Values That Pass Each Other By: Tiananmen, Human Rights, Taiwan, Hong Kong

On the morning of June 5, 1989, on Chang’an Avenue in Beijing, a single man stood before a column of tanks. With what looked like shopping bags hanging from both hands, the man blocked the path of the steel formation. When a tank tried to swerve left, the man also moved left and stood in its way again. Before long he was led away by someone, and his name, and the fate that followed, remain unknown to this day.

The figure of this nameless man, captured by cameras around the world, was remembered as one image that symbolized the twentieth century. What had happened in the heart of Beijing the night before? It was an event that thrust upon the world the fact that the US and China, who had begun to intertwine in economics, held a domain they would never cross.

1989, Beijing Spring

That spring, students and citizens demanding democratization gathered day after day in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. The trigger had been a movement to mourn the death of a reformist leader, but it swelled into a great surge demanding freedom and political reform. The square filled with tents, hunger strikes continued, and as the world’s press looked on, tension rose to its limit.

Within the Chinese leadership, a grave split ran over how to respond. General Secretary Zhao Ziyang believed the situation could be settled through dialogue with the students, and went to the square himself to speak to them. But the hard-line view prevailed. Under the decision of paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, martial law was declared over the city of Beijing in May. Zhao Ziyang fell from power and vanished from the public stage.

Then, in the predawn of June 4, the People’s Liberation Army moved soldiers and tanks into the city and set out to seize the square and its surroundings. Many are said to have lost their lives, but the exact number remains unclear to this day. The season called ‘Beijing Spring’ was thus closed in violence.

This event was reported day after day by televisions around the world. Right around then, views of China in America were wavering greatly. Ever since Nixon’s visit, China had largely been spoken of in positive terms: as a partner in strategy against the Soviets, and as a promising market that had stepped into reform and opening. But the bloodshed in the square drove a deep crack into that bright story. Would a China growing rich truly change into the kind of country they had hoped for? That question was thrust upon them, for the first time, bearing a heavy shadow.

Sanctions, and a Relationship That Continued Even So

The incident threw cold water directly on US-China relations. America put forward sanctions including an arms embargo, and in Congress, hard-line voices swirled saying economic ties with China should be severed. As a country that upheld human rights, to overlook this would be to betray the founding ideals. Public opinion seethed fiercely.

Amid that turmoil, there was a symbolic scene. Physicist Fang Lizhi, regarded as a spiritual pillar of the democracy movement, rushed into the American embassy with his wife and sought protection. The Chinese authorities demanded he be handed over, and the US and China entered nerve-wracking negotiations. It was not until a little over a year after the incident that Fang Lizhi was permitted to leave the country.

Even so, the Bush administration did not choose the path of completely severing relations. The president is said to have sent a secret envoy to Beijing and, through a personal letter to Deng Xiaoping, conveyed his intent not to let the relationship break down despite pressure from Congress. The economic bond was already that deep. Anger, interests, and strategic calculation. After those engaged in a tug-of-war, the US and China barely held on to the thread of the relationship. But the gulf carved at this time would not disappear over the decades that followed.

Symbolic of this was the debate over the trade preferences granted to China. In America after the incident, voices grew louder that this preference should be tied to improvements in human rights and reviewed almost every year. The idea was to use the economy as a lever to change China’s behavior. But in the end, the position that valued the practical gains of trade pushed back, and the preference was maintained. A Congress that upheld ideals, and an administration that wished to continue the relationship. Within America itself ran a deep division over how to face China. This wavering would appear, again and again, in subsequent China policy.

Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Line That Would Not Cross

The mismatch did not stop at the abstract ideal of human rights. It erupted again and again as a more visceral conflict over specific lands and peoples.

In 1996, as Taiwan’s first direct presidential election approached, China forced through large-scale military exercises in the waters near Taiwan, including missile launches. It was an intimidation of Taiwan’s voters. In response, America dispatched a carrier task force, and tension in the strait rose all at once. This episode, called the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis, etched anew into the post-Cold War world the picture of the US and China facing each other militarily over Taiwan.

As the twenty-first century began, Hong Kong joined the stage. Returned from Britain to China in 1997, Hong Kong was supposed to have been promised a high degree of autonomy under one country, two systems. It was a promise to maintain capitalism and free institutions for half a century after the handover. Yet after the large-scale protest movement of 2019, the following year, in 2020, Hong Kong’s National Security Law took effect. The international community pushed back strongly, and the US is said to have moved to sanctions, holding that one country, two systems had been undermined. The transformation of a city once regarded as a free window connecting East and West was received as an event symbolizing the mismatch between the US and China.

Furthermore, over the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region as well, exchanges of sanctions and counter-sanctions continued between America, which held that human rights violations had occurred, and China, which pushed back, calling it interference in internal affairs. America even established a law restricting the import of related products. On these issues the claims of both sides sharply oppose each other, and views over the facts and their assessment remain divided to this day. What is certain is the mismatch in perspective itself: Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Xinjiang were all positioned by China as core interests bearing on its sovereignty and unity, while America continued to take interest in them from the standpoint of the universal values of human rights and freedom.

The expectation placed in the bet called ‘engagement,’ that prosperity would change China, came to a halt before this line. China grew rich. But it did not change in the direction America had wished. If anything, it deepened its confidence in its own system and came to assert its own path before the world.

The gulf in values that had been lying at the bottom of the honeymoon had now revealed itself, beyond any way of hiding it. What remained was who the leaders standing on either side of that gulf would be. Before long, two figures would step onto the stage of history and turn the mismatch into a conflict from which there was no turning back.