ABSTRACT
The leaders of the People's Republic of China have believed that China, Japan, and Western Europe were emerging alongside the United States and the Soviet Union as independent and roughly coequal partners in a multipolar world order. According to this view of the world, old cold-war alignments were breaking down and new patterns of international relations forming. In the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) worldview, US foreign policy remains animated by a fundamental hatred of communism and embodies a relentless crusade to destroy socialism around the world. According to the CCP view of the world, the "counterrevolutionary rebellion" that China experienced in early 1989 was a product of just such a strategy of "peaceful evolution" and was the result of collusion between domestic and foreign counterrevolutionaries seeking to overthrow the CCP. The Chinese leadership believes that unipolarity is dangerous primarily because it tempts US leaders to pursue more vigorously their scheme of bringing about "peaceful evolution" in China.
