GEORGE BUSH AND Brent Scowcroft had a better relationship and more experience with China than had any other US president and national security advisor with the exception of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. It’s understandable that they expected to be able to improve US-China relations following the difficulties of the Carter and Reagan years. But despite their optimistic outlook on US-China relations, they had even more serious difficulties than had the two previous presidencies. In many ways, the history of US-China relations during the Bush presidency was the history of four deaths—one in January, one in April, and two in December 1989—and the long shadows they cast.
But Bush and Scowcroft persevered. By the end of their administration, China would be engaged in the global economy, poised to prosper, and on the verge of becoming, at last, a superpower.
The first of those deaths was that of Emperor Hirohito of Japan on January 7, 1989. Hirohito’s state funeral provided an opportunity for President Bush to engage in one-on-one talks in Tokyo with many heads of state and to make short visits afterward to Beijing and Seoul.202
The second death was that of former Chinese party secretary and political reformer Hu Yaobang on April 15. Two days after Hu’s death, university students in Beijing donned black armbands and put up posters protesting his 1987 ouster and ongoing corruption within the Chinese Communist Party leadership. On April 22, fifty thousand students, workers, and city residents assembled in Tiananmen Square to present petitions for reform and democratization. The demonstrations grew in size until May 20, when the Chinese politburo—its ruling committee—declared martial law.203 In the early morning hours of June 4, soldiers arrived in Tiananmen Square and opened fire on crowds of unarmed civilians. The killing continued for days, with the total number of deaths estimated at between 1,000 and 2,600.204 Tiananmen Square would become a byword for Chinese government repression and pose a huge obstacle to good relations between the United States and China—an obstacle that Bush and Scowcroft somehow had to overcome.
The third and fourth deaths were those of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu, executed at almost exactly the same instant on Christmas Day, 1989, by a Romanian paratrooper firing squad. The Ceausescus had fled Bucharest after their country’s December 21 revolution, only to be captured and, following a two-hour trial, placed against a wall and shot. Ceausescu’s Romania had been a longtime ally of China, and the executions, which the Chinese leaders saw on videotape, darkly underscored the dangers of the developments in Eastern Europe. If the Tiananmen Square massacre made the elderly members of the ruling committee defensive, the deaths of the Ceausescus, coming on the heels of the peaceful revolutions in East Germany, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia earlier that year, spooked them. They understood that the same might happen to them.205
So Hirohito’s death presented President Bush with an opportunity to reach out to China’s leaders—but the other three deaths focused attention on the challenges those leaders faced in a world where the communist system was rapidly collapsing. The response of the Chinese party leaders was to clamp down. Not until early 1992 would the Chinese government start to make economic development its top priority, embrace entrepreneurship, accept business growth as desirable, encourage wealth, and open up to international trade and foreign investment. This slow turn toward capitalism and gradual return to Confucianism and Chinese tradition marked a departure from communist principles—though not from the rule of China’s Communist Party leadership.206
The steadfast handling of China by Brent Scowcroft and the rest of the Bush administration throughout these tumultuous years amounted to a kind of “gardening”: a careful attention to dialogue, diplomacy, and the cultivation of relationships even during difficult times when a clear agenda was lacking and the potential for results seemed scanty. It meant listening and waiting patiently until the time was ripe for moving forward.
However fallow US-China relations may have seemed for the years 1989 through 1992—the “worst” period in US-China diplomacy since before 1972, the NSC’s Douglas Paal said in an interview207—the cultivation of US-China relations by Bush, Scowcroft, and their aides prepared the ground for future growth and blossoming. Their thoughtful engagement enabled US-China relations to morph after 1992 into the complicated, often mutually beneficial, and not always consistent mix of political, economic, and military policies connecting the two countries today.
SCOWCROFT HAD SUGGESTED to Bush that they contact Chinese leaders soon after the inauguration. Both men believed in the fundamental importance of US-China relations. What’s more, Soviet leader Gorbachev was scheduled to visit China in May 1989, and Bush and Scowcroft wanted to talk to the Chinese leaders before he did. They “were frankly worried” about Gorbachev’s skill. He had mesmerized Europe already, and they feared he would be able to charm the Chinese, holding out the promise of a better relationship and an end to conflict on their borders, which had been such a troublesome issue for both of them for a couple of decades.208
Emperor Hirohito’s state funeral, scheduled for February 24, “gave us a great opportunity,” Scowcroft said. State funerals can be windfalls in the world of international diplomacy. They allow national leaders to become acquainted, or reacquainted, with one another despite their extraordinarily busy schedules. Heads of state, foreign ministers, and other state representatives can conduct business free of the usual political constraints, and issues can be broached with foreign counterparts. The death of Hirohito would enable the onetime chief of the US liaison office in China—now the president—to confer with his old friends about Gorbachev, the Soviet Union, and the US-China relationship.209 It would mark the first time in American history that a US president had traveled to the Far East before Europe upon taking office.
Barely a week after the presidential inauguration, Scowcroft met with Chinese ambassador Han Xu to plan Bush’s visit. Bush would have meetings with Deng Xiaoping as well as president Yang Shangkun, premier Li Peng, and party general secretary Zhao Ziyang.210 As the capstone to the trip, Bush was to host a banquet the Sunday after he arrived in Beijing. The dinner, to be held at the Sheraton Great Wall Hotel, would honor Chinese president Yang Shangkun and reciprocate for President Yang’s dinner honoring President Bush the evening before. The meal was going to be Texas barbecue, complete with checkered tablecloths, country music, bandana-wearing waiters, and other Texas-themed decorations.
Five hundred guests were invited, a little more than half of them Chinese. The American embassy invited top party leaders and dozens of other prominent Chinese as well as important Americans residing in China. The list, compiled by ambassador Winston Lord and his staff, included a handful of political dissidents—foremost among them the astrophysicist Fang Lizhi.211
Fang Lizhi, fifty-three years old, was a brilliant astrophysicist, an outspoken dissenter, and immensely self-confident. Intensely committed to reform and courageous in pursuit of his ideals, Fang was a long-standing advocate of democracy and a fervent critic of Marxism. Chinese authorities had sent Fang to labor in a coal mine and a brick factory for a year as part of a reeducation campaign during the Cultural Revolution, and in January 1987 they expelled Fang from the Communist Party and banned all of his political writings. In January 1989, only a month before President Bush’s visit, Fang had called for an amnesty for political prisoners and for the release of Wei Jingsheng, another prominent dissident.212 Fang represented what Deng Xiaoping found most upsetting: the refusal of people to understand that China could develop only if there was political stability. To tolerate Fang would be to tolerate instability, and this, for Deng and the leaders around him, was impossible.
On February 10, the embassy sent the final guest list to the White House, with a cover letter in which the names of the dissidents, their identities, and the reasons for inviting them were highlighted. When the embassy received no response from the White House, it resent the list, once more flagging the names of the dissidents and highlighting Fang Lizhi’s name.213
For American diplomats to invite political dissidents to US-hosted events in foreign countries wasn’t unusual. It was important for the United States to acknowledge its commitment to human rights and political freedoms, sending a message both to American observers and to reformers and dissidents in China and elsewhere around the world.214 During the Reagan years, US officials had contacted dissidents when they’d visited the Soviet Union, for instance. So in inviting Fang Lizhi to the Bush dinner, State Department officials believed they were simply carrying on the practices of the Reagan administration.215
However, the week before the banquet, Chinese officials learned that Fang Lizhi had been invited, and they complained to the US embassy that Fang’s attendance would be unacceptable. State Department officials sought clarification of the seriousness of the objection, and a few days later, the Chinese vice minister for foreign affairs responded: President Yang Shangkun and other Chinese leaders would refuse to go to the banquet if Fang was there.216 Ambassador Lord said he would inform President Bush.
Twenty hours before the president’s arrival, scheduled for Saturday, February 24, the Chinese further stiffened their position in a particularly ugly meeting with the ambassador and other State Department officials. But not until four hours before Air Force One was to land in China did it become fully apparent that the Chinese leaders wouldn’t attend the banquet. A very worried Lord flashed a cable to Bush to warn him of the deteriorating situation.217 When Bush received the message, he shouted at his aides, “Who is Fang Lizhi?”218
The president was understandably upset. If the Chinese party leaders skipped the banquet, it would defeat the purpose of the evening and cast a grim shadow over the entire visit. Bush and Scowcroft were furious with Lord and the embassy. Feeling sandbagged, they gave Lord the cold shoulder upon arriving in Beijing.219 Scowcroft and J. Stapleton Roy, the deputy assistant secretary of state, thereupon immediately began intense, secret negotiations with Chinese officials to see if they could resolve the problem.
Neither side could easily back down, for fear of international embarrassment if the story got out. Scowcroft, Roy, and their Chinese counterparts argued for hours, with no progress.220 Scowcroft refused to rescind the invitation, despite the Chinese insistence that the United States do so, and the Chinese refused to accept the president’s invitation if Fang were to attend the banquet, so the stalemate dragged on. The breakthrough came at around three o’clock in the morning, when the Chinese asked Scowcroft, “What if Fang doesn’t come?” That, Scowcroft replied, would be Fang’s business. (When asked about the statement later, he explained—a bit disingenuously—that he didn’t think the Chinese would interpret it to mean they could forcibly prevent Fang from attending the banquet.)221
Meanwhile, President Bush met with party chairman Deng Xiaoping at the Great Hall of the People, with Li Peng, and then with President Yang. The Chinese welcomed Bush and his entourage with “wonderful red and white banners” strung across the road, and they even put the US president on live television—the first time any American had been so featured. Bush gave Deng Xiaoping a pair of handmade leather boots, and the Chinese leader gave Bush a bicycle in recognition of the bicycling he’d done around Beijing while serving as US liaison officer. It was George Bush’s fifth return to Beijing since his time as China liaison, and, as Barbara Bush remarked, “It was great to be back.”222
Bush and the Chinese leaders then talked about the Soviet Union and its “encirclement” of China, Gorbachev’s upcoming visit, and other issues, including Taiwan, North and South Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia, the Middle East, Afghanistan, and nuclear proliferation. President Bush was very much encouraged by the meetings, and his press secretary described the session with Li Peng as “remarkable.”223
Later that Sunday, the US embassy received a note saying that the Chinese party leaders would be attending the banquet after all. Lord received the news with immense relief, and he made sure that Fang’s table wouldn’t be in the direct line of sight of the head table, where the Chinese leaders, President Bush, Baker, Scowcroft, and he would be sitting. The ambassador assumed everything was settled.224
That evening, however, Beijing police intercepted Fang and his wife, Li Shuxian, on their way to the Sheraton Great Wall Hotel. Over the next four and a half hours, security forces repeatedly blocked Fang’s attempts to get to the banquet, whether by car, by taxi, by bus, or on foot. Meanwhile, at the banquet, neither President Bush nor Ambassador Lord realized Fang wasn’t in attendance, and the dinner went on as planned, to great success.225
Fang Lizhi refused to be silenced; he called a press conference, announcing what had happened to him. President Bush responded with only a mild statement of regret concerning how the Chinese had treated Fang. Combined with the fact that Bush hadn’t earlier brought up human rights issues in his meetings with Chinese leaders, Bush’s weak response to the Fang Lizhi incident provoked a furor. The human rights group Asia Watch, for instance, called Bush’s silence on the treatment of Chinese political prisoners “deafening.”226 Political commentators and politicians accused the president of ignoring human rights and of kowtowing to the Chinese. The result was that the visit ended up being a “disaster,” in the description of Ambassador Lord and the NSC’s Paal.227 It was an inauspicious start for the administration’s conduct of foreign policy.
Back in Washington, Scowcroft gave a background briefing to the press on the administration’s actions. He hadn’t paid attention to Fang’s name on the guest roster, he said, and President Bush hadn’t even known of the invitation. (Henry Kissinger later told Deng Xiaoping and the other Chinese leaders the same thing, that President Bush hadn’t known about the embassy’s invitation to Fang Lizhi.)228 Scowcroft’s words implied that since the US embassy had invited Fang, the embassy was responsible for what had happened. He then wryly conceded to reporters that since Fang’s name had slipped through the White House’s screening process, they clearly could have handled things better.229
Ambassador Lord, members of his embassy staff, and State Department officials became upset when they learned what Scowcroft had told the press, feeling they’d been scapegoated for a problem that was not of their making. Stapleton Roy, who would later become US ambassador in Beijing, assured the press the White House had seen the guest list—a list that included Fang Lizhi’s name and those of the other invited dissidents—and that no one in the Bush White House had made any objections.230
Roy was right. Bush and Scowcroft had known that Fang was going to be at the banquet. Before leaving for Tokyo on February 20, Bush, Baker, and Scowcroft had met for several hours with several China and Asian experts at Camp David, and Fang’s name had come up at the meeting.231 In a press briefing the day before Bush, Scowcroft, and their staff were to depart, a reporter asked Scowcroft whether Fang Lizhi had been invited to the banquet and he answered, “Yes, yes.” And Fang had been discussed on Air Force One before the Americans landed in Beijing.232
So Scowcroft had known that Fang had been invited—he just hadn’t foreseen how much trouble it would cause. “I was confronted with a problem I didn’t know existed,” he said. That’s why he and Bush blamed Lord and the Beijing embassy: the ambassador and his staff had failed to anticipate the vehemence with which the Chinese party leaders would react to Fang’s presence at the banquet. (Of course, no one in Washington had anticipated it, either.)
Reflecting back on the incident, Karl Jackson, the head of the East Asia directorate, said that Scowcroft and Bush didn’t want a “hot potato in their laps” and thought “Win Lord showed bad judgment in not knowing that it was his responsibility to know the mind of the Chinese leadership.” This is why Bush and Scowcroft were so upset at what Barbara Bush called an “amazing . . . gaffe.”233
With the controversy, Fang Lizhi became the focal point of the difficulties in US-Chinese relations in the latter half of 1989. He became what ambassador James Lilley (who had worked with Bush in the US liaison office and would succeed Winston Lord) referred to as “a living symbol of our conflict with China over human rights.”234
Two days later, once the dust had settled, Lord sent Scowcroft a carefully drafted back-channel message (one he’d rewritten about ten times, Lord recalled) in an effort to clear the air with a man he both liked and respected. Lord had the letter (which he copied to Secretary Baker) sent to the White House via the CIA. In the correspondence, Lord emphasized how important it was for the US government to signal to Chinese citizens, as well as to American and global audiences, its support for human rights and the democratic values of speech and political freedom. To retreat before the Chinese—as he considered Scowcroft and Bush to have done—was to appear weak to both the Chinese and fellow Americans.235
Scowcroft said he did not remember getting Lord’s message, though Lord said that the CIA station chief had assured him that the cable had been handed personally to Scowcroft. The New York Times’ Patrick Tyler reported that an NSC or White House official also distinctly remembered Scowcroft receiving the cable, and that Scowcroft became infuriated when he read it and called Lord a “bum.”236
Lord thought Scowcroft’s failure to acknowledge or respond to the cable was graceless. The ambassador believed he’d been unjustly blamed for something that wasn’t his fault, and he called the incident the worst experience of his entire career.237
Lord left Beijing two months later, on April 23, 1989, embittered. Back in the States, he began to publicize his disagreements with the Bush administration and to speak out on behalf of a tougher and more ethical US-China policy. Lord subsequently published his criticism in Foreign Affairs and in a scathing op-ed in the Washington Post.238 Lord later supported Clinton in the 1992 election, with the Clinton campaign making US-China relations one of its issues, and then served in the Clinton State Department as assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs.239 Lord and Scowcroft remained estranged for twenty-two years. Not until June 2011 did the two reconcile.240
Bush and Scowcroft omit the incident in A World Transformed. It also goes unmentioned in two notable books, James Lilley’s China Hands and Ezra F. Vogel’s biography Deng Xiaoping.241 Yet the controversy points to the profound differences that mark US-China relations and reveals Bush’s and Scowcroft’s foremost priority: protecting the US-China relationship, even at the expense of alienating the US ambassador in Beijing, his embassy staff, and others in the State Department.242 If this meant appearing less than zealous about defending the human rights of Chinese dissidents, so be it.
Bush wasn’t naive. While serving as the head of the Liaison Office and living in Beijing, during what had in many ways been a difficult and frustrating year, he had seen the harsh aspects of Chinese rule firsthand. He also knew of the brutal history of Chinese communism under Mao. But he nonetheless believed the best way to advance US interests was to cultivate friendly ties with Chinese officials and improve relations gradually, step by step.243 Neither did Deng Xiaoping want any surprises. “With regard to the problems confronting China,” he told Bush on February 26, “let me say to you that the overwhelming need is to maintain stability. Without stability, everything will be gone, even accomplishments will be ruined. We hope our friends abroad can understand this point.”244
The contrasting perspectives of Bush and Scowcroft, on one hand, and of Lord and other critics of the administration, on the other hand, reflected both differing personal experiences and the deep-rooted philosophical disagreements those experiences helped to produce.
Bush had gotten to know Deng Xiaoping when he lived in Beijing in 1974–1975—a period after diplomatic relations had been established but before the People’s Republic of China was the official “China” for the purposes of US diplomacy. Bush considered Deng a friend. When Barbara Bush later took a trip to China, she personally told Deng of her husband’s intention to run for president.245 So in 1989, with Bush having been elected president and with Deng having risen to be first among equals—with authority over the Army by virtue of his position as Chairman of the Party’s Military Commission, although not a member of the Chinese politburo—Bush had no desire to upset or alienate him.
By contrast, Scowcroft viewed Ambassador Lord and, later, Ambassador Lilley as “more political, more emotional, more democratic,” and he viewed Lord and his wife, the writer Bette Bao Lord, as overly sympathetic to the victims of the Chinese government.246 Lord had visited with and received Chinese political dissidents at the US embassy, and he recognized full well that his wife and he “were pushing the envelope in terms of political freedoms in China, seeing semi or outright dissidents.” Barbara Bush had little patience with either the ambassador or Mrs. Lord, and it must have showed, because after one of her visits to Beijing, Lord called Mrs. Bush’s treatment of his wife “unbelievably rude.”247
Bush and Scowcroft appreciated how far the US-China relationship had progressed since the early 1970s. They knew about China’s historic sensitivity to foreign intervention, dating back to its conquest by European powers. They remembered the horrors of Mao’s Cultural Revolution and appreciated how strained US-China relations had once been. And they recognized China’s strategic significance in the Cold War and could readily imagine the significant benefits that might result from friendly US-China relations, whether commercially or in strategic terms in relation to the Soviet Union.248
At the same time, they feared that the hard-won improvements in US-China relations could unravel quickly. No one could rule out the possibility that Chinese domestic affairs might revert to a newer version of the Cultural Revolution. And they believed the United States could do little to change China’s internal policies. Aggressive diplomacy could easily provoke a political backlash. Rather than indulging in feel-good gestures such as openly criticizing the Chinese or penalizing them for their human rights record, a sounder policy would be for the United States to promote China’s economic growth and further engagement in global society, which would inevitably lead to political liberalization. “Broadening and deepening the [US-China] relationship was in the national interest,” Scowcroft said.249
Ambassador Lord and many critics disagreed. Not only were Bush and Scowcroft’s reactions “supine,” in Lord’s description, but their actions ran contrary to sound US foreign policy; the Chinese respected strength, Lord emphasized, not solicitude.250 He denied it was a matter of isolation versus engagement, as Bush administration officials often claimed. One didn’t have to be “soft” on China to remain engaged; one could also have hard-nosed engagement, just as the United States had had with the Soviet Union, Syria, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and other governments and organizations that acted contrary to American values.251 Lord himself advocated that the United States take a tougher position against Chinese political repression, and during the Clinton administration, Lord supported holding the issue of China’s most-favored-nation trade status hostage to the human rights program.252
Others on the political right also criticized the Bush administration’s China policy. Many neocons believed it was “possible to have a working relationship with a totalitarian communist power and a terrible human rights abuser and negotiate with them constantly,” in the words of Elliott Abrams, “and yet be fairly clear on your condemnation of their system.” The Chinese themselves were struggling to determine Chinese traditions and to define themselves, Abrams argued, and while the United States couldn’t tell the Chinese how to be, the one thing it could do “is to just make our own position clear on the nature of Chinese-ness and how it doesn’t necessarily include a Communist Party and a totalitarian government and doesn’t necessarily exclude republican democracy and denounce human rights violations.” Even if reform in China were to take decades, “clarity,” he said, “is important.”253
The tightrope challenge of engaging China while standing up for American values would soon become even more difficult for Scowcroft and the rest of the Bush foreign policy team.
ON APRIL 15, less than two months after President’s Bush controversial visit, the second crucial death of 1989 occurred when Chinese leader Hu Yaobang died of a heart attack at the age of seventy-three.
Hu had been a colorful politician, liberal in his views on Tibet, outspoken in his support of political and economic reforms, and renowned for his incorruptibility. At one time Deng Xiaoping’s heir apparent, Hu had been held responsible for the student unrest in December 1986, and Deng was uncomfortable with Hu’s message and style. So in early 1987 he removed Hu as party secretary.254
Hu’s death thereby became a symbol for students, reformers, and others with grievances. Within forty-eight hours, people began to gather in Tiananmen Square, at the main entrance to the Forbidden City in central Beijing—just as people had assembled in the square in early 1976 after the death of long-term premier Zhou Enlai. More and more students as well as others massed in protest against Deng Xiaoping’s ouster of Hu as general secretary and then, increasingly, in protest against other problems, including corruption, censorship, inflation, the condition of the universities, nepotism, and the abuse of power by the children of top party officials.
The White House began to become concerned. Douglas Paal wrote to Scowcroft that with Hu’s death and the student demonstrations, China was entering “a prolonged period of extreme sensitivity” and that Hu’s funeral was “likely to mark the end of the period of tolerance we have witnessed this week in Beijing’s response to student demonstrations.” Paal expressed concern over the divisions among the Chinese party leaders and over how the ongoing, spreading, and organized demonstrations “will work uniformly against the reformers,” with Zhao’s position “shaky” and Deng’s “in growing disrepute.” He recommended that any statements by US officials be kept “to the absolute minimum” and that the administration avoid entangling the United States “in Chinese internal politics” or giving the Chinese “reason to show Gorbachev extra warmth as a rebuke to the U.S.”255
By April 24, a hundred thousand people had assembled in Tiananmen Square. With the upcoming seventieth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement, which protested how China had been betrayed by the Treaty of Versailles, there were further expectations of additional protests.256
At first, the Chinese leaders took no action. General secretary Zhao Ziyang, Wan Li, and other politburo members wanted to reduce tensions peaceably. Zhao and other more reform-and liberal-minded party leaders wanted to hear the students out and then let the demonstrations run their course. More conservative politburo members, such as Li Peng, and Beijing Mayor Chen Xitong, considered the student unrest and mass protests to be hostile to the party government and potentially dangerous. For them, the best course of action would be to squash the protesters.257
But with the party leaders unable to reach a consensus on how to handle the mass protests and with “enormous sympathy” for the demonstrators within the Chinese bureaucracy and among the residents of Beijing, the struggle between the reformers and hardliners persisted, paralyzing the Chinese leadership for the weeks leading up to Gorbachev’s scheduled visit.258 Shortly after Hu Yaobang’s funeral on April 22, Deng Xiaoping sided with the hard-liners.
On April 25 Deng issued a warning that the Chinese media broadcasted and reprinted the next day in the People’s Daily. He said that the extraordinary illegal protests caused turmoil and constituted incorrect behavior: “Their purpose was to sow dissension among the people, plunge the whole country into chaos and sabotage the political situation of stability and unity,” he said. “This is planned conspiracy and a disturbance. Its essence is to, once and for all, negate the leadership of the Communist Party of China and the socialist system.” Deng warned that it might be impossible to prevent bloodshed. He and Li Peng hoped to intimidate the protesters and get them to back down.259
Instead, feeling that any chance for a dialogue had now vanished, the protesters dug in their heels. Zhao himself tried to convince the students not to demonstrate during the upcoming Sino-Soviet summit. So, too, did a handful of well-known Chinese commentators and writers, who attempted to mediate the dispute so that the square could be cleared before Gorbachev’s visit; more vigorous protests, they feared, would only play into the hands of Li Peng and other conservative party leaders. Chinese authorities even made a final plea for the protesters to clear the square. But to no avail.260
On May 13, tens of thousands of students from more than twenty universities escalated their protests against the Chinese government by launching hunger strikes. They hoped to use Gorbachev’s visit, from May 15 to May 18, to capture the attention of the global media. Civil servants, journalists, academics, workers, and other Beijing residents joined the protests, with about 1.2 million gathering in the square on May 18. The international press noticed.261
On May 17 Deng Xiaoping and the other members of the politburo met with Zhao Ziyang, and Deng said that troops would be needed to restore order; Li Peng and other hard-liners agreed. So Zhao, who was the last holdout on the Politburo to advocate letting the demonstrations run their course, prepared his letter of resignation.262
Gorbachev left Beijing on May 18, and Zhao personally appealed to the students to stop their hunger strikes. But the protesters were too far committed, the party leaders had decided on a course of action, and Zhao himself was now out of power. It would be his last public appearance; on May 19, Zhao left office.263
Operating under the authority of martial law, Deng sent in fifty thousand People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops who had been stationed on the outskirts of Beijing, ordering them to disperse the protesters. Remarkably, the soldiers didn’t get far. They were met by hundreds of thousands of protestors who used their numbers to block the roads, trains, and subways leading into Beijing. The soldiers were unable to move, and they’d been instructed by their commanding officers not to open fire. Worse for the Chinese party leaders, the troops appeared to be sympathetic to the protesters and were seen fraternizing with them. So on May 22, the PLA forces were instructed to withdraw from the city. Some wits called it a “partial martial.”264
The ridicule didn’t last long.
On May 22, Ambassador Lilley sent a cable to the White House and the State Department warning that the Chinese government was on the verge of violently suppressing the Tiananmen Square protesters and predicting the use of force within the next several days.265 President Bush consequently sent a short letter to Deng Xiaoping in a last-ditch effort to avoid a catastrophe. He wrote of his “hope that there would be no outcome with respect to the student demonstrations which would interfere with my ability to pursue the kinds of policies which would promote the goals we seek in our relationship. Specifically it would be my hope that any solution you decide upon would avoid violence, repression and bloodshed.”266
By May 24, Beijing was emptied of soldiers. A week went by before Deng Xiaoping and the other party elders decided to bring in the PLA once more. This time they wanted to be sure to clear Tiananmen Square of protesters.
The next day, all hell broke loose.