fiscal stability.

The relationship between the state and the private sector has become increasingly uncertain under Xi Jinping. The regulatory crackdowns of 2020–2021 — targeting the technology sector, private tutoring, real estate, and other industries — have shaken business confidence and raised questions about the party's commitment to the private economy. Xi's emphasis on "common prosperity" (共同富裕, gongtong fuyu) and his repeated calls for the party to control the economy more directly have created anxiety among entrepreneurs and investors, both domestic and foreign.

The question facing China in the mid-2020s is whether the economic model that produced three decades of extraordinary growth — export-led manufacturing, massive infrastructure investment, real estate development, and state-directed resource allocation — can be successfully transitioned to a new model based on domestic consumption, technological innovation, and higher-value production. The answer to this question will determine not only China's economic future but the shape of the global economy and the balance of power in the twenty-first century.

9. COVID-19 and Its Aftermath

The COVID-19 pandemic, which emerged from the central Chinese city of Wuhan in late 2019, was a defining event for China and the world. The initial response of local authorities — the suppression of information about the outbreak, the silencing of whistleblower Dr. Li Wenliang (李文亮), and the delay in acknowledging human-to-human transmission — allowed the virus to spread unchecked during the critical early weeks. The subsequent national response was one of the most dramatic public health interventions in history: the complete lockdown of Wuhan, a city of 11 million people, on January 23, 2020, followed by the lockdown of the entire province of Hubei and the imposition of sweeping travel restrictions and quarantine measures across the country.

The "zero COVID" (动态清零, dongtai qingling) policy, which China maintained for nearly three years while most of the world moved toward living with the virus, was a demonstration of the party-state's extraordinary capacity for social control — and of the costs of that control. Repeated lockdowns — including the two-month lockdown of Shanghai in the spring of 2022, which caused severe economic disruption and widespread suffering — took an enormous toll on the economy, on mental health, and on public patience. The policy also revealed the limits of the system's ability to process feedback: because zero COVID had been personally championed by Xi Jinping, no official dared to question it, even as its costs became increasingly unsustainable and its epidemiological rationale evaporated with the emergence of the highly transmissible Omicron variant.

The unprecedented street protests of November 2022 — the "White Paper Movement" (白纸运动, Baizhi Yundong), in which demonstrators held up blank sheets of white paper to symbolize censorship — forced an abrupt reversal of policy. Zero COVID was abandoned virtually overnight in December 2022, without adequate preparation of the health system or the population. The resulting wave of infections caused an estimated one to two million deaths — a catastrophic outcome that the government has never officially acknowledged.

The pandemic and its aftermath have had lasting effects on China's international relationships, its domestic politics, and its economy. The question of the virus's origins — whether it emerged through natural zoonotic transmission or through a laboratory incident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology — has become one of the most politically charged scientific questions of the twenty-first century and has further poisoned Sino-American relations. Domestically, the pandemic experience has contributed to a broader mood of disillusionment and caution — reflected in declining consumer confidence, falling birth rates, and the phenomenon of "lying flat" (躺平, tangping) — a passive resistance to the relentless demands of a system that offers diminishing returns.

10. Conclusion: China at a Crossroads

China in the mid-2020s is a nation of extraordinary power and extraordinary uncertainty — a country that has achieved more in a single generation than most nations achieve in centuries, but that now faces challenges of a complexity and magnitude that test the capacity of any political system, let alone one that concentrates power in a single leader and prohibits dissent.

The external challenges are formidable: an increasingly hostile international environment, in which the rivalry with the United States threatens to constrain China's access to technology, markets, and capital; the unresolved question of Taiwan, which carries the risk of military conflict between the world's two most powerful nations; and a global economy that is fragmenting along geopolitical lines, threatening the export-led model that has driven China's growth.

The internal challenges may be even more daunting: a demographic decline that will shrink the population and the workforce for decades to come; a real estate crisis that has destroyed the savings of millions of families; a youth generation facing historically high unemployment and diminished expectations; an environmental crisis that includes some of the world's worst air and water pollution; and a political system that, by concentrating all power in a single leader and suppressing all feedback mechanisms, has made itself vulnerable to exactly the kind of catastrophic policy errors that it was redesigned after Mao to prevent.

The CCP's response to these challenges has been to tighten control — to strengthen the surveillance state, to restrict the flow of information, to crack down on dissent, and to demand ever-greater loyalty from the population. Whether this approach can sustain China's development and manage its growing tensions — or whether it will produce the kind of rigidity and brittleness that has historically been the downfall of authoritarian systems — is the central question of twenty-first-century politics.

The history of China since 1989 is, in many ways, a vindication of the CCP's claim that a one-party state can deliver economic development and national power more effectively than a democracy. But it is also a story of costs — the human costs of repression, the social costs of inequality, the cultural costs of censorship, the political costs of a system that cannot tolerate dissent or self-correction. The question that hangs over China's future — as it has hung over every authoritarian system in history — is whether the benefits of control can indefinitely outweigh the costs. The answer to that question will shape not only China's future but the future of the world.