Thirty years ago today, as all the world knows, Chinese authorities savagely attacked thousands of demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. Hundreds, maybe thousands, died.
The picture of the lone demonstrator in a clean white shirt standing calmly in front of a column of four huge tanks is engraved on the memories of everyone old enough to remember.
Tom Watkins, who went on to be Michigan’s state superintendent of schools a dozen years later, happened to be there. He told me long afterwards that he had been interested in China since he’d been in the fourth grade, but that Tiananmen Square had an impact on him like nothing else. Through an interpreter, he had talked to some of the students in the days before the massacre. They had asked him to describe freedom, and explain democracy.
China’s leadership, which had begun to encourage capitalism and a market economy, cared most of all about power. They savagely and brutally cracked down on the demonstrators.
This was at a time, we often forget, when Mikhail Gorbachev had drastically loosened the reins on state control in the Soviet Union. His theory was that if people had freedom of speech and expression, they would work even harder and more joyously to make socialism succeed.
Instead, he was dead wrong. The economy tanked; it was clear by June 1989 that things were spinning out of control. Later that year, Eastern European nations would all abandon Communism. The Soviet Union itself crashed and burned and ceased to exist in 1991.
After Tiananmen Square, it was widely predicted that much the same would happen in China, that the martyrs of June 4th would inspire a more dissidents and a steadily growing pro-Democracy movement. But the exact opposite happened.
Today, China is far richer and more prosperous than anyone in this country would ever have dreamed thirty years ago. But state control is stronger than it ever was, thanks in part to technology. When I began my career as a journalist, we didn’t trade with China at all. Now, we are engaged in a fierce economic struggle with them, and it isn’t clear that we are winning. Watkins, who has held a variety of high-level jobs in Michigan government, today is a business and education consultant who is constantly going back and forth between the nations.
He’s been telling me for twenty years that we need to take China more seriously, and that above all, we have to treat them with respect. “Trump’s biggest mistake in the US-China trade war is not recognizing that China will never bow again,” he told me. This was a nation that was humiliated by foreign powers for a century, back to the days when we forced them to sell opium.
That memory has steeled China’s resolve, he told me. Watkins has also been telling me something for years that should now be clear to everyone: Our relationship with China is “the most important bilateral relationship in the world today. All major issues going forward will intersect at the corner of Washington, D.C. and Beijing.”
We need to treat China with deep respect, for our own good. Watkins isn’t saying we should ignore or keep silent about the very real terrible human rights abuses. But he says “building bridges is more productive than building walls.”
Especially, that is, when you are talking about a nation with more than a billion people, that happens to be the largest and fastest growing economy in the world.
