The actions of the Chinese government during the Tiananmen Square protests nearly split the Communist Party of China. Sarotte and Sean Lynn-Jones discuss internal party reactions to the event, how it affected relations between the US and China, and lessons the CCP may have learned from other Cold War-era governments.

The actions of the Chinese government during the Tiananmen Square protests nearly split the Communist Party of China.

Sarotte and Sean Lynn-Jones discuss internal party reactions to the event, how it affected relations between the U.S. and China, and lessons the CCP may have learned from other Cold War-era governments.

Obsession with the democratic changes sweeping Europe in the late 1980s and a concomitant desire to keep these changes from spreading may have played a critical role in the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) decision to take violent action against the Tiananmen Square protestors in 1989. New sources, released during the 2009 to 2011 anniversaries of the events that ended the Cold War, cite the CCP’s determination to prevent the spread of democracy as one of its primary motivating factors. These sources also suggest that the CCP did not fear reprisals by the United States, which it predicted would take “no real countermeasures.”

Washington and Bonn pursued a shared strategy of perpetuating U.S. preeminence in European security after the end of the Cold War. As multilingual evidence shows, they did so primarily by shielding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) from potential competitors during an era of dramatic change in Europe. In particular, the United States and West Germany made skillful use in 1990 of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev's political weakness and his willingness to prioritize his country's financial woes over security concerns. Washington and Bonn decided "to bribe the Soviets out," as then Deputy National Security Adviser Robert Gates phrased it, and to move NATO eastward.