ABSTRACT
After Tiananmen, China was diplomatically isolated. Most Western countries froze high-level contacts with the Beijing authorities for around two years. Some discreet visits took place in order to keep diplomatic channels open and reassure the Chinese leadership that there was no Western plan to destabilize the People’s Republic. But relations between China and its most important partners, the USA, the major European nations and Japan were marred by the former’s opposition to the asylum given by the latter to a large number of political refugees, as well as the latter’s public condemnation of the former’s fierce repression of any political dissent. The concomitant dramatic evolution of central and eastern parts of the European
continent gave additional reasons to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to be alarmed. Among the most famous destabilizing events – both for the world and for China – of the year 1989, one can mention the first democratic election in Poland, which, ironically, took place on June 4th, the collapse of the Iron Curtain and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the unilateral independence of the Baltic states and the ignominious end of the Ceaucescu regime in Romania. In the aftermath of these political earthquakes, the CCP became obsessed with the danger of ‘peaceful evolution’ (heping yanbian) towards ‘bourgeois democracy’ and clearly gave priority to consolidating its grip on China’s economy and society. To that end, at the instigation of Deng Xiaoping himself, it intensified its nationalist propaganda, turning nationalism into a core substitute for Marxism-Leninism, and restored the CCP discourse on ‘national humiliation’.1
