1989: o ano que a China gostaria de esquecer: massacre da praça da Paz Celestial (Foreign Affairs)

 

The Tiananmen Papers By Andrew J. Nathan Foreign Affairs, Summer Readings   Read the essay Throughout the summer, we’re bringing our readers an essay every Sunday from the Foreign Affairs archives that sheds light on secret histories and untold stories in international affairs. This week, we’re featuring Andrew Nathan’s groundbreaking 2001 essay on what secret documents reveal about a moment that shaped modern China: the Chinese Communist Party’s crackdown on student protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989. In June of 1989, authorities in Beijing shocked the world by ordering the Chinese military to remove by force students who for weeks had occupied the square calling for economic and political reform. The bloody clearing of Beijing streets would cast a long shadow over China’s relations with governments around the world. But as Nathan made clear 12 years later, the decision to order troops to move on student protesters was not inevitable; rather, it was the product of factional political debate among a handful of CCP elders and authorities. Using materials smuggled out of China by a reformist sympathizer, Nathan provides a “revealing and potentially explosive view of decision-making at the highest levels of the government” and the “battles between hard-liners and reformers” over how to handle the protests. For weeks, authorities met in a mansion in the heart of Beijing, receiving classified reports including on the state of mind of students, farmers, street peddlers, and millions of others across the country, and evaluated the threat to their rule. The students, Nathan argued, had not “set out to pose a mortal challenge to what they knew was a dangerous regime,” and authorities “did not relish” the use of force against them. But the hard-liners in government ultimately gained the upper hand. “Those favoring political reform lost out and their cause has been in the deep freeze ever since.” Had the more conciliatory faction won out, Nathan lamented, “China’s recent history and its relations with the West would have been very different. Dialogue with the students would have tipped the balance toward political reform.” Instead, “China has experienced more than a decade of political stasis at home and strained relations with the West”—and Beijing “believes it has learned from Tiananmen that democratization is not an irresistible force.” For them, Nathan wrote, “the lesson of Tiananmen is that at its core, politics is about force.”

Read the essay