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The 7th of December 1988. Manhattan was abuzz that evening. Thousands of New Yorkers and tourists lined the streets, cheering, waving and giving thumbs-up signs behind the police barricades as Mikhail Gorbachev rode down Broadway in a forty-seven-car motorcade.

Gorbymania in Manhattan

Suddenly, in front of the Winter Garden Theater where the musical Cats was playing, Gorbachev ordered his stretch limo to halt. Smiling, he and his wife Raisa jumped out and had their pictures taken. The Soviet leader was photographed beneath a huge neon Coca-Cola sign, raising his clenched fists in triumph – like Robert ‘Rocky’ Balboa.

Gorbachev was really soaking up American adulation. A block south, in the middle of Times Square – the Mecca of world capitalism – the electronic billboard was flashing a red hammer and sickle with the message ‘Welcome, General Secretary Gorbachev’. He might still have been a communist at heart and the leader of America’s rival superpower, but that night in New York, ‘Gorby’ was a superstar, hailed above all as a peacemaker. Indeed most of his time in Manhattan the Soviet leader was mixing with celebs, billionaires and high society, rather than rubbing shoulders with the American proletariat.[1]

One of the visits tentatively scheduled was to Trump Tower. Real-estate developer Donald Trump could not wait to take Mrs Gorbachev around the glitzy shops in his tower’s marble atrium. He was also dying to show off to the Gorbachevs a suite on the sixtieth floor with a swimming pool that he claimed was ‘virtually regulation size, within the confines of an apartment’ and, of course, his own opulent $19 million domicile on the sixty-eighth floor. He said he wanted them to get ‘a good shot of what New York and the United States are about’ and he hoped that they would ‘find it special’. In the end, Gorbachev’s itinerary was altered and Trump Tower slipped off the list. That afternoon, however, when a Gorbachev lookalike was seen strolling past Tiffany’s and down Fifth Avenue followed by a horde of film crews drawing huge crowds, Trump and his bodyguards rushed down from his office thinking that the Soviet leader had changed his mind and was now keen to view his temple of consumerism. Squeezing on to the sidewalk, the tycoon enthusiastically pumped the fake Gorbachev’s hand.

The real Gorbachev was actually sequestered inside the Soviet mission. Caught out, Trump assured journalists he had seen through the stunt, declaring ‘I looked into the back of his limo and saw four attractive women. I knew that his society had not come that far yet in terms of capitalist decadence.’ Mikhail Gorbachev certainly did not share Donald Trump’s ideal of decadence. Nevertheless, he was clearly fascinated by the market economy. Bystander Joe Peters reckoned that Gorbachev was ‘going to learn all our tricks of capitalism and become the Donald Trump-ski of the Soviet Union’.[2]

The sense of anticipation was palpable. That very morning Gorbachev achieved perhaps his greatest international triumph so far. At the United Nations he had delivered a truly astounding address, one that would become pivotal for future Soviet foreign policy and for the course of world politics. Gorbachev’s intention was to deliver ‘the exact opposite’ of Winston Churchill’s notorious Iron Curtain speech of 1946.

Over the course of one hour, the Soviet leader dropped a succession of bombshells on specific policy issues. Most striking, he declared the termination of the international class struggle, insisting that ‘the use or threat of force no longer can or must be an instrument of foreign policy’. Instead, he urged the world to embrace ‘the supremacy of the universal human idea’ and lauded the significance of the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights which had been adopted, almost to the day, forty years before.[3]

These were amazing words from any Moscow policymaker, let alone the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. On the eve of 1989 Gorbachev stood before the world as the master of reform, apparently in control of events.

In reality, he would unleash a revolution that swept everything before it – eventually even himself. And the Western leader who would have to cope with the fallout was a cautious new American president who felt considerable scepticism about his magnetic Soviet counterpart and was wary about the true intentions behind Russia’s headline-grabbing reforms. George H. W. Bush had been vice president for all eight years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency (1981–9). He would enter the White House determined to take stock of US–Soviet relations and rethink his priorities as he started building a new agenda that would distinguish him politically from the Reagan administration.[4] In fact, his main concern in early 1989 was how to handle the ‘reinvention’ of communism that was under way not in Europe but in Asia.

*

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev was not a ‘normal’ Soviet leader. Born in 1931 in Privolnoye, a small village near Stavropol in the north Caucasus, he grew up witnessing his family’s suffering under Stalin’s collectivisation drive and later the Great Purge. When Gorbachev was ten, his father was drafted into the army and did not return for five years. Privolnoye was spared destruction during the Great Patriotic War but Stavropol was occupied by the Germans for five months in 1942–3, so Gorbachev experienced the ravages of war close-up and did not forget. Academically gifted and interested in politics, he shone at school and was cultivated from an early age by the local leaders of the Communist Party. Thanks to their patronage, he was sent to the prestigious Moscow State University (MGU) to study law; in order to gain entry he wrote an essay entitled ‘Stalin is our battle glory, Stalin is the Flight of our Youth’ – evidence that his political views then were still ‘straight Stalinist, like everyone else at the time’, as his best friend at university put it. At a third-year ball he met Raisa Maximovna Titarenko, a chic and clever philosophy student. A year later, in 1954, they were married.

Sent back to Stavropol, Gorbachev rose steadily through the Soviet nomenklatura system in the usual way, while Raisa taught Marxism at the local polytechnic and studied for a PhD on the peasantry in the region’s collective farms. Gorbachev’s youthful Stalinism was shaken by First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 ‘secret speech’ which denounced his predecessor Stalin’s monstrous crimes and laid bare the endemic problems of Russian industry and agriculture. Henceforth Gorbachev, though continuing to believe faithfully in communist ideology, recognised how flawed it had become in Soviet practice. Through his travels with Raisa to France, Italy and Sweden from the 1960s onwards, he encountered the West and glimpsed an alternative future. Meanwhile, his political career accelerated. In 1967, he became the regional party boss, aged only thirty-five; twelve years later he was put in charge of Soviet agriculture, moving to the centre of power in Moscow, while Raisa was given a teaching post at MGU. One of his leading patrons was KGB chief Yuri Andropov, who succeeded Leonid Brezhnev as general secretary in November 1982.[5]

Although nearing fifty, Gorbachev was almost a spring chicken by the standards of the Soviet Politburo. Andropov, nearly seventeen years his senior, suffered from acute kidney failure and died in February 1984. His successor Konstantin Chernenko was two decades senior to Gorbachev: afflicted with heart and lung problems, he expired in March 1985. Finally the old men of the Kremlin decided to jump a generation and opt for Gorbachev. Justifying to Raisa why he was taking the job, Mikhail said ‘all those years … it’s been impossible to achieve anything substantial, anything on a large scale. It’s like coming up against a wall. But life demands it. We can’t go on like this.’[6] Yet what should be done instead was much harder to determine. First Gorbachev tried an anti-alcohol campaign; after that failed he looked for deeper remedies and new slogans, espousing first ‘uskorenie’ (acceleration), then ‘perestroika’ (restructuring) and ‘glasnost’ (transparency). But these did not entail revolutionary changes: Gorbachev was still a party man and wanted to re-form the Soviet system to make it more viable and competitive: his motto was ‘Back to Lenin’.

His frequent invocations of Lenin were in part to justify to the party his policies of innovation and restructuring, which so sharply deviated from the Stalinist and Brezhnevite practice that in Gorbachev’s opinion had perverted ‘socialism’. But more than that, he identified his own view of fundamental reform of the Soviet system under the auspices of perestroika with Lenin’s 1920s ideas of a New Economic Policy: a guided and limited system of free enterprise. His goal at this stage was not a turn to capitalism or to social democracy. For him Lenin remained the source of legitimacy for policy changes within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) – the pure font of Soviet doctrine. He wanted to restructure the traditional Soviet sociopolitical order ‘within the system’, which is why under glasnost he also advocated ‘socialist pluralism’ ahead of full ‘political pluralism’ – all this to reinvigorate the Soviet Union.[7]

To achieve reform and rejuvenation, Gorbachev had to reduce the burden of the military-industrial complex on the Soviet economy, intensified during the 1980s by the war in Afghanistan and the spiralling arms race with America.

To be sure, the Soviet command economy was performing poorly simply for structural reasons – a fact masked by the global oil price rise of the 1970s and the country’s vast Siberian reserves which fuelled a GDP growth rate of 2–3.5% between 1971 and 1980. But when the oil price dropped in the next decade, national income fell sharply. Indeed, in 1980–5 the USSR found itself at near zero growth. The increasing dissatisfaction of Soviet consumers was exacerbated by declining living standards and limited access to high-tech civilian goods. This was due in part to the inflexibility of the planned economy and the lack of industrial modernisation, but the root problem was that perhaps up to a quarter of GDP was being gobbled up by the military sector to the detriment of the civilian production.[8]

In order to galvanise the economy at home while slowly opening it up to the outside world, Gorbachev needed to foster a stable international environment and also to address the USSR’s ‘imperial overstretch’ in Eastern Europe and the developing world. This meant reducing US hostility (disengaging from the arms race) and making compromises in the Third World (including ideological recognition of the right to self-determination). So domestic policy was inextricably bound up with foreign policy. Seeking a less confrontational relationship with the United States, Gorbachev was keen to talk with his American opposite number.[9]

At first glance, however, US president Ronald Reagan seemed an unlikely partner. Born in 1911, and so the same age as the man Gorbachev had just replaced, Reagan was a vehement anti-communist who had intensified the arms race once he came to power in 1981. He was notorious for his denunciation of the USSR as an ‘evil empire’ and for his prediction that the ‘march of freedom and democracy’ would ‘leave Marxism–Leninism on the ash heap of history’.[10] This all-out ideological competition, he believed, justified the military build-up of his early years. But there was another side to Reagan – the would-be peacemaker, who saw military power as a basis for diplomacy to secure ‘peace through strength’. Even more surprising, this hard-headed realist cherished a utopian belief in a nuclear-free world.[11]

During his first term, Reagan had been unable to initiate dialogue with the sick old men of the Kremlin. But with the accession of Gorbachev, not merely dialogue but negotiation suddenly became possible. Over the course of four summits between Geneva in November 1985 and Moscow in May/June 1988 the discussions were often heated but the two leaders gradually forged a relationship based on personal trust and even affection. Gorbachev’s radical nuclear arms-reduction proposals at Reykjavik in October 1986 – six months after the horrendous Chernobyl accident – almost carried Reagan along with him, to the horror of some die-hard advisers. By the time of their Washington meeting in December 1987 they had moved on to first-name terms. There was also substance in the new relationship. At Washington, Reagan and Gorbachev signed away a whole category of nuclear weapons in the Intermediate Nuclear Forces Treaty – the first time the superpowers had ever agreed to reduce their nuclear arsenals. Here was a significant step in defusing the Cold War, making it less likely that a nuclear conflict would break out. Atomic scientists put back their celebrated ‘Doomsday Clock’ to six minutes before midnight, instead of three. And on 31 May 1988, when Reagan was asked in Red Square whether he still felt the USSR was an ‘evil empire’, he replied ‘I was talking about another time, another era.’[12]

Reagan was moving on – and so was Gorbachev. Six months later, the dramatic address at the UN on the morning of 7 December was for the Soviet leader a ‘watershed’ moment. He wanted to present himself as a shaper of international affairs but, unlike Churchill, moving the world out of the Cold War. And he was keen to wrong-foot the Americans, especially at a time of transition between presidents when their foreign policy would be in limbo. ‘The Americans are scared that we might do something as in the spirit of Reykjavik.’ He had been preparing the speech for months, ever since Reagan’s visit, and it went through many drafts, being tweaked right up to the last minute. Gorbachev was determined to use the occasion to show the world his belief in the bright future of the rejuvenated Soviet Union and to confirm his credentials as a visionary peacemaker. And he hoped that by setting out his new political thinking in such an eye-catching way he would secure Western credits and economic assistance.[13]

By the time Gorbachev arrived at the UN, the vast General Assembly Hall was totally packed, with all 1,800 seats occupied. There was a buzz of excited chatter. Expectations were high. Gorbachev stepped up to the podium, dressed in a dark, well-tailored suit, white shirt and burgundy-coloured tie. At the start of his address, he spoke slowly and deliberately but then gathered pace, with increasing sweep and authority. In doing so, he set out his ideological blueprint for how Marxism–Leninism should evolve and how the world should extricate itself from the Cold War.[14]

He began with remarks that drew together Western and Eastern European history around the revolutionary idea: ‘Two great revolutions, the French Revolution of 1789 and the Russian Revolution of 1917, have exerted a powerful influence on the actual nature of the historical process and radically changed the course of world events. Both of them, each in its own way, have given a gigantic impetus to man’s progress.’ Having detoxified revolution and established common ground across the divided continent, Gorbachev expatiated on the universality of human experience – ‘today we have entered an era when progress will be based on the interests of all mankind’ – and insisted that further progress was possible only through a truly global consensus, in a movement towards what he called ‘a new world order’. If that were so, he added, ‘then it is also worth agreeing on the fundamental and truly universal prerequisites and principles for such activities. It is evident, for example, that force and the threat of force can no longer be, and should not be, instruments of foreign policy.’ Here was an explicit renunciation of the ‘Brezhnev Doctrine’ – Moscow’s claimed right to deploy the Red Army within its own sphere of influence to save a fellow communist state – that in 1968 had justified the use of tanks to crush the Prague Spring. Instead, considering the ‘variety of sociopolitical structures’, he declared ‘freedom of choice’ to be a ‘universal principle’ that knows ‘no exception’.[15]

So Gorbachev was thinking big, way beyond the conventional bipolarities of East versus West. After more than forty years of Cold War, he was explicitly advocating the ‘de-ideologisation of interstate relations’ and thereby declaring an end to Third World interventionism. Indeed, with the world as a whole now seriously tackling hunger, disease, illiteracy and ‘other mass ills’, he argued for recognising ‘the primacy of the universal human idea’. Nevertheless, he did not intend to abandon Soviet values: ‘The fundamental fact remains that the formation of the peaceful period will take place in conditions of the existence and rivalry of various socio-economic and political systems.’ However, he went on, ‘the meaning of our international efforts, and one of the key tenets of the new thinking, is precisely to impart to this rivalry the quality of sensible competition in conditions of respect for freedom of choice and a balance of interests’. So the two systems would not blur into each other, but their relationship would become one of peaceful ‘co-development’. In this way, working together, the superpowers would be able to ‘eliminate the nuclear threat and militarism’ whose eradication was essential for world development and the survival of the human race.

In addition to his grand vision, Gorbachev made specific proposals, especially terminating the nine-year intervention in Afghanistan, the USSR’s equivalent of America’s Vietnam, and on disarmament, which he called ‘the most important topic, without which no problem of the coming century can be resolved’. He spoke of the need for a new strategic arms-reduction treaty (START), reducing each superpower’s arsenal by 50%. And, to put pressure on the United States, he unveiled a unilateral proposal to cut the Soviet troop strength in Europe by half a million men over the next two years. In this way Gorbachev sought to initiate a shift from the ‘economy of armament’ to an ‘economy of disarmament’.

Such a conversion had become absolutely essential to underpin his project of a ‘profound renewal’ of the entire socialist society – a project that had grown vastly in scope since 1985 as he developed his big ideas of perestroika and glasnost. Indeed, Gorbachev explained, ‘under the sign of democratisation, perestroika has now spread to politics, the economy, intellectual life and ideology’. Soviet democracy would be ‘placed on a solid normative base’ including ‘laws on the freedom of conscience, glasnost, public associations and organisations’. Nevertheless, in order not to tempt anybody to ‘encroach on the security’ of the Soviet Union and its allies while the Kremlin undertook the much-needed ‘bold revolutionary transformations’, Gorbachev was adamant that the USSR’s defence capability should be maintained at what he termed a level of ‘reasonable and reliable sufficiency’. Such language was a marked change from the pursuit of ‘superiority’ that had dominated East–West relations for most of the Cold War. Serious differences still existed, he admitted, and tough problems had to be resolved between the superpowers but the Soviet leader was essentially upbeat about the future as he looked around the hall: ‘We have already graduated from the primary school of learning to understand each other and seek solutions in both our own and common interests.’[16]

Near the end of his speech he acknowledged the work of President Reagan and his Secretary of State, George Shultz, in forging agreements. ‘All this’, he said, ‘is capital that has been invested in a joint undertaking of historic importance. It must not be wasted or left out of circulation. The future US administration headed by newly elected President George Bush will find in us a partner, ready – without long pauses and backward movements – to continue the dialogue in a spirit of realism, openness, and goodwill, and with a striving for concrete results, over an agenda encompassing the key issues of Soviet–US relations and international politics.’[17] Bush was not in the audience – he watched the speech on television – but he could not have missed the message. As Gorbachev had told the Politburo before leaving Moscow, with his diplomatic offensive there would be ‘nowhere for Bush to turn’.[18]

Gorbachev’s aide Anatoly Chernyaev was in the audience. Having helped write the speech, he had expected it would make an impression but was not prepared for the reaction that morning. ‘For over an hour nobody stirred. And then the audience erupted in ovations, and they would not let [Gorbachev] go for a long time. He even had to get up and bow as if he were on stage.’[19] Gorbachev, a great showman, lapped it all up. Much of the press reaction was also positive. The New York Times editorialised, ‘Perhaps not since Woodrow Wilson presented his Fourteen Points in 1918 or since Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill promulgated the Atlantic Charter in 1941 has a world figure demonstrated the vision Mikhail Gorbachev displayed.’[20] But others looked behind the occasion and the rhetoric. The Christian Science Monitor, for instance, drew attention to what Gorbachev did not say. There was no suggestion that the Kremlin intended to pull back fully from its farthest positions of strategic influence gained in the Second World War – in East Germany and in East Asia. Indeed the speech said virtually nothing about Asia. Armed forces in Soviet Asia would be reduced, he promised, and ‘a major portion’ of Soviet troops temporarily stationed in the Mongolian People’s Republic would ‘return home’. But there was no mention of the bases in Vietnam, the Monitor complained, and not a word about the four northern Japanese islands seized by Stalin in 1945 whose disputed status had blocked a peace treaty between Japan and the USSR to formally end the Second World War.[21] The newspaper had a point – Gorbachev’s post-Cold War vision was selective – but the UN speech made clear that for him the cockpit of the Cold War lay in Europe. It was there that the tension had to be defused.

As soon as his show at the United Nations was over,[22] Gorbachev turned his mind to the next event in his packed New York schedule: a meeting with President Reagan and Vice President Bush on Governors Island, off the southern tip of Manhattan. Yet in the limo down to the pier at Battery Park, the Soviet leader had to take an urgent phone call from Moscow: a major earthquake had hit the Caucasus and the latest reports said that some 25,000 people in Armenia had died. Gorbachev decided to return home the next morning, without stopping over in Cuba and London as originally planned.[23] Controlling his anxieties, Gorbachev turned his mind during the short boat ride to what would be his fifth and farewell meeting with Reagan, the man he no longer considered an ‘unreconstructed Cold Warrior’ but instead with whom he had managed against the odds to develop a genuine fondness and friendship.[24]

As Bush watched the ferry coming towards him across the choppy waters of New York Harbor, he sensed a feeling of tense expectation among the waiting American and Soviet officials. He was certainly on edge himself. As president-elect, a few weeks away from inauguration and not yet in a position to set policy, he had to weigh his future role against his present status as merely Reagan’s deputy. He knew Gorbachev would be anxious to know in which direction he intended to take relations with the Soviet Union, but Reagan was still the man in the Oval Office. On this particular day Bush wanted to avoid doing anything that could be interpreted as undermining the current president’s authority or to circumscribe his own future freedom of action.[25]

Gorbachev walked off the boat – waving to the onlookers, a broad smile on his face – and an equally cheerful Reagan greeted him on the quayside. The two delegations were soon sitting in the commandant’s residence on Governors Island. Conversation during their meeting was mostly light and nostalgic: it was not a ‘negotiating session’, as Gorbachev remarked to the media present. Yet it was in some way ‘special’, as Bush put it, because of his own double role, looking to the past and the future.[26]

After the journalists and photographers had left, Reagan and Gorbachev reminisced about their first encounter in Switzerland a mere three years before, and the president offered the Soviet leader a memento – a photo of the moment they met in the parking lot with Reagan’s handwritten inscription that they had ‘walked a long way together to clear a path to peace, Geneva 1985–New York 1988’. Gorbachev was touched and said how much he valued their ‘personal rapport’. Reagan agreed. He felt proud of what they had ‘accomplished together’: two leaders who had the ‘capability of creating the next world war’ had decided ‘to keep the world at peace’[27] and so they had laid a ‘strong foundation for the future’. This was possible, he claimed, because they had always been ‘direct and open’ with each other. What Reagan did not mention – naturally, because this was a cosy wander down memory lane – was that their Moscow summit in May/June had failed to ‘crown’, as Gorbachev hoped, the procession of meetings with a treaty to reduce their strategic offensive weapons – START I. This, as Gorbachev emphasised in his UN speech, was significant unfinished business.[28]

Reagan asked Bush whether he wanted to add anything. The vice president chose to comment only on the symbolism of the photo. The two countries had come a long distance in the last three years, he said, going on to express the hope that in three years’ time there would be ‘another such picture with the same significance’. Bush said he wanted to build on what President Reagan had done, working with Gorbachev. Nothing that had been accomplished ought to be reversed. But he added that he would just need ‘a little time to review the issues’. Gorbachev wanted assurances that Bush would follow the path laid down by Reagan. Yet the vice president would not be drawn, using the need to construct a new Cabinet as his excuse. His theory, he said, was to ‘revitalise things by putting in new people’. He wanted to ‘formulate prudent national security policies’ but insisted that he didn’t want to ‘stall things’ or ‘set the clock back’. Bush was trying to keep the discussion loose and vague, using platitudes to keep his options open.[29]

There was, however, no let-up from the Soviet leader. His eyes firmly on the future, Gorbachev continued to probe Bush over lunch. He fished for substantive reactions to his UN speech. Shultz merely said the audience had been ‘very attentive’ and the final burst of applause was totally ‘genuine’. Bush, apart from commenting that Gorbachev seemed to have had ‘a full house, with every seat filled’, stayed silent. Gorbachev stressed that he was committed to all that he had said at the UN about cooperation between their countries.[30] While admitting that there were ‘real contradictions’ between them, particularly on regional issues, he insisted that Washington should not be suspicious of the Soviet Union. Turning directly to Bush, he said that it was ‘a good moment to make that point, with the vice president there’. The Soviet leader did a quick tour d’horizon of crisis hotspots around the world and then reprised his main theme about the cooperation he and the president had managed to build up. Glancing pointedly again at Bush as well as Reagan, he declared that ‘continuity was the name of the game’ and that ‘we should therefore be able to work together on all regional problems in a constructive way’. There was still no reaction from Bush, so Gorbachev tried to put him on the spot. ‘If the next president has studies under way, and has some remarks or suggestions on these issues I would like to hear from him.’ Bush again declined to be drawn. In the end Gorbachev simply joked that ‘the important thing was to make life easier for the next president’.[31]

Throughout the meeting, Bush remained buttoned up and stayed on the margins – sometimes, according to journalist Steven V. Roberts, edging ‘awkwardly into the picture’.

George H. W. Bush – The marginal man

Speaking to the press later that day in Washington, the vice president stuck to this non-committal tone: ‘I made clear to the general secretary that I certainly wanted to continue the progress that’s been made in the Reagan administration with the Soviets, and I also made clear that we needed some time, and he understood that.’[32]

*

George H. W. Bush was inaugurated on 20 January 1989 as forty-first president of the United States. He was the first serving vice president to be elected to the White House since Martin Van Buren in 1836. To many, in fact, George Bush had always seemed in the anteroom of history, doing useful jobs but on the edge of greatness: ambassador to the United Nations, US envoy to China and head of the CIA in the 1970s. And when he finally stuck out his neck in 1980, by running for the Republican nomination to the presidency, Bush had been outclassed by the telegenic Reagan – a product of Hollywood – whose financial policies Bush denigrated as ‘voodoo economics’.[33]

Reagan initially hoped to enlist former president Gerald Ford as his running mate, but after negotiations broke down less than twenty-four hours before the ticket was to be announced, he offered the position to Bush who, despite the bruising campaign for the nomination, immediately accepted. He was a loyalist and team player. His diary entries included comments such as ‘I am not going to be building my own constituency or doing things like background conferences to show that I am doing a good job’, and also ‘the president must know that he can have the vice president for him and he must not think that he has to look over his shoulder’.[34]

In Reagan’s second term, when Bush started to plan his own campaign, such loyalty was sometimes held against him – as evidence of his perpetual readiness to play second fiddle.[35] And when pressed to articulate his own agenda, he reportedly exclaimed ‘Oh, the vision thing!’ – a phrase often cited against him.[36] Did Bush have the backbone and self-confidence to take that final big step into the Oval Office?[37] He also lacked Reagan’s carefully crafted homespun eloquence and, although his speech accepting the Republican nomination in July 1988 won praise, it also contained the pledge ‘Read my lips: no new taxes.’ Bush slipped this in to appease the Republican right, to whom he looked unacceptably centrist compared with Reagan. In due course those words would come back to haunt him, but at the time they typified the thrust of his bid for the presidency, which concentrated on economic and social issues, rather than foreign affairs.[38] During a highly personalised, at times truly ugly, campaign the Republicans lambasted their Democratic opponent Michael Dukakis, former governor of Massachusetts, as an effete Harvard liberal who was weak on crime and profligate on spending. On 8 November 1988, number two finally became number one, chalking up a landslide victory by winning forty of the fifty states and 80% of the electoral college vote.[39]

Many people assumed that Bush would largely continue the policies of the outgoing administration, both at home and abroad, but the new president was determined not to be the stand-in for a Reagan third term. In fact the two men had never been particularly close and Bush privately held Reagan in fairly low esteem, as someone who was ‘kind of foolish and simplistic on many issues’. So the handover was really a ‘takeover’, albeit friendly. And, contrary to impressions during the campaign, foreign policy would not take a back seat. What’s more, in diplomacy Bush had a different style and agenda from his predecessor. It was here that the ‘real’ George Bush would step out of Reagan’s shadow.[40]

This fresh approach to foreign affairs was mapped out during the interregnum from November to January. Bush’s two key advisers were James A. Baker III, the new Secretary of State, and Brent Scowcroft, who became national security adviser. Their close relations with the president created a kind of constructive tension, as they acted out different roles in Bush’s diplomacy. Both men agreed that Washington had a strong hand to play in dealing with the Kremlin, but they differed significantly on how to use it.[41]

Baker was a long-time Texan sidekick (born in Houston in 1930, he was six years younger than Bush). The two had been close friends for over thirty years: Baker was almost like a younger brother. He had been a US Marine in his youth, then a successful attorney, before becoming a Washington insider. He went on to organise the election campaigns of Gerald Ford in 1976 and Ronald Reagan in 1984, and served right through Reagan’s two terms as White House chief of staff and then Treasury Secretary. In the view of Dennis Ross, a Washington veteran who was appointed director of the State Department policy planning staff, Baker was a superb instinctive negotiator, with a natural flair for dealing with people and a rare talent for identifying priorities. As regards the Soviet Union, Baker favoured continued and intensive diplomatic engagement. He wanted to test Gorbachev’s sincerity and encourage the Soviet leader into further reforms at home and abroad.[42]

Scowcroft served as the focus for a second group of advisers who were much more sceptical of Gorbachev and his plans, fearing that they might be intended to revitalise Soviet power. Moscow, Scowcroft warned, might ‘smother the West with kindness’ and thus weaken NATO’s resolve and cohesion. For this reason he firmly opposed an early summit meeting between Bush and Gorbachev in 1989, lest it would simply feed into Soviet propaganda. As he reflected later: unless there were substantive accomplishments, such as in arms control, the Soviets would be able to capitalise on the one outcome left – the good feelings generated by the meeting. They would use the resulting euphoria to undermine Western resolve, and a sense of complacency would encourage some to believe the United States could relax its vigilance. The Soviets in general and Gorbachev in particular were masters at creating these enervatingly cosy atmospheres. Gorbachev’s UN speech had established, largely with rhetorical flourish, a mood of heady optimism. He could exploit an early meeting with a new president as evidence to declare the Cold War over without providing substantive actions from a ‘new’ Soviet Union.[43]

Scowcroft and Bush were almost the same age: they had both been airmen but Bush’s service was confined to the Pacific War whereas Scowcroft was a career officer in the post-war US Air Force from 1947 until he joined the Nixon White House in 1972, before becoming Ford’s national security adviser (1975–7). It was during the Ford years that he became closely acquainted with Bush, who was US envoy to China and then director of the CIA. They shared the same world view, one defined by the Second World War, the Cold War and Vietnam. Both believed in US leadership in the world, the centrality of the transatlantic alliance, and the necessity of using force decisively if and when it had to be employed. And both believed in the efficacy of personal diplomacy and the paramount importance of good intelligence. Bush trusted Scowcroft completely. He called him ‘the closest friend in all things’ – on the golf course as much as in the Oval Office.[44] Scowcroft saw his role as the president’s personal adviser and also an honest broker, being free – unlike Baker – from having to represent the interests of a particular government department. And as national security adviser, he was also the nodal point of Bush’s security and foreign policy. Now in the post for a second time, Scowcroft developed his own ‘system’, a highly effective decision-making process. Its hallmarks were regular consultation among the NSC staff, and ruthless discouragement of leaks, with everything channelled through Scowcroft to the president. But, unlike the NSC under Henry Kissinger or Zbigniew Brzezinski in the 1970s, the atmosphere was essentially collegial rather than conspiratorial. And Scowcroft and Baker, despite their inevitable frictions, managed to work productively together.[45]

Taken as a whole, therefore, the Bush administration possessed great expertise in foreign policy, and the president himself cared deeply about these issues. He enjoyed reading briefing papers and memos and, unlike his three immediate predecessors – Ford, Carter and Reagan – brought to the job extensive experience in international affairs. In addition to the posts he held in the 1970s, he had served eight years as vice president, during which he got to know many foreign officials and most heads of government. In terms of personality, Bush was unassuming and cautious but also highly ambitious and self-assured. Though he may not have been a strategic visionary, his statecraft was guided by a clear set of basic convictions and goals. A stable world order needed leadership and, in spite of much pessimism in the 1980s, Bush had no doubt that the United States alone could provide it; he did not see America as being in ‘decline’.

To be sure, in some American circles the narrative of ‘decline’ combined with gloomy talk about a dawning ‘Pacific century’ (with Japan in the vanguard due to its prodigious economic growth) and a potential ‘Fortress Europe’ (an ever more closely economically and politically integrated and protectionist European Community). But the Bush White House focused on what it perceived as the rising popularity and spread of America’s liberal values across the world and on pushing for the creation of a new, truly global trading system (led by the United States) – one that would replace the dying 1947 GATT agreement and include the Soviet Union, China and the Third World.

Bush was confident that the US was actually entering a new era of ascendancy; the twenty-first century would be America’s. The United States, Bush declared expansively in November 1988, just before his election, had ‘set in motion the major changes under way in the world today – the growth of democracy, the spread of free enterprise, the creation of a world market in goods and ideas. For the foreseeable future, no other nation, or group of nations, will step forward to assume leadership.’[46]

These themes of global change and American opportunity were developed more fully in his inaugural address on 20 January, looking out from the West Front of the Capitol across the Mall to the Lincoln Memorial. After the customary invocations of the deity and American history, Bush positioned himself on the cusp of a new era, as yet ill-defined. ‘There are times when the future seems thick as a fog; you sit and wait, hoping the mists will lift and reveal the right path. But this is a time when the future seems a door you can walk right through into a room called tomorrow.’ And Bush was ready to do so. ‘We live in a peaceful, prosperous time, but we can make it better. For a new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn. For in man’s heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over.’ The new president made no direct reference to the amazing transformations under way in the Soviet bloc and in communist China, but no one could have been in any doubt of what he meant. ‘The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree … Great nations of the world are moving toward democracy through the door to freedom.’ And America was the gatekeeper. ‘We know what works: freedom works. We know what’s right: freedom is right.’ The president set out the country’s mission: ‘America is never wholly herself unless she is engaged in high moral principle. We as a people have such a purpose today. It is to make kinder the face of the Nation and gentler the face of the world. My friends, we have work to do.’[47] This was America’s moment and he wanted to seize it.

But where should the work begin? One might have expected that Bush would have opened the door towards Moscow: after Gorbachev’s watershed speech at the UN and with the political transformation under way in Poland and Hungary, much of the world was fixated on the changes in the Soviet Union and the ferment in Eastern Europe. Yet, guided by the scepticism of Scowcroft and also keen to break from Reagan’s cosy relations with Gorbachev, Bush’s presidency began with a deliberate ‘pause’ in superpower diplomacy.[48] With few active agenda items left by the Reagan White House – START I being the notable exception – Bush decided to order a set of studies ‘re-examining existing policy and goals by region, with reviews of arms control as well’. Working out how to deal with Moscow was ‘obviously our first priority’, Scowcroft would later recall, but the reports would take a while to produce. Indeed, the NSC review on the Soviet Union (NSR 3) did not land on the president’s desk until 14 March, the reviews on Eastern (NSR 4) and Western Europe (NSR 5, focused on closer union by 1992) two weeks after that.[49]

Meanwhile, Bush had not only opened the China door but strode right through it. On 25–6 February he met with the Communist Party in Beijing. It was the first time in American history that a new US president had travelled to Asia before going to Europe.[50]

*

Bush, who considered himself an expert on China, was keen to bring Beijing into a ‘Trans-Pacific Partnership’. ‘The importance of China is very clear to me,’ Bush told Brzezinski two weeks after his election. ‘I’d love to return to China before Deng leaves office entirely. I feel I have a special relationship there.’[51] Deng Xiaoping was the mastermind of China’s policies of ‘reform and opening up’ – the drive after Mao Zedong’s death in 1976 to abandon the autarkic planned economy and cautiously enter the global market. By 1989 the diminutive Deng was eighty-four and Bush was anxious to exploit their unusually long-standing personal relationship, which dated back to Bush’s quasi-ambassadorship to China in 1974–5. For Bush, China meant Deng. The president’s fascination with China had less to do with the country per se (its language, landscape or culture) than with its social and economic potential that Deng was in the process of unleashing into the global capitalist economy. Conversely, the Chinese referred to Bush as a lao pengyou – their term for a really trusted ‘old friend’ who is committed to building positive relations and acting as interlocutor between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the wider world but who also enjoys a special confidence that permits plain speaking. Those Americans before Bush who had earned such a distinction included Nixon and Kissinger; but neither Carter nor Reagan were considered a lao pengyou.[52]

China’s new course, promoted by Deng from 1978, was one of the transitional moments of the twentieth century. Under his leadership Beijing promoted rapid modernisation through greater engagement in an increasingly interdependent world, particularly with technologically advanced Western Europe and America. Domestically, measures were introduced to make policy more responsive to economic incentives. These included the decollectivisation of agriculture, allowing farmers to make profits; rewards for especially efficient industrial performance; and the promotion of small-scale private business. With an eye on both the global economy and the international power balance, Deng gradually relaxed controls on foreign investment and trade and sought membership of global financial institutions. His stated aim was to accomplish before the end of the century a total socio-economic transformation of his country, which in the 1980s ranked among the poorest third of states in the world. By the time Bush was elected president Deng’s gamble was already paying off. In just over one decade of reform, China’s GDP more than doubled from $150 billion in 1978 to over $310 billion in 1988.[53]

The world’s most populous country was in the throes of an economic revolution which, unlike Soviet Russia under Gorbachev, was very tightly managed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and which also advanced step by step. Not only did Gorbachev’s economic liberalisation begin much later, in 1985 rather 1978, but the concomitant political reforms, which gradually dismantled the Soviet Communist Party’s monopoly on power, amounted to nothing less than a new system of governance. This process in turn stirred up destructive ethnic conflicts in what was a much less homogeneous society than China’s. Whereas in the PRC the process of economic reform was controlled from above, in the USSR perestroika combined with glasnost would eventually undermine the Soviet state.[54]

In the course of this Chinese revolution, the United States played a major role. Although Deng was initially keen to engage with Western Europe, America represented his ultimate model, especially after his eye-opening visit in early 1979 to mark the opening of full diplomatic relations: ‘what he saw in the United States was what he wanted for China in the future’. During a week’s whirlwind tour from Washington DC to Seattle, America’s factories and farms simply ‘bowled him over’. So impressive was US technology and productivity that, by his own admission, Deng could not sleep for several weeks.[55]

The Carter administration was keen for Deng’s reforms to succeed; it also wanted to pull China closer to the USA at a time when détente was eroding and the relationship with Moscow had slipped into a deep freeze amid the ‘New Cold War’. Not only did Carter normalise diplomatic relations with China but he granted ‘most favoured nation’ (MFN) status twelve months later – a crucial precondition for expanded bilateral trade. The PRC joined the World Bank in April 1980, the same month that it took over from Taiwan China’s place on the IMF. Accelerating the momentum, in September 1980 the Carter administration concluded four commercial agreements: on aviation, shipping, textiles and expanded consular representation. Announcing these, Carter called the Sino-American relationship ‘a new and vital force for peace and stability in the international scene’ which held ‘a promise of ever-increasing benefits in trade and other exchanges’ for both countries.[56]

Reagan took up Carter’s policy and pursued it with even greater vigour. One of the priorities of his new ‘global strategy’ was the integration of the Pacific Rim into the world economy. Within that enlarged market, China was potentially the biggest player, so its successful opening up would offer exceptional opportunities for US trade and investment. There was also a strategic dimension. The drive for economic modernisation would align China with the capitalist order and make it a more robust bulwark against the Soviet Union. In this vein, the Reagan administration offered Deng in 1981 a ‘strategic association’ with the USA – effectively a de facto alliance. So at a time when Cold War tensions ratcheted up, Sino-American security cooperation expanded. Beijing got US weapons technology, while coordinating with the American anti-communist campaigns in Afghanistan, Angola and Cambodia.[57] Although Reagan himself visited China in 1984, he was happy to make as much use as possible of his vice president’s old-friend status with the Chinese. Bush paid two week-long visits to Beijing in May 1982 and October 1985. On the second occasion he was particularly bullish about Sino-American trade: ‘The sky’s the limit, the door’s wide open,’ he told a news conference, adding that he found ‘much more openness’ now than three years before. Of course, continued progress depended on the Paramount Leader, now eighty-one. Observers were keenly aware that, in the interval between Bush’s first and second trips to China, three gerontocrats had passed from the scene in the Kremlin. But Bush cheerfully told the press of Deng’s words to him: ‘The vital organs of my body are functioning very well.’[58]

The evolving Sino-American relationship was proving a win-win situation. In 1983, the Reagan administration had taken the crucial step of liberalising Cold War controls on trade, technology and investment, allowing the private sector to engage with China at minimal cost to the American taxpayer. Deng, for his part, was desperate to tap every kind of American know-how. Between 1982 and 1984 export licences doubled and sales of high-tech goods such as computers, semiconductors, hydro-turbines and equipment for the petrochemical industry rose sevenfold from $144 million in 1982 to $1 billion in 1986.[59] Out of this grew American joint ventures with China, in areas such as energy exploration, transport and electronics. Consumer goods were another important sector for collaboration, with Coke and Pepsi, Heinz, AT&T, Bell South, American Express and Eastman Kodak among the high-profile US corporations represented.[60] In all these ways the US government acted as low-cost facilitator and gatekeeper for American private enterprise, using natural market forces to try to draw China out of its old shell during the course of the 1980s. In a dozen years of reform. Beijing and Washington became significant trading partners: US–China bilateral trade grew from $374 million in 1977 to nearly $18 billion in 1989.[61]

By the end of the Reagan administration Washington viewed Beijing with almost a sense of triumph. Secretary of State George Shultz described China’s ‘long march to the market’ as a ‘truly historic event – a great nation throwing off outmoded economic doctrines and liberating the energies of 1 billion talented people’. When Bush took office, therefore, it seemed axiomatic that Deng’s economic reforms were fully embedded and would go from strength to strength. The question now in Washington was how soon economic change would generate political change – akin to the transformations in the Soviet bloc under Gorbachev. Like a succession of American leaders since the era of Franklin Roosevelt and Cordell Hull, Bush tended to assume that one form of change would lead to the other: democratisation in China therefore seemed not a question of whether but when.[62]

Yet the consequences of Deng’s economic reforms were double-edged. They stirred popular desire for a more open society but also provoked mounting discontent by the late 1980s. During Mao’s Cultural Revolution a whole generation had lost out on higher education, and when Deng set China on course to catch up with the developed and developing world, frustrated radicals turned Beijing, Shanghai, Wuhan and other university cities into hotbeds of dissent. This occurred just when inflation hit unprecedented levels (8.8% in 1985) as the command economy was eased. The regime embarked on cautious political reforms and allowed intellectuals and academics a freer rein. Fang Lizhi, astrophysicist and vice chancellor of the University of Science and Technology in Hefei, became celebrated in the West for his advocacy of human rights and his support of student protest. And journalist Liu Binyan gained notoriety after he famously stated that ‘the economic reform is a very long leg in China, while the political reform is a very short one. One can’t proceed without being tripped up by the other.’ By way of explanation, he added: ‘The student movement […] exploded because political reform had hardly begun.’[63]

China’s leadership was not ready for democracy. Spasms of political openness were followed by harsh crackdowns when protests got out of hand. The problem wasn’t simply in the streets or on the campuses, it was also eating away at the party itself in a battle between hardliners and reformers. In a backlash against ‘bourgeois liberalisation’, conservative elders forced out the reformist party general secretary, Hu Yaobang, in January 1987.[64] There was a further challenge. The ageing Deng knew he had to hand over soon to the next generation. He ensured that Hu was replaced by another moderate, Zhao Zhiang, who in the autumn, at the CCP Congress, pushed through a watered-down programme of political reform. This resulted in the retirement of nearly half the Central Committee members – a major step in rejuvenating the party. Retirees included Deng himself who retained only the crucial post of chairman of the Military Affairs Committee. A temporary calm was established between the rival factions of the CCP and the Politburo’s vital Standing Committee, which hung in uneasy balance between reformists led by Zhao and conservatives headed by Li Peng.[65]

During 1988 the inflation rate rose to an unprecedented 18.5%[66] and student protests at price hikes, overcrowding and corruption hit new heights. Things got even worse in 1989. Media reports and images of the political transformation under way in the Soviet satellite states galvanised the protestors, and the impending seventieth anniversary of China’s fabled student uprising against the humiliations imposed on the country by the Versailles Treaty in 1919 – the Fourth of May Movement – also loomed large.[67] Deng – revealing that he worried more about the contagion of the Eastern European and Soviet reforms than Western political ideas – stated in a speech on 25 April 1989: ‘This is not an ordinary student movement but a turmoil … Those influenced by Yugoslav, Polish, Hungarian, and Soviet liberalism have destabilised our society with the objective of overthrowing the Communist leadership, which will endanger the future of our country and our nation.’ The CCP still had no intention of loosening its grip on society or allowing political pluralism in the manner of Gorbachev.[68]

This, however, did not seem to bother George Bush. He had faith in Deng as a progressive leader, whereas Gorbachev was still an unknown quantity and the Soviet Union much more of an existential threat to America and NATO. So, once he became president, there seemed no reason for any kind of ‘pause’ in Sino-American relations. On the contrary Bush, as he had told Brzezinski in November 1988, was keen to consolidate and advance his ‘special relationship’ with Deng and China as soon as possible.

There was also another pressing concern on Bush’s mind. Nothing about China could ever be considered without taking Sino-Soviet relations into account. Washington, Moscow and Beijing formed a strategic triangle whose dynamics were always in flux. Bush was well aware that, a year before he assumed office, Mikhail Gorbachev had already formally proposed a summit meeting with the Chinese leadership – the first since Khrushchev and Mao had met in 1959 on the brink of the Sino-Soviet split that brought the two countries to the verge of war ten years later.

Gorbachev’s overture reflected his desire for normal relations between the world’s two largest communist nations but it was also driven by the need for international stability so as to concentrate on reforms at home. Deng, in turn, had always been clear about China’s conditions for such a summit: 1) that Moscow reduce its military presence along the Sino-Soviet border; 2) that the Soviets withdraw their troops from Afghanistan; and 3) that the Kremlin end support for the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia. By the end of 1988 the Chinese were sufficiently satisfied with Soviet concessions to issue a formal invitation for Gorbachev to come to Beijing in May 1989 for summit talks with Deng. The visit was intended to symbolise Sino-Soviet rapprochement after three decades of estrangement and even antagonism.[69]

Gorbachev did not know Deng personally. He had never been to China and was certainly not a lao pengyou. Twenty-seven years Deng’s junior, Gorbachev had few memories of Sino-Soviet relations before the split, which had occurred when he was only in his twenties. Nevertheless, like Bush, he had prioritised a breakthrough with China ever since becoming general secretary. Yet Deng was wary. Although he welcomed closer economic links with the USSR, he did not appreciate Gorbachev’s enthusiasm for political reforms and even spoke of him as an ‘idiot’ for putting politics before economics.[70] For his part, Gorbachev remained sceptical of China’s reform programme in the absence of a major political overhaul, which to his mind was required for a full and successful perestroika. And so he kept downplaying Chinese reforms and indeed prophesied their failure. He also dismissed the Chinese as mere imitators. ‘They all now claim they started perestroika before us,’ he scoffed. ‘They are adopting our approaches.’ Gorbachev’s lofty attitude reflected both a traditionally dismissive Soviet stereotyping of the PRC and also his own competitive, almost messianic, ambition that perestroika – as proclaimed on the title page of his book Perestroika – was not just ‘for our country’ but ‘for the entire world’.[71]

In fact Gorbachev appeared to see himself as the new Lenin. He claimed that his country was the leading state of the socialist system and, as his aide Georgy Shakhnazarov put it, one of the ‘greatest powers or superpowers of the modern world, upon which depends the fate of the world’. From this perspective, predominant among Kremlin policymakers and especially Gorbachev’s own entourage, China was still a secondary power, despite its remarkable recent rise from poverty and backwardness. Moscow itself had always craved recognition from the West to which it looked, at times neurotically, as the sole benchmark against which to measure its own successes. And in this bigger quest for international status, it was almost necessary to deride China’s experience and achievements.[72]

This was not, of course, the way the relationship was viewed in Beijing. Deng was adamant that China not be seen as Moscow’s ‘younger brother’ – as Stalin cynically treated Mao. And with a view to resetting Sino-Soviet relations, Gorbachev was at pains to assure the Chinese he did not harbour any such views: China, he said, had outgrown such a role. Their mutual edginess, however, was a reminder that thirty years of alienation could not be transcended overnight. And the Chinese leaders were quietly watching and drawing conclusions from what seemed to them an utterly chaotic Soviet situation.[73]

So Sino-Soviet relations were at a particularly delicate moment at the beginning of 1989, with the Gorbachev–Deng summit scheduled for May. In Washington, on the third point of the triangle, Bush and Scowcroft were keen to get to Beijing ahead of the Soviets. Even though the Cold War was on the wane, the old verities of Nixon-era competitive triangularity remained a strategic imperative. Bush and his advisers feared that the smooth-talking Gorbachev would be able to charm the Chinese, as he had done in Europe, ending conflict on their joint borders and burying the ideological hatchet. As Scowcroft put it: ‘We anticipated that he might attempt a rapprochement between Moscow and Beijing, and would have liked to be certain it did not come at our expense. There was no way, however, to justify a trip to China in the first quarter of the first year of the president’s term.’[74]

Then fate came to Bush’s aid. Hirohito, the emperor of Japan, died on 7 January 1989.

*

The president’s attendance at Hirohito’s funeral in Tokyo on 24 February meant a great deal to the Japanese. Not only was Bush the head of state of Japan’s great ally and protector, he was also a veteran of the Pacific War in which Hirohito had been the official leader of one of America’s Axis enemies. The visit therefore symbolised the remarkable reconciliation between their two states since 1945. Yet it also mattered in other ways. The presence of the US president prompted other world dignitaries to come as well, further raising the profile of the occasion, and it gave Bush the chance to engage in funeral diplomacy. He held over twenty one-to-one meetings on the margins of the ceremonies, with figures such as François Mitterrand and Richard von Weizsäcker, the presidents of France and West Germany. Tokyo was a perfect opportunity for Bush to take the temperature of world politics without becoming entangled in the paraphernalia of high-profile summitry.[75]

Above all, the unforeseen trip to Japan offered an ideal pretext to visit China. As soon as Bush was inaugurated, Scowcroft met with Chinese ambassador Han Xu to start detailed planning. Time was too short to set up a full-dress state visit, so instead a ‘working visit’ was arranged – a trip without any specific agenda except for the president to reconnect with China’s senior leaders and to reaffirm his commitment to the Asia-Pacific region.[76] Just before Bush flew from Tokyo to Beijing, he and Japan’s prime minister Noboru Takeshita compared notes. It was ‘important for the US and Japan to help the modernisation of China’, Takeshita told Bush. And he stressed that improved Sino-Soviet relations were not expected to ‘pose any threat to Japan’. The president, for his part, sought to reassure Japan by emphasising that, when he eventually unveiled his policies on the USSR and arms control, they would not have any detrimental effect on Japan or China. Overall, Bush’s main message was: don’t worry, we remain a staunch ally of Japan.[77]

Happy returns: George and Barbara in the Forbidden City

On arriving in Beijing on the evening of 25 February, Bush was warmly received at the Great Hall of the People by Chinese president Yang Shangkun, who again highlighted Bush’s special stature as a lao pengyou. In a cordial forty-five-minute chat, Yang called Bush’s first presidential visit to Beijing (and his fifth trip to China since his serving as US envoy in 1974–5) ‘very significant’. There was plenty of personal flattery, of the sort that Chinese leaders lavished on their ‘special friends’. President Yang threw in lines like ‘you’ve made great contributions to the development of Sino-US relations and to cooperation between our two countries … I think this shows that you, Mr President, pay much attention to our bilateral relationship … Personally, as I have told Ambassador Lord many times, if I could vote, I would vote for Bush.’[78]

But behind all the sweet talk there was substance as well. Both sides made clear their commitment to deepening the bilateral relationship in and for itself – not just to counterbalance Soviet power. ‘I feel the relationship we have now is not based on some facet of Soviet relations,’ Bush declared, ‘but on its own merits. For example, we now have cultural, educational and trade relations. It is not just based on worry about the Soviets, although we still do to a degree.’ Yang agreed: ‘We are two big countries, located on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean. So the friendly cooperation between our two countries will promote cooperation in the Pacific region and in the world as well. This is most important for the maintenance of world peace, stability and security.’[79]

All this was a curtain-raiser to the meeting that Bush really wanted, with China’s diminutive Paramount Leader.[80] He talked with Deng for an hour on the morning of 26 February in a room off the Great Hall of the People. Bush was at pains to offer assurances that he had not rushed to Beijing in order to steal a march on Gorbachev, but the two leaders spent much of their time circling around the great imponderable of where the Soviet Union was going. Deng spoke at length about history, emphasising that the two countries which had caused China the most suffering and ‘humiliation’ over the last century and a half had been Japan and Russia. Even though Japan cost China ‘tens of millions of lives’ and ‘incalculable’ financial damage, the Soviet impact had been much more profound because they acquired 3 million square kilometres of Chinese territory. Given that background, Deng wondered, even if his summit with Gorbachev proved successful and relations were normalised, what would follow? ‘Personally, I think it is still an unknown quantity,’ he said. ‘The fact is there are many accumulated problems. What’s more they have deep historical roots.’[81]

Bush echoed Deng’s feeling that one man could not change history. ‘Gorbachev is a charming man, and the Soviet Union is in a state of change. But the byword for the US is caution … Our experience tells us that you cannot make broad foreign policy decisions based on the personality or aspirations of one man. You need to consider the trend of the whole society and country.’[82]

At the end, Deng brought this point much closer to home. ‘With regard to the problems confronting China, let me say to you that the overwhelming need is to maintain stability. Without stability, everything will be gone; even accomplishments will be ruined.’ Looking hard at Bush, he added: ‘We hope our friends abroad can understand this point.’ Bush did not blink: ‘We do.’ Deng’s message was clear. Whatever one thought about perestroika and glasnost, about freedom of choice in Eastern Europe and grand proclamations about universal values, there would be no Gorbachevs in China. Human rights and political reform were not appropriate subjects for discussion, even with a lao pengyou. Bush got the message and had no intention of challenging it. The two leaders understood each other. ‘All right,’ said Deng, ‘let’s go to lunch.’[83]

Bush left Beijing optimistic that important groundwork had been laid for what he called a ‘productive period’ in diplomatic relations, despite the turbulence in China’s domestic affairs. The president remembered appreciatively ‘the warm and genuine handshakes between old friends’. But more pragmatically he also felt that he had been able to speak frankly with the Chinese leadership[84] and that the two sides could develop a practical working relationship based on a ‘real level of trust’. Bush had no illusions that anything would be easy with Beijing and therefore lobbied for good communication on all issues, but he recognised that criticism should not be expressed in public, particularly about human rights. ‘I understood that strong words and direct views were best exchanged between us privately, as in this visit, not in press statements and angry speeches.’[85]

Returning to Washington from his first foreign trip as president, Bush reflected on what he had learned. Back at Andrews Air Force Base on 27 February he told the assembled press that his whirlwind tour of Japan, China and South Korea had underscored for him America’s stature as a present and future ‘Pacific power’. From those four days of intensive discussions, what stuck in his mind was that ‘the world looks to America for leadership’. This, he asserted, was ‘not just because we’re militarily strong, not just because we have the world’s largest economy, but because the ideas we have championed are now dominant. Freedom and democracy, openness, and the prosperity that derives from individual initiatives in the free marketplace – these ideas, once thought to be strictly American, have now become the goals of mankind all over Asia.’[86]

This was a striking ideological clarion call from a man who was not a natural rhetorician. Less than three months after Gorbachev’s grandstanding performance at the UN, the new US president was putting down his own markers. The Soviet leader liked to present his new socialism as the answer not only for Russia but also for the whole world. Now Bush was making a counterclaim for American values, almost as if the ideological Cold War was still raging. Although that February evening at Andrews he talked particularly about the USA in Asia, by the middle of April he was also speaking in similar tones about Eastern Europe.

*

The president had already made clear to Weizsäcker in Tokyo on 24 February ‘we don’t want Gorbachev to win a propaganda offensive’. As Atlantic allies ‘we must stay together’.[87] Six weeks later, on 12 April, he developed his thinking when talking with NATO secretary general Manfred Wörner. He said he intended to strengthen the Alliance’s solidarity by taking a leading role. He was worried that ‘Gorbachev had dominated the headlines in Europe, causing strains over NATO defense issues’ – in particular undermining support in West Germany for short-range nuclear missiles. Now was the time, said the president, to ensure that NATO would not ‘unravel’. Wörner agreed: he saw the upcoming NATO summit in late May as a ‘unique opportunity’ in a truly ‘historic’ situation. The challenge was that ‘although we are successful, public perception is that Gorbachev is driving history’. It was up to Bush to ‘turn this public perception around’. NATO should not just challenge Moscow on arms control but ‘stress the political battleground’, pushing for ‘a Europe of self-determination and freedom, free of the Berlin Wall and the Brezhnev Doctrine’. In this endeavour NATO looked for American ‘ideas, concepts and cooperation’ because the other allies would not be able to ‘deliver much’. Bush concurred. Gorbachev had, ‘like a kind of surfer, caught a wave of public support’. It would be important at the upcoming NATO summit to find ‘agreement on a broad vision of our own’.[88]

The president was now ready for ‘the vision thing’. In a carefully planned series of major speeches during April and May, he gradually unveiled his grand scenario for a Europe emerging from the Cold War. The first speech was deliberately staged in Hamtramck, a predominantly Polish–American suburb of Detroit, on 17 April – twelve days after Poland had unveiled major constitutional reforms: the creation of the Senate and the office of the president, as well legalisation of the free trade union Solidarity. These major structural changes were the result of two months of round-table talks between the opposition movement and the communist regime under General Wojciech Jaruzelski. Democratic elections would follow later in the summer. The ‘ideas of democracy’, as Bush put it, were clearly ‘returning with renewed force in Europe’, with Poland in the vanguard – hence the otherwise unlikely venue of Hamtramck.

Picking up themes from his inaugural address, Bush reflected on the passing of totalitarianism, the spread of freedom and the right to self-determination. ‘The West can now be bold in proposing a vision of the European future,’ he declared. ‘We dream of the day when there will be no barriers to the free movement of peoples, goods, and ideas. We dream of the day when Eastern European peoples will be free to choose their system of government and to vote for the party of their choice in regular, free, contested elections … And we envision an Eastern Europe in which the Soviet Union has renounced military intervention as an instrument of its policy.’ Bush’s refrain about ‘dreams’ and ‘visions’ fleshed out his comments five days earlier to Wörner. He was driven by a growing conviction that America, as the leader of the West, now had an unprecedented opportunity to apply its statecraft to the reshaping of Europe. ‘What has brought us to this opening?’ he asked. ‘The unity and strength of the democracies, yes, and something else: the bold, new thinking in the Soviet Union, the innate desire for freedom in the hearts of all men.’ The president proclaimed that ‘if we’re wise, united, and ready to seize the moment, we will be remembered as the generation that made all Europe free’.[89]

Scowcroft called the Hamtramck speech the administration’s ‘first major step on Eastern Europe’. Although he admitted that it received ‘scarcely a glance’ in the US, Bush’s words attracted much greater attention in Europe and the USSR, where Pravda was indeed rather favourable, singling out the president’s positive evaluation of Soviet reforms and the prospects for better superpower relations.[90]

By May the administration’s sluggish review of Soviet policy was finally gathering pace. On the 12th Bush used the commencement ceremonies at Texas A&M University in his adopted home state to publicise something of the new strategy for superpower relations, which he summed up in the key concept ‘Beyond Containment’. In other words, the president wanted to transcend the defensive posture that had characterised US policy at the height of the Cold War. Here was a more assertive Bush: the cautious bystander on the margins of the Reagan and Gorbachev summit at Governors Island the previous December now had a clear sense of where he wanted to go:

We are approaching the conclusion of an historic post-war struggle between two visions: one of tyranny and conflict and one of democracy and freedom. The review of US–Soviet relations that my administration has just completed outlines a new path toward resolving this struggle … Our review indicates that forty years of perseverance have brought us a precious opportunity, and now it is time to move beyond containment to a new policy for the 1990s – one that recognises the full scope of change taking place around the world and in the Soviet Union itself. In sum, the United States now has as its goal much more than simply containing Soviet expansionism. We seek the integration of the Soviet Union into the community of nations.

Bush also set out the terms on which the USSR would be welcomed back ‘into the world order’. Fine rhetoric from Gorbachev was not sufficient – ‘promises are never enough’. The Kremlin must take some concrete ‘positive steps’. Top of the list were to reduce Soviet forces (proportionate to legitimate security needs), provide support for self-determination, ‘tear down the Iron Curtain’ and find diplomatic solutions with the West to resolve regional disputes around the world, such as in Afghanistan, Angola and Nicaragua. Taking these steps would make possible a qualitatively new relationship between the two superpowers.[91]

And yet, as Bush admitted, Soviet military capabilities remained ‘awesome’. So deterrence still remained vital and this demanded a strong NATO – the theme of Bush’s speech on 24 May in New London, Connecticut, to the US Coast Guard Academy. There he outlined future US military strategy and arms-control policy for the next decade. ‘Our policy is to seize every – and I mean every – opportunity to build a better, more stable relationship with the Soviet Union, just as it is our policy to defend American interests in light of the enduring reality of Soviet military power.’ He acknowledged that, ‘amidst the many challenges we’ll face, there will be risks. But let me assure you, we’ll find more than our share of opportunities … There’s an opportunity before us to shape a new world.’

A new world was possible because ‘we are witnessing the end of an idea: the final chapter of the communist experiment. Communism is now recognised … as a failed system … But the eclipse of communism is only one half of the story of our time. The other is the ascendancy of the democratic idea’ – evident across the world from trade unionists in Warsaw to students in Beijing. ‘Even as we speak today,’ he told the young American graduands, ‘the world is transfixed by the dramatic events in Tiananmen Square. Everywhere, those voices are speaking the language of democracy and freedom.’[92]

The Coast Guard speech completed Bush’s public exposition of his administration’s new strategy toward the European cockpit of East–West relations ahead of the NATO summit in Brussels on 30 May.[93] His visionary statements about peace and freedom, about global free markets and a community of democracies, give the lie to later claims that his foreign policy was aimless, merely reactive and ‘too unwilling to move in untested waters’. Above all, he was repeatedly emphasising the place of US leadership in the world and asserting what the administration regularly referred to as the ‘common values of the West’.[94] As Bush had said in that scene-setting cameo on Governors Island, he intended to take his time and act prudently in an era when the fundamentals of international relations had been shaken as never before since 1945. ‘Prudence’ would indeed remain a watchword of Bush’s diplomacy but this did not preclude vision and hope. Those speeches of April and May 1989 – often neglected by commentators amid the dramas of the second half of the year – make the ambition of his foreign policy abundantly clear.

But converting ambition into achievement was a different challenge. And his first test was particularly demanding. The NATO summit in Brussels was unusually high profile because it coincided with the fortieth anniversary of the Atlantic Alliance and because it was imperative to come up with an eye-catching response to the potpourri of dramatic arms-reduction proposals Gorbachev had tossed out in his UN speech. To make matters worse, NATO governments had been unable to agree in advance on a joint position, mainly because of fundamental disputes about short-range nuclear forces (SNFs) – those with a range of less than 500 kilometres. And, at a less visible level, the arguments surrounding the NATO summit may be seen as marking a subtle but significant shift in America’s alliance priorities in Western Europe – away from Great Britain and towards West Germany.[95]

Britain, represented by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher – the notorious ‘Iron Lady’ – demanded rapid implementation of a 1985 NATO agreement to modernise its SNFs (eighty-eight Lance missile launchers and some 700 warheads). Her fixation was with their deterrent value and NATO’s defensibility. The coalition government of West Germany, where most of these missiles were stationed, instead pressed the USA to pursue negotiations on SNF reduction with the Soviet Union, building on the success of the superpower 1987 treaty to eliminate all their intermediate nuclear forces (INFs) worldwide. Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher – leader of the junior coalition partner the Free Democrats (FDP) – even lobbied, like Gorbachev, for the total abolition of SNFs. This was known as the ‘third zero’ – building on the ‘double zero’ agreement for the abolition of INFs in Europe and Asia. For Thatcher, relatively secure in her island kingdom, these weapons were an instrument of military strategy but for Genscher and for the German left they were a matter of life or death, because Germany would be the inevitable epicentre of a European war. Kohl considered Genscher’s position as far too extreme but he not only needed to appease his coalition partner and calm the domestic public mood by supporting some kind of arms-reduction talks, he also had to navigate around ‘that woman’, as he called Thatcher, and keep the Alliance strong.[96]

Both the British and the Germans had been manoeuvring ahead of the summit. Thatcher met Gorbachev on 6 April in London. On a human level, the two of them had got on famously ever since their first encounter in December 1984, before he became general secretary, when she proclaimed that Gorbachev was a man with whom she could ‘do business’.[97] At their meeting in 1989 the personal chemistry was equally evident but so were their fundamental differences on nuclear policy. Gorbachev launched into a passionate speech in favour of nuclear abolition and ‘a nuclear-free Europe’ – which Thatcher totally rejected – and he vented his frustrations with Bush for not responding more positively to his disarmament initiatives. The prime minister, playing her preferred role as elder stateswoman, was at pains to reassure him: ‘Bush is a very different person from Reagan. Reagan was an idealist who firmly defended his convictions … Bush is a more balanced person, he gives more attention to detail than Reagan did. But as a whole, he will continue the Reagan line, including on Soviet–American relations. He will strive to achieve agreements that are in our common interest.’

Gorbachev jumped on those last words: ‘That is the question – in our common interests or in your Western interests?’ The reply came back: ‘I am convinced in the common interest.’ Her subtext was clearly that she was the one who could broker the relationship between the two superpowers.[98]

Privately, however, Thatcher was worried about the new US president. She had developed a close, if sometimes manipulative, rapport with ‘Ronnie’ and had felt secure about the centrality of the much-vaunted Anglo-American ‘special relationship’ in US foreign policy.[99] With Bush, the situation was less clear. It appeared that the new administration’s ‘pause’ also entailed a review of relations with Britain. And she felt that the State Department under Baker was biased against her and inclined to favour Bonn rather than London.[100] Her suspicions were not unfounded. Bush, a pragmatist, disliked Thatcher’s dogmatism and certainly did not intend to let her run the Alliance. Both he and Baker found her difficult to get on with, whereas Kohl seemed an agreeable partner.[101]

The problem in Bonn was not on the personal level but the political, because of the deep rift within the coalition. In several phone conversations during April and May, Kohl tried to reassure Bush of his loyalty to the transatlantic partnership and that he would not let the SNF issue ruin the summit. His language was almost desperate – a point not concealed even in the official American ‘telcon’ record of their talks. ‘He wanted the summit to be successful … He wanted the president to have a success. It would be the president’s first trip to Europe as president. The president was a proven friend of Europeans and, in particular, of the Germans.’[102]

The pre-summit bickering in Europe did not faze Bush. He knew that Kohl’s aim was ‘a strong NATO’ and that the chancellor had ‘linked his political existence to this goal’.[103] But the prognostications before the summit were distinctly bleak. ‘Bush Arrives for Talks With a Divided NATO’, the New York Times headlined on 29 May. The paper claimed that Bonn’s insistence on reducing the threat of SNFs to German territory raised fears in Washington, London and Paris of nothing less than the ‘denuclearisation’ of NATO’s central front. Such was the gulf, the newspaper noted, that no communiqué had been agreed in advance, which meant that NATO’s sixteen leaders would ‘have to thrash it out themselves’ at the summit. One NATO delegate confessed, ‘I honestly don’t know if a compromise is possible.’[104]

The president, however, had something up his sleeve when he arrived in Brussels. He presented his allies with a radical arms-reduction proposal not on SNFs but on conventional forces in Europe. This had not been easy to hammer out in Washington but fear of an alliance crisis in Brussels enabled Bush to bang heads together. What the president dubbed his ‘conventional parity initiative’ of 275,000 troops on each side would mean the withdrawal of about 30,000 Americans from Western Europe and about 325,000 Soviet soldiers from Eastern Europe. This was to be agreed between the superpowers within six to twelve months. Bush’s initiative was intended to probe Gorbachev’s longer-term readiness to accept disproportionate cuts that would eliminate the Red Army superiority in Eastern Europe on which Soviet domination of their satellite states had always depended. But more immediately, according to the New York Times, it was meant to ‘bring about a dramatic shift in the summit agenda’, thereby ‘swamping the missile discussion’. And this indeed proved to be the case. After nine hours of intense debate the allies accepted Bush’s proposals on cuts to conventional forces in Europe and especially his accelerated timetable. In return, the United States committed itself to ‘enter into negotiations to achieve a partial reduction of American and Soviet land-based nuclear missile forces’ as soon as the implementation of a conventional-arms accord was ‘under way’. This deal kept the Genscherites happy because of the prospect of rapid SNF negotiations, while Thatcher and Mitterrand – representing the two European nuclear powers – were gratified that there had been no further erosion of the principles of NATO’s nuclear deterrence per se. And it also suited Bush: keen to lower the conventional-warfare threat in Europe, he had been adamant that on the issue of nukes there should be ‘no third zero’.[105]

So the NATO summit that had seemed so precarious ended up as a resounding success. ‘An almost euphoric atmosphere’ surrounded the final press conference. Kohl declared ebulliently that he now perceived ‘a historic chance’ for ‘realistic and significant’ progress on arms control. He could not resist poking fun at his bête noire, Thatcher, who, he said, had come to Brussels taking a very hard line against any SNF negotiations and fiercely opposing concessions to the Germans. ‘Margaret Thatcher stood up for her interests, in her temperamental way,’ the chancellor remarked. ‘We have different temperaments. She is a woman and I’m not.’[106]

The remarkably harmonious outcome of the Brussels meeting – ‘we were all winners’, proclaimed Kohl[107] – was a big boost for NATO at forty. Indeed, he felt it was the ‘best kind of a birthday present’ the Alliance could have.[108] But it was also a huge boon for Bush, who had been under attack at home for failing to give leadership to the Alliance and for surrendering the diplomatic initiative to Gorbachev. Now, however, with his compromise package he had turned the entire situation around. As Scowcroft reflected with satisfaction, after this ‘fantastic result’ the press ‘never returned to their theme of the spring – that we had no vision and no strategy’.[109] Brussels, stated an American reporter, was ‘Bush’s hour’.[110]

As soon as the NATO press conference was over, the president travelled on to a sunlit evening in Bonn, basking in the warm glow of his success.[111] At a state dinner that night in a grand eighteenth-century restaurant, the president toasted another fortieth anniversary – that of the Federal Republic itself. ‘In 1989,’ he declared expansively, ‘we are nearer our goals of peace and European reconciliation than at any time since the founding of NATO and the Federal Republic.’ He added: ‘I don’t believe German–American relations have ever been better.’[112]

The following morning, 31 May, the Bush–Kohl caravan sailed on down the Rhine to the picture-book city of Mainz, capital of the Rhineland-Palatinate, Kohl’s home state.[113] ‘The United States and the Federal Republic have always been firm friends and allies,’ the president announced, ‘but today we share an added role: partners in leadership.’[114]

This was a striking phrase, testimony to the maturation of the American–West German relationship over the previous forty years – made ever sharper by the downgrading at the summit of Thatcher and by implication of London’s ‘special relationship’. To speak about Bonn as Washington’s ‘partner in leadership’ definitely stuck in her gullet: as she sadly admitted, it ‘confirmed the way American thinking about Europe was going’.[115]

Whereas Thatcher fixated on the partnership aspect of what Bush was saying, in his Mainz speech the president focused much more on what it meant to lead. ‘Leadership’, he declared, ‘has a constant companion: responsibility. And our responsibility is to look ahead and grasp the promise of the future … For forty years, the seeds of democracy in Eastern Europe lay dormant, buried under the frozen tundra of the Cold War … But the passion for freedom cannot be denied forever. The world has waited long enough. The time is right. Let Europe be whole and free … Let Berlin be next – let Berlin be next!’[116]

Two years before, Bush’s predecessor Ronald Reagan had stood before the Brandenburg Gate and called on the Soviet leader, ‘Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall.’[117] Now in June 1989 a new US president was throwing down the gauntlet once again, mounting a new propaganda offensive against the charismatic Soviet leader. ‘Let Berlin be next’ was in one way headline-grabbing rhetoric, but it revealed that the administration was already beginning to grapple with the issue of German unification. As Bush said in his Mainz speech, ‘the frontier of barbed wire and minefields between Hungary and Austria is being removed, foot by foot, mile by mile. Just as the barriers are coming down in Hungary, so must they fall throughout all of Eastern Europe.’ Nowhere was the East–West divide starker than in Berlin. ‘There this brutal wall cuts neighbour from neighbour, brother from brother. And that wall stands as a monument to the failure of communism. It must come down.’

Despite his emphasis on Germany, Bush’s vision remained much broader. The will for freedom and democracy, he insisted yet again, was a truly global phenomenon. ‘This one idea is sweeping across Eurasia. This one idea is why the communist world, from Budapest to Beijing, is in ferment.’[118] By June 1989, Hungary was undoubtedly on the move but here change was occurring peacefully. On the other side of the world, however, the forces of democratic protest and communist oppression collided violently and with dramatic global consequences in China’s Forbidden City.

*

On 15 May, just before noon, Mikhail Gorbachev landed at Beijing’s airport to begin a historic four-day trip to China. Descending the steps of his blue-and-white Aeroflot jet, he was greeted by the Chinese president Yang Shangkun. The two men then walked past an honour guard of several hundred Chinese troops in olive-green uniforms and white gloves. A twenty-one-gun salute boomed in the background.

The long awaited Sino-Soviet summit showed that relations between the two countries were returning to something like ‘normal’ after three decades of ideological rifts, military confrontation and regional rivalries. The Soviet leader certainly viewed his visit as a ‘watershed’. In a written statement issued to reporters at the airport, he remarked: ‘We have come to China in the springtime … All over the world people associate this season with renewal and hope. This is consonant with our mood.’ Indeed, it was anticipated that Gorbachev’s visit could seal the reconciliation of the two largest communist nations at a time when both were struggling through profound economic and political changes. ‘We have a great deal to say to each other as communist parties, even in practical terms,’ observed Yevgeny Primakov, a leading Soviet expert on Asia, ahead of the meeting. ‘This normalisation comes at a time when we are both studying how socialist countries should approach capitalism. Before, we both thought that socialism could be spread only by revolution. Today,’ he added, ‘we both stress evolution.’ There were fears in Asia and America that this summit meeting might even presage a new Sino-Soviet axis, after years when the United States had been able to capitalise on the rift between Moscow and Beijing.[119]

Gorbachev arrived in a city gripped by political upheaval. For over a month students from across China, but especially from Beijing, had been on the streets. Their frustrations against the authorities had been simmering for several years but the immediate trigger was the death of Hu Yaobang, former general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (1982–7) – the man who in 1986 had dared to suggest that Deng was ‘old-fashioned’ and should retire. Instead Deng and the hardliners had forced out Hu in 1987, who was then lauded by the students as a champion of reform. In the weeks after Hu died on 15 April 1989, more than a million people turned out to protest in Beijing – denouncing growing social inequality, nepotism and corruption and demanding democracy as an all-purpose panacea. What started out as law-abiding protest quickly swelled into a radical movement. And the stakes rose even higher for both sides, after the party newspaper the People’s Daily, in an editorial on 26 April, characterised the demonstrations as nothing less than ‘turmoil’ and denounced the students as ‘rioters’ with a ‘well-planned plot’ to cause anarchy. They were accused of displaying unpatriotic behaviour, of ‘attacking’ and even ‘rejecting’ the Chinese Communist Party and the socialist system.[120]

On 13 May, two days before Gorbachev’s arrival in the capital, a thousand students began a hunger strike in Tiananmen Square, bedding down on quilts and newspapers close to the monument honouring the nation’s heroes. The Soviet leader’s visit was a pivotal moment for the young Chinese protestors, for it offered an unprecedented opportunity to air their grievances while the eyes of the world were upon them. They carried banners in Russian, English and Chinese. One read ‘Welcome to a real reformer’; another ‘Democracy is our common dream’.[121] Gorbachev – a household name from the media – represented to them everything the Chinese leaders were not: a democrat, a reformer and a changemaker. Their aim was to take their case straight to him – over the heads of the regime – while embarrassing their leaders into making concessions. The students delivered a letter with 6,000 signatures to the Soviet embassy asking to meet with Gorbachev. The response was cautious. The embassy announced that the general secretary would talk with members of the public but it gave no details about who and when.[122]

New dawn for China?

The CCP leadership was caught in a cleft stick. For weeks the summit talks had been meticulously prepared: the Chinese government wanted everything to unfold without a hitch. Instead, the centre of their capital had been turned into a sea of demonstrators chanting to the world media ‘You have Gorbachev. And who do we have?’[123] The massive student protests were therefore a major embarrassment, especially considering the presence of no less than 1,200 foreign journalists, there to cover the summit but now taking every opportunity to interview protestors and broadcast live pictures of the chaos into which Beijing had descended. And the government could do nothing to stop them, for fear that repression would be beamed around the world. It was, as Deng tersely admitted, a ‘mess’. He told insiders: ‘Tiananmen is the symbol of the People’s Republic of China. The Square has to be in order when Gorbachev comes. We have to maintain our international image.’[124]

On Sunday 14 May, the day before the summit talks, the students made clear that they had no intention of complying with appeals to their patriotism by the Chinese authorities, who had called on them to clear the Square. On the contrary, some 10,000 held a vigil in the middle of Tiananmen; by daylight on Monday the crowd had swollen to an estimated 250,000. Top party officials spoke repeatedly with student leaders, promising to meet their demands for dialogue and warning of grave international embarrassment for China if they did not desist. All this was to no avail. In fact, the students’ obduracy forced a last-minute shift in Chinese protocol – changing the whole dynamic of the summit.[125]

The grand red-carpet entrée for Gorbachev up the sweeping steps of the Great Hall of the People that faces Tiananmen Square had to be abandoned. Instead there was a hastily arranged welcome ceremony at Beijing’s old airport and an incognito drive through backstreets and alleyways to enter the National People’s Congress building by a side door. Only when safely inside would Gorbachev enjoy a lavish state banquet hosted by President Yang.[126]

The situation was equally delicate for Gorbachev. The only appropriate response, it seemed, was to keep completely out of China’s internal politics and pretend that everything was running normally. But privately the Soviet delegation was shocked. Largely in the dark, they wondered whether China was falling apart. Maybe the country was in the midst of a wholesale ‘revolution’, perhaps on its political last legs? Gorbachev tried to act with appropriate ‘reserve and judiciousness’, as he put it later, but as soon as he saw the situation first-hand he felt they should leave for home as quickly as possible.[127] Obliged to speak to the press once during his visit, he offered only vague answers. He dodged questions about the protests – admitting he had seen the demonstrators with their banners demanding Deng’s resignation but saying that he would not himself assume ‘the role of a judge’ or even ‘deliver assessments’ about what was going on.[128] Of course, he said, he was personally for glasnost, perestroika and political dialogue but China was in a different situation and he was in no position to be ‘China’s Gorbachev’. Indeed, he had told his own staff on arriving that he was not keen to take the Chinese road, he did not want Red Square to look like Tiananmen Square.[129]

Conversely, the Chinese leadership did not want Beijing to go the way of Budapest or Warsaw. The visit of the prime champion of communist reform provoked intense debate within the CCP. On 13 May Deng had made clear his dogmatic hard-line position to the politically reformist Zhao Ziyang. ‘We must not give an inch on the basic principle of upholding Communist Party rule and rejecting a Western multiparty system.’ Zhao was not convinced: ‘When we allow some democracy, things might look chaotic on the surface; but these little “troubles” are normal inside a democratic and legal framework. They prevent major upheavals and actually make for stability and peace in the long run.’[130]

Prime Minister Li Peng took a position similar to Deng, with a preconceived and highly negative view of the man from the Kremlin and his reform agenda: ‘Gorbachev shouts a lot and does little,’ Li wrote in his diary. And by eroding the party monopoly on power he had ‘created an opposition to himself’, whereas the CCP had kept sole control and thereby ‘united the great majority of officials’. Li also blamed glasnost for triggering ethnic unrest inside the USSR, especially the Caucasus, and for stirring up the political upheavals in Eastern Europe. He warned that such recklessness might lead to the total break-up of the Soviet empire and spread this contagion to China itself. Deng and Li spoke for most of the inner circle, which was extremely wary of their Soviet visitor – especially given the inspirational effect he clearly had on his youthful Chinese fan club.[131]

Like Bush three months earlier, on 15 and 16 May Gorbachev met with China’s senior figures. But unlike Bush’s experience, there were no warm recollections of past times together; no intimacy or small talk. In fact, even though Yang and Li had lived for a while in the USSR as students and spoke Russian quite well, there was no personal connection between Gorbachev and his Chinese interlocutors. But, as with Bush, it was the encounter with Deng that really mattered to Gorbachev.

‘Gorbachev 58, Deng 85’[fn1] read some of the banners in the streets, contrasting the youthfulness and dynamism of the Russian leader and the conservatism of his ‘elderly’ Chinese counterpart, who would be 85 in August. Gorbachev was keen to make a good impression on Deng: trying to be tactful and deferential – for once, inclined to listen rather than talk. To let the older man speak, he reasoned, ‘is valued in the East’. The Chinese were equally sensitive to style and symbolism. They wanted to avoid all bear hugs or smooching of the sort that communist leaders so often lavished on each other. Instead they were keen to see the ‘new’ Sino-Soviet relationship, symbolised by a respectful handshake. This would be appropriate to international norms and also underline the formal equality now being established between Beijing and Moscow.[132]

A friendly grip? Deng with Mikhail and Raisa

Deng and Gorbachev met for two hours in the Great Hall of the People on 16 May. The first few minutes were televised live so they could announce to the world the official normalisation of their relations. The catalyst, Deng said, had been when Gorbachev assumed power in 1985 and began to reassess Soviet foreign policy, moving away from the Cold War with the West and conflicts with other countries. He particularly praised Gorbachev’s speech at Vladivostok in July 1986, when the Soviet leader had made a major overture to China. ‘Comrade Gorbachev, all the people of the world, and I myself, saw new content in the political thinking of the Soviet Union. I saw that there might be a turning point in your relations with the United States and it might be possible to find a way out of the confrontation and transform the situation into one of dialogue.’ Since then, he added, Gorbachev had gradually removed or reduced the three big obstacles: Afghanistan, the Sino-Soviet border disputes, and then the war in Cambodia. As a result they had been able to normalise both state and party relations between the USSR and PRC.[133]

In public, therefore, all was sweetness and light. But once the TV cameras had left, Deng changed his tone. ‘I would like to say a few words about Marxism and Leninism. We have studied it for many years.’ Much of what had been said in the past thirty years had ‘turned out to be empty’, he observed. The world had moved on from the days of Marx, and Marxist doctrine must move as well. Gorbachev remarked that ‘Thirty years did not pass in vain … by contrast, we rose to a new level of comprehension of socialism’ and, he added, ‘now we study Lenin’s legacy more attentively’. But, Deng interjected, Leninism also had to move with the times, not least because ‘the situation in the world is constantly changing … he who cannot develop Marxism–Leninism taking into consideration the new conditions is not a real Communist’. Deng’s thrust seemed to be that ideology had to evolve in the light of changing national and international circumstances – ‘there is no ready-made model of any kind’ – but that a socialist ideological framework remained essential to avoid the chaos of pragmatism and mere experimentation.[134]

Here was a coded but clear critique of Gorbachev’s approach to reform in the ‘construction of socialism’, but the Soviet leader – seeking to remain deferential – chose to ignore it, agreeing instead with his Chinese counterpart that they ‘must now draw a line under the past, turning one’s sights to the future’. Yes, said Deng, ‘but it would be incorrect if I did not say anything today about the past’. Each side, he added, had ‘the right to express their own point of view’ and he would start the ball rolling. ‘Fine,’ said Gorbachev, only to be on the receiving end of a long and rambling monologue by the aged Chinese leader about the damage and indignities inflicted on his country over the course of the twentieth century. Deng listed in turn the territorial depredations by Britain, Portugal, Japan, tsarist Russia and then the USSR under Stalin and Khrushchev – and especially, after the Sino-Soviet split, the Soviet military threat along China’s own border. Though dismissing the ideological quarrels of the past, Deng conceded ‘We were also wrong.’ But he clearly laid overwhelming blame for their bilateral tensions at the Kremlin’s door: ‘the Soviet Union incorrectly perceived China’s place in the world … the essence of all problems was that we were in an unequal situation, that we were slighted and oppressed’.[135]

Eventually Gorbachev got his chance for a few words. He said that he saw things differently but did accept ‘a certain culpability and responsibility on our part’ for the very recent past. All the rest – especially the territorial shifts of the early twentieth century – belonged already to history. ‘How many states have disappeared, and new ones have appeared? … History cannot be rewritten; it cannot be remade anew. If we took the road of restoring past borders on the basis of how things were in the past, which people lived in which territory, then, in essence, we’d have to redraw the entire world. That would lead to a worldwide scuffle.’ Gorbachev stressed his belief in geopolitical ‘realities’ – the ‘principle of the inviolability of borders gives stability to the world’ – and reminded Deng that his own generation had grown up ‘in the spirit of friendship with China’.

These mollifying words seemed to snap the old man out of his historical reverie. ‘This was just a narrative,’ Deng muttered. ‘Let us consider that the past is over with.’ ‘Good,’ replied Gorbachev. ‘Let’s put an end to this.’ After some final vague words about the ‘development’ of their relations, the meeting came to a conclusion. It was as if they had settled the past, but without any clear sense of the future.[136]

This was indeed the case. When Gorbachev had tried to discuss Sino-Soviet trade and joint economic projects with Li Peng, he had made no progress. He could offer the USSR’s usual export staples – oil and gas – but the Chinese were not particularly interested. When asked for Soviet investment, Gorbachev was in no position to provide anything. And as for advanced technology, especially IT, Li made clear that China looked to the United States and also Japan. There were no other substantive talks.[137] In fact, on his last day in Beijing Gorbachev was largely marooned in a guest house on the outskirts – unable, as originally scheduled, to reach the Forbidden City or attend the opera because of the protests. After a short visit to Shanghai, he returned home on 19 May with very mixed feelings about the whole trip: real satisfaction about the normalisation of relations – ‘a watershed event’ of ‘epoch-making significance’ – but also profound uncertainty about the future not only of Sino-Soviet relations but of the People’s Republic itself.[138]

The moment Gorbachev had left Beijing, Deng turned his mind to sorting out the students. Their brazen refusal to leave Tiananmen voluntarily had humiliated the Paramount Leader but, while his Soviet guest was around, Deng’s hands had been tied. Now his anger boiled over. The Chinese capital had become virtually paralysed with over a million protestors sitting in the Square and marching down the boulevards. The students had been joined by workers, shopkeepers, civil servants, teachers, peasants – even recruits from Beijing’s police academy dressed in their uniforms.[139] Order was crumbling; the regime itself seemed in danger.

Over the weekend of 20 May, Deng declared martial law in Beijing. The government brought in thousands of troops armed with machine guns and backed by tanks, tear gas and water cannons.[140] It imposed tight media censorship and forced out Zhao, the liberal chief of the party, because of his conciliatory approach to the protestors. The hardliners were now in charge. But it would take another two weeks of heightened tension before the crisis was resolved. The mere presence on the streets of the People’s Liberation Army was not enough: the men had in any case been briefed not to cause bloodshed. The students, certainly, were not cowed and they used techniques of non-violence to keep the troops at bay. Even though their numbers had diminished by late May to perhaps 100,000, they continued to hold the Chinese communist leadership hostage, both politically and ideologically.[141]

State power and human vulnerability

What the protestors stood for was summed up, at least for the global media, in the ‘Goddess of Democracy’. This ten-metre-high white pâpier-mâché and styrofoam statue resembling New York’s Statue of Liberty was erected on 29 May at the heart of the Square in front of the Imperial Palace. Press photographs showed it as if eyeing defiantly the great picture of Mao. Democracy – on the US model – had become the celebrated symbol of the demonstrators’ demands. The Chinese government issued an official statement ordering the statue to be taken down, calling it an ‘abomination’ and declaring ‘this is China, not America’.[142]

Beside himself with frustration, Deng finally ordered the military to use force on those who, he said, were trying to subvert the nation. His justification was that China needed a peaceful and stable environment to continue along its reform path, to modernise and open up to the capitalist world. But reform, he insisted, did not mean doing away with four key principles: upholding socialism, maintaining the CCP’s leadership and party monopoly, supporting the ‘people’s democracy’, and adhering to Marxist–Leninist–Maoist philosophy. Pure ideology, enforced by autocratic party rule, was there to stay.[143]

At dawn on Sunday 4 June, tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers flooded Tiananmen Square and the surrounding streets, firing their sub-machine guns into crowds of men and women who refused to move out of the way. Scores of students and workers were killed and wounded. Several thousand on the edge of the mayhem left the Square peacefully, though still defiantly waving their university banners. Their encampment was then destroyed: armoured personnel carriers ran over the tents, ruthlessly driving over individuals who had chosen to stay put. When some of the protestors retaliated by toppling army vehicles and stoning the Great Hall of the People, the soldiers used tear gas and truncheons. Soon the city’s hospitals were inundated. ‘As doctors, we often see deaths,’ said one medic at the Tongren Hospital. ‘But we’ve never seen such a tragedy like this. Every room in the hospital is covered with blood.’[144]

The precise death toll remains impossible to establish: estimates vary from 300 to 2,600. Chinese state news on 4 June exulted in the crushing of a ‘counter-revolutionary rebellion’ and highlighted the casualties among police and troops. The demonstrators were soon airbrushed out of China’s official history. But what really mattered was that the country’s brief and traumatic battle for democracy had been immortalised by the world’s media. In addition to the reports of the carnage and the civilian deaths, images emerged of the crackdown that became truly iconic – fetishised by reformers around the world as symbols of China’s lost 1989. The two most notable icons were the photo of a lone man apparently defying a line of tanks, whose fate remains tantalisingly unknown. He would become the classic emblem of global 1989 – the power of the people. And the Goddess of Democracy captured in an eye-catching way what the protestors had struggled for. On the morning of 4 June the statue was quickly reduced to shards and then washed out of the Square by the clean-up troops amid the debris of a failed revolution. But the world would not forget.[145]

Tiananmen – The tanks take over

And so China reinvented communism – by force. In the process, as the tragedy was played out in real time on TV, the students became identified in the Cold War context with Western ideals of freedom, democracy and human rights. The Chinese government’s use of tanks against unarmed students also evoked memories of 1968, not just student protests around the world but the suppression of the Prague Spring by the Red Army – which had shaken European communism to its core. Deng was now widely seen as the villainous enemy of freedom and many asked whether Gorbachev would stay true to his UN speech, when he had renounced the Brezhnev Doctrine and championed ‘freedom of choice’. With unrest mounting in the Soviet bloc and the USSR itself, would Gorbachev go the way of Deng? Would the tanks now roll in Eastern Europe?

*

Five days later Moscow issued a limp statement of ‘regret’ over the bloodshed and expressed the ‘hope’ that common sense and continued reform would prevail in the PRC. Soviet government spokesman Gennady Gerasimov admitted that Soviet officials were surprised at the brutality with which the Chinese leaders put down the student demonstrators. ‘We hadn’t expected this.’[146] Privately, Gorbachev told Kohl that he was ‘dismayed’ by developments in China, but did not elaborate further.[147] For him the stand-off in Beijing corroborated his long-held view that Deng’s approach to reform was bound to create tensions and that political liberalisation was the only way to resolve such tensions without spilling blood. So the Soviet leader became ever more convinced that his strategy, aimed at avoiding violence and building a ‘mixed economy’ without the extremes of capitalist privatisation and social inequality, was the only sensible way forward. In short, for Gorbachev economic reform had to be complemented by political reform – whatever that would mean.[148]

Others in the Soviet Union wanted Gorbachev to openly condemn the Chinese government. The radical politician Boris Yeltsin and the human-rights advocate Andrei Sakharov decried Deng’s actions as ‘a crime against the people’ and drew parallels between the Chinese crackdown and the Soviet military’s ‘repression’ of demonstrations in Tbilisi, Georgia, in April, only weeks before Gorbachev went to Beijing. (Interestingly, Deng had cited that incident to his own people as an example of good discipline.) But Gorbachev had no intention of emulating Yeltsin and Sakharov. He was not about to sacrifice the hard-won gains of his personal diplomacy for the sake of abstract principles.[149] China was too important to the USSR to risk alienating Deng by what both sides would have agreed was ‘interference in internal affairs’.

Bush’s reaction to Tiananmen was similarly cautious. The Americans had not been surprised by the turn of events – James Lilley, the new US ambassador in Beijing, had been predicting a crackdown for weeks and the president himself had been careful not to make any encouraging noises to the demonstrators to avoid inflaming passions.[150] He told reporters on 30 May: ‘I’m old enough to remember Hungary in 1956, and I would want to do nothing in terms of statement or exhortation that would encourage a repeat of that.’[151]

In private the president had sent Deng a letter three days earlier appealing to him frankly as an old friend and warning against ‘violence, repression and bloodshed’, lest this damage Sino-American relations.[152] Deng took no notice. On 4 June Bush tried to reach him by phone but Deng simply refused to take the call. It was a blatant snub: even a lao pengyou had no clout when it didn’t suit China.[153]

Deng clearly believed he could risk the crackdown. He predicted that the West would soon forget, and in any case they knew that trade with China was too important to sever relations altogether. Indeed, Deng had been careful to reassure Washington about his deep concern for their mutual relations. The Chinese leader was not wrong in his assumptions. The signals from Washington were mixed. On the one hand, Bush ‘deplored’ Deng’s decision to use force against peaceful demonstrators[154] and suspended military sales and high-level official contacts with China. He also offered humanitarian and medical assistance to anyone who had been injured in the Tiananmen tragedy. But, on the other hand, he had no intention of severing diplomatic relations or pressing for tough sanctions, from which only ordinary people would suffer. Given his personal bond with Deng and his faith in the magnetic attraction of capitalism, Bush sought to avoid any confrontation that would jeopardise a blossoming Sino-American relationship in the long run. China in Bush’s eyes had come such a long way. If he acted too harshly, he might feed the anti-reformist, hard-line elements in Beijing and set the clock back – something he wanted to avoid at all costs. But if he was seen as acting too softly, the communist regimes in Eastern Europe including the USSR might feel encouraged to use force against their political opponents. The problem was that his room for manoeuvre was severely limited – especially at home where Congress was calling for stricter sanctions and the human-rights lobby wanted to punish the ‘butchers of Tiananmen’ and denounced Bush as the ‘appeaser’ of Beijing.[155]

Juggling these various pressures, and having publicly defended presidential pre-eminence in foreign policy against congressional encroachment, on 21 June Bush tried again to reach out to Deng. This time he sent a handwritten letter composed, he said, ‘with a heavy heart’. He appealed to their ‘genuine friendship’, stressed his respect for Deng personally, and even trumpeted his own ‘great reverence for Chinese history, culture and tradition’. He made it clear that he would not dictate or interfere but appealed to Deng not to ‘let the aftermath of the tragic recent events undermine a vital relationship patiently built over the past seventeen years’. Mindful of the 4 June snub, the president added, ‘I would of course welcome a personal reply to this letter. This matter is too important to be left to our bureaucracies.’[156]

This time personal diplomacy worked. Bush got a reply within twenty-four hours – sufficiently positive that at the beginning of July Bush asked Scowcroft to smuggle himself into China for talks with Deng and Li. It was an epic adventure story reminiscent of Kissinger’s Marco Polo visit to Beijing in July 1971. They set off at 5 a.m. on 30 June 1989 from Andrews Air Force Base, travelling on a C-141 military cargo plane ‘in which had been installed what was euphemistically called a portable “comfort pallet”, a huge box containing bunks and place to sit’. The aircraft could be refuelled in the air, avoiding the need to land anywhere en route, and their official destination was Okinawa but that was amended on the way. All USAF markings had been removed and the crew started in military uniforms but changed to civilian clothes before arriving in Beijing. The mission was so secret that Chinese military air defence had not been informed. Fortunately, when they saw an unidentified aircraft entering Chinese airspace near Shanghai and asked whether they should shoot it down, the call went right through to President Yang Shangkun who told them to hold their fire. The American party landed safely at lunchtime on 1 July and spent the rest of the day recovering from their ordeal at the State Guest House.[157]

Scowcroft’s conversation with Deng on 2 July in the Great Hall of the People set the parameters for future policy on both sides – so much so that it’s worth setting out their positions in detail.[158] Deng started by saying that he had ‘chosen’ Bush as a special friend because, ever since they first met, he had found him ‘trustworthy’. Of course, the problems in Sino-US relations could not be ‘solved by two persons from the perspective of being friends’, the Chinese leader said. So Deng was pleased that Bush had sent Scowcroft ‘as his emissary’. It showed that Bush understood the complexities of the situation. He had taken ‘a wise and cool-headed action – an action well received by us’. And so, ‘it seems there is still hope to maintain our originally good relations’.[159]

Nevertheless, in Deng’s view, the blunt truth was that ‘on a large scale the United States has impugned Chinese interests’ and ‘hurt Chinese dignity’. That for him was the ‘crux of the matter’. Some Americans who were keen for the PRC and its socialist system to be overthrown had helped stir up ‘counter-revolutionary rebellion’. And because the US had tied the knot, to borrow from a Chinese proverb, Deng insisted ‘our hope is that in its future course of action the United States will seek to untie the knot’. In other words, it was up to Bush to remedy the situation.

His government, Deng added, was determined to put down ‘the counter-revolutionary leaders’ in line with ‘Chinese laws’. And he insisted that ‘China will by no means waver in its resolution’. Otherwise, he asked rhetorically, ‘how can the PRC continue to exist?’ Deng left Scowcroft in no doubt that any interference in China’s internal affairs would not be tolerated and he warned Congress and the US media not to add more fuel to the fire. Indeed, he expected Washington to find a ‘feasible way and method’ to settle their differences regarding the events of Tiananmen.[160]

Scowcroft responded with the studied courtesy that always mattered in America’s relations with China. He spoke at length about the personal bond between Bush and China and his own depth of feeling for the country. He tried to underline the strong US investment in the steady ‘deepening’ of its relations with Beijing since 1972, from which both sides had benefited strategically and economically, as well as on a human level. He also stressed the significance of his visit. ‘Our presence here after a trip of thousands of kilometres, in confidence so as not to imply anything but an attempt to communicate, is symbolic of the importance President Bush places on this relationship and the efforts he is prepared to take to preserve it.’[161]

Having echoed Deng’s emphasis on the importance of personal friendship, Scowcroft then inserted the irreducible American agenda. ‘It is into this bilateral climate of deepening cooperation and growing sympathy that the events of Tiananmen Square have imposed themselves.’ He explained that the president had to cope with his electorate’s emotional reaction. This was America’s ‘internal affair’ – touching on its people’s fundamental values which Bush in turn shared to a significant degree. In other words, the president stood by his commitment to ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ that he had enunciated in his inaugural address. And, by thereby defending America’s stance on human rights, he could not be seen to visit Beijing in person because that would confer a legitimacy on Deng’s regime which the bloodshed in Tiananmen had removed. But, Scowcroft told Deng, Bush wanted to ‘manage events in a way which will assure a healthy relationship over time’. And he was ‘very sensitive to Chinese concerns’. Back-channel diplomacy was therefore the only way to ‘restore, preserve and strengthen’ the bilateral relationship.[162]

Deng did not reply directly. Instead, he emphasised three maxims that drove China. First, ‘I think one must understand history,’ Deng said. China had fought a twenty-two-year war costing 20 million lives – a conflict waged by the Chinese people under the leadership of the Communist Party. Indeed, he told Scowcroft, ‘if one should add the three-year war to assist Korea against US aggression then it would be a twenty-five-year effort’. Second, he underlined the sanctity of China’s independence: a country that would not allow itself to be directed by another nation ‘no matter what kind of difficulties should crop up in our way’. China would follow its own course for development regardless of the ‘macro international climate’. As for the third fundamental: there existed ‘no other force’ except the Chinese Communist Party that could represent China. This had been proved over ‘several decades’.[163]

Scowcroft had a similar discussion with Li. Reflecting later, he sensed a deep rift and a ‘clash of cultures’[164] which could not at the moment be bridged, but the clandestine trip had served its main purpose: to maintain channels of communication and thus quietly preserve economic ties. Bush noted in his diary, ‘I kept the door open.’[165]

The Kremlin and the White House therefore reacted cautiously to Tiananmen. But behind the scenes their thinking was now in flux. In different ways Gorbachev and Bush had focused on relations with China in the early months of 1989 – both making high-profile visits to Beijing – but there was little that could be done, at least for the foreseeable future, in view of the Chinese communist leaders’ hard-line response to revolution.[166] In mid-1989 Gorbachev and Bush were both recalibrating their policies.

The Soviet leader, it must be said, was still inclined to look east. Discussing Tiananmen with the Indian prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, in Moscow on 15 July 1989, Gorbachev brushed aside emotive talk about the death toll, remarking ‘politicians have to be careful in these matters. Especially when we are talking about a country like China. About a country with a population higher than 1 billion people. This is a whole civilisation!’ Looking for positives, he even felt that China’s estrangement amidst world outrage about the ‘Tiananmen massacre’ had a silver lining: Beijing now needed friends and this might give Moscow and New Delhi a real opportunity at a time when Deng had become really fed up with Bush’s procrastination. ‘The Americans want everything to go badly here, or even worse than that. So we need to put hope mainly in ourselves.’ And also, he mused, perhaps in other sympathetic countries undergoing the tribulations of modernisation and development. ‘Yesterday we spoke to the minister of science and technology of the PRC. We talked about cooperation. He is well disposed.’ Gorbachev reminded Gandhi about their previous talks about ‘the triangle’ – a new framework of trilateral cooperation between the Soviet Union, India and China. ‘Perhaps now is the exact moment when they are truly interested in ties with you and with us?’[167]

Gorbachev’s musings were symptomatic of the uncertainties of the international scene in the confusing summer of 1989. Yet others in his entourage viewed Tiananmen in the light of more immediate challenges in Europe. Vladimir Lukin, the head of Gorbachev’s planning staff, warned that the events of 4 June showed that the PRC leadership was drifting ‘more and more obviously towards the group of socialist countries with traditional ideology’ – meaning East Germany, Cuba, Romania and North Korea – ‘and, at the same time, treats with fear and suspicion those countries which are reforming the administrative-bureaucratic system’ – in other words Poland and Hungary. This, said Lukin, ‘of course is an unpleasant fact but it would be incorrect not to take it into account in our contacts with the Chinese’. Rather than trying to build an overt Asian axis, he advocated a posture of ‘well-wishing reserve’ towards Beijing, devoid of any flamboyant gestures. Such a policy would allow the Soviet Union ‘to pass through the current difficult period without spoiling relations with official Beijing’. And it would have the additional advantage of securing ‘the respect of the most advanced sections of the Chinese people’ who, he predicted, would doubtless play a role during the ‘not so distant period after Deng’ and would support ‘our forward movement in the “Western direction” of our foreign-policy activity’. This was a striking admonition. Lukin not only warned that China had now aligned itself firmly with the rearguard not the vanguard of communist reinvention – though he clearly thought the Deng era was coming to an end – but he also explicitly saw Russia’s future as lying not in Asia but with Europe and the Western world.[168]

Amid all the furore about Tiananmen, it is easy to forget that 4 June was not just a landmark moment for China. That was the day when Solidarity came to power in Poland. So democracy was also on the march in Eastern Europe. Quite literally, indeed, because it was just four weeks earlier that Hungary’s communist government had taken the fateful step of cutting open its barbed-wire border with Austria. That breach offered a loophole to the West, particularly for East Germans who had the right of citizenship in the Federal Republic. At a time when China was walling itself into a new hybrid model – communist-controlled embryonic capitalism – the Iron Curtain was coming apart in Europe. This was a challenge to the Cold War order as a whole – and one that only the two superpowers could address. After pussyfooting around Mikhail Gorbachev for half a year, George H. W. Bush had no choice but to engage.