21

BLOOD ON THE STONES

ON THE EVENING of June 3, 1989, more than 180,000 troops stationed in and around Beijing and drawn from three separate regions of China simultaneously converged on Tiananmen Square, mobilizing trucks, armored personnel carriers (APCs), tanks, and other vehicles from the equivalent of ten army divisions. In response, thousands of students, workers, professionals, bureaucrats, and other protesters went out to barricade the main streets and avenues leading into the heart of the city. Despite an evening news broadcast warning everyone to stay at home and keep away from Tiananmen Square, the protesters weren’t particularly afraid. Seven weeks had already elapsed, almost entirely without violence, since they’d begun their protests. The PLA had been unsuccessful in its previous attempt at removing them, and the protesters’ sheer numbers gave them confidence.³⁶⁴

This time it was different, however. This time the PLA soldiers didn’t hesitate to use their AK-47s, machine guns, and other weapons on the crowds of students, workers, and others. The civilians only had improvised weapons such as bricks, stones, and Molotov cocktails to fight back with. The protesters managed to set a number of trucks, tanks, personnel carriers, and buses on fire, and they killed several soldiers. But the PLA forces easily made it through the makeshift barricades and hostile crowds.

What happened next is still a matter of some controversy. Regime sources insist the demonstrators were allowed to depart Tiananmen Square without interference. Other sources, based on eyewitnesses’ reports, paint a very different picture. According to the US Department of State, by 4:30 on the morning of June 4:

SOME 10,000 TROOPS IN THE SQUARE FORMED CONCENTRIC RINGS, ONE FACING INWARD TOWARD SOME 3,000 REMAINING DEMONSTRATORS, AND THE OTHER FACING OUTWARD. AT 0530 A COLUMN OF ABOUT 50 APCS, TANKS, AND TRUCKS ENTERED TIANANMEN SQUARE FROM THE EAST. DEMOSTRATORS SHOUTED ANGRILY AT THE CONVOY AND PLA TROOPS IN TIANANMEN OPENED A BARRAGE OF RIFLE AND MACHINE GUN FIRE. WHEN THIS GUNFIRE ENDED AT 0545, A NUMBER OF CASUALTIES REMAINED LYING ON THE GROUND. AT 0620, A SECOND COLUMN OF ABOUT 40 APCS AND TRUCKS ENTERED TIANANMEN SQUARE BY THE SAME ROUTE AND THE STUDENTS AGAIN MOVED INTO THE ROAD. PLA TROOPS IN TIANANMEN AGAIN OPENED FIRE WITH RIFLES AND MACHINE GUNS, ONCE MORE CAUSING A LARGE NUMBER OF CASUALTIES.365

Others described some soldiers using flamethrowers and witnessed at least one tank plowed into a crowd, killing and injuring dozens of people. PLA troops smashed the Goddess of Democracy—the ten-meter-high plaster, Styrofoam, and metal statue that the protesters had erected—into small pieces. Then, according to eyewitnesses, they proceeded to detain an unspecified number of protesters, many of whom were tortured and then systematically executed with knives or by blows from rifle butts. The State Department reported the next day “the severity of the assault on Tiananmen Square is clear. Troops shot indiscriminately into crowds of unarmed civilians, including women and children. In one case students attempting to parlay with troops were gunned down.” The State Department’s source added that foreign journalists saw “fleeing protesters shot in the back,” whereupon the enraged demonstrators “burned personnel carriers and killed some security personnel.” James Baker called Tiananmen Square a killing field.³⁶⁶

The killing continued on June 5 and 6. On June 7, PLA soldiers sprayed dozens of bullets into the diplomatic residencies overlooking Tiananmen Square, which included ten US embassy apartments. Ambassador James Lilley, who writes about the massacre in his memoirs, believed the PLA was trying to drive away the international news teams, which had been using some of the residencies to film the massacre. James Baker and the State Department quietly issued orders for the voluntary evacuation of all embassy dependents and other Americans in Beijing and China (about six thousand left out of a total of over eight thousand).³⁶⁷

Because army, medical, and Chinese governmental records have been destroyed or made inaccessible, the exact number of deaths and injuries and their exact causes will most likely never be known. Although Chinese officials later admitted arresting six thousand people (Amnesty International put the figure at more than ten thousand), many others were imprisoned and executed over the succeeding weeks, without announcement or recognition. China had its own “disappeared.”368

The fact that the Chinese leadership wanted to clear the square of protesters shouldn’t be surprising, as Henry Kissinger writes in On China. Similarly, Scowcroft argued that if the blocks around Times Square in New York City were occupied by tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of protesters over several weeks’ time, US authorities would surely take action.³⁶⁹ But why was the Chinese repression so violent? The contrast with the methods later used by US authorities to evict the participants in the Occupy Wall Street protests, for instance, is obvious—and shocking.

Deng Xiaoping, Li Peng, Yang Shangkun, and other Chinese leaders had been doubly embarrassed by Mikhail Gorbachev’s state visit. They had resented the popular acclaim Gorbachev received because of the reforms he had instituted in the Soviet Union, and they had felt humiliated by the ongoing public protests against their own government. Because of the noise of the crowds, the welcoming ceremony for the Soviet leader couldn’t be held at the Great Hall of the People on Tiananmen Square, but had to be conducted at the airport.³⁷⁰ It was right after Gorbachev’s departure, on May 20, that Chinese officials publicly declared martial law.

By this point, the demonstrations had long been a source of anxiety for Chinese party leaders. The hundreds of thousands of students, workers, bureaucrats, professionals, journalists, and other residents of Beijing who showed up in support of the protesters signaled that the Chinese rulers had lost the support of countless citizens. The demonstrations were spreading to other cities, with protests in Nanjing, Xian, Changsha, Wuhan, and elsewhere, thereby revealing just how fed up the Chinese people were.³⁷¹ The top Communist Party officials may have feared that a revolution was in the offing and that their own physical safety might be threatened.³⁷²

Once the frightened party leaders decided to treat the occupation of Tiananmen Square as a military operation rather than a civilian disturbance, several factors narrowed the timing to early June.

One was the challenge posed to the Chinese rulers and the powerful mayor of Beijing on May 28 by the arrival of thousands of sleeping bags and articles of clothing for the protesters, along with other goods and a significant amount of cash that had been raised at a charity concert in Hong Kong. The new resources lifted the protesters’ spirits and enabled them to prolong the occupation.³⁷³

Another was the appearance on May 30 of the “Goddess of Democracy,” modeled on the Statue of Liberty—“obviously designed for American television,” as Scowcroft said. Chinese leaders called it an insult to the nation.374

A third factor was Deng Xiaoping’s concern over succession in the Communist Party. He had already selected Jiang Zemin to succeed Zhou Ziyang, and he wanted the new party secretary to be able to take office as soon as there was a consensus for him to do so—and the protests presented an obstacle.³⁷⁵

In addition, the evening of June 3 was a new moon, the darkest day of the lunar cycle, and therefore well suited to military operations. The unsuccessful advance of the PLA on May 22, by contrast, had taken place during a full moon, when the ample moonlight had helped the demonstrators resist the incoming troops.³⁷⁶

So some kind of military action against the protestors early in June may have been all but inevitable. Less explicable is why Deng and other Chinese leaders sanctioned an attack that even former president Richard Nixon—a hard-nosed policy maker and a longtime friend of China—called “brutal and stupid.”³⁷⁷

One reason is that Deng and his politburo colleagues wanted to send an unequivocal message to the protesters and Chinese people: what had happened in Romania and Eastern Europe wasn’t going to happen in China. So instead of issuing water hoses, tear gas, and rubber bullets to the PLA troops—equipment normally used to handle public disturbances—authorities equipped the soldiers with live ammunition for their AK-47s and their APC-mounted machine guns and sent them out with flamethrowers and other deadly ordnance. Thus when Deng Xiaoping ordered the 150,000 to 200,000 PLA soldiers into action on the evening of June 3, he and his fellow politburo members knew exactly what they were getting.³⁷⁸

What they were getting was terror. But the scale of bloodletting appears to have gone beyond what the Chinese leaders anticipated. One cause may have simply been poor management. A few military units got lost within Beijing as they made their way to Tiananmen Square, for instance. Soldiers didn’t help their fallen fellow soldiers or come to the rescue of those whose safety was being endangered by civilians. On the contrary, some units of the PLA attacked other units, perhaps by accident or perhaps not—since there were reports of internal conflicts within the PLA—and more than a hundred soldiers were killed in action, a very high number under the circumstances (since they were fighting unarmed adversaries, essentially).³⁷⁹ One possible explanation is that the PLA casualties came from friendly fire, with tens of thousands of troops pulled in from different armies from around China using their AK-47s, which had a half-mile range, and APC-mounted machine guns, with an even longer range, in almost total darkness.380

Further consistent with the idea that the massacre was the result of a botched military operation is the fact that after the massacre, Beijing streets were filled with burned-out vehicles, including a thousand trucks and hundreds of armored personnel carriers, police vans, buses, and tanks. Although protesters set some of them alight, several eyewitnesses reported seeing soldiers themselves setting their own army vehicles on fire.³⁸¹ It is possible the Chinese soldiers were ordered to destroy equipment to make the conflict seem more serious militarily than it actually was.

Consistent with this scenario, Chinese officials repeatedly low-balled the number of civilian casualties—Deng Xiaoping told Scowcroft when he visited in July that there were only 310 deaths—while emphasizing the relatively large number of soldier casualties and destroyed vehicles.³⁸² And in the following months, numerous soldiers, officers, and commanders from the army units involved were disciplined, relieved of command, or executed. By the end of 1989, 111 officers and 1,400 enlisted men had been subjected to some form of disciplinary action.³⁸³

The evidence points to a profound lack of coordination within the PLA as well as a glaring absence of effective centralized military command. Scowcroft said that his own worst fear was that the PLA was not following its orders and that the Communist Party wasn’t in control of the military. And we still don’t know the Chinese side of the story, he observed. “If you actually analyze that period of a little over a month,” he said in an oral history interview, “it becomes much more complex with many more forces at work. Did we understand them? No. Not even close.”³⁸⁴

Whatever its causes, the massacre pushed back the clock on years of progress in Chinese civil rights and undermined the country’s record of political and economic reforms in the 1980s. For Bette Bao Lord, who remained in Beijing to report for CBS News, “the legitimacy of the Chinese government” had “been destroyed.” (Deng Xiaoping thought the opposite, claiming “Westerners would forget.”)³⁸⁵ But the immediate impact was enormous. Televisions worldwide broadcast searing images of the atrocities, and newspapers printed graphic photographs of the injured and dead—especially those of a lone protester facing down a column of tanks the following day.³⁸⁶ The news shocked Chinese communities in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, Canada, and elsewhere. In the United States, outraged members of Congress, reporters and commentators, human rights advocates, Hollywood celebrities, and others—Chinese students especially—condemned the massacre.

The Tiananmen Square tragedy seriously damaged China’s foreign relations and international reputation, and it set back US-China relations almost to their pre-1972 status. It also made things extraordinarily difficult for Bush, Scowcroft, the Beijing embassy, and the State Department.387 They now had to find a new course of action that could both respond to the horrors of the massacre and somehow put US-China relations back on track.

The president was under no illusions about the reality of the Chinese government, as his China diaries show. But he wanted to penalize the Chinese military and not the Chinese people. So after issuing a muted response only hours after the killing, he made a stronger statement two days later. Although his inclination as a former professional diplomat and a conservative was to be unsympathetic to the Chinese protesters, his advisers on China policy from across the government, guided by the interagency process managed by the national security advisor, convinced him that he needed to do more. So he halted weapons sales to China, stopped the exchange of senior-level officials between the two countries, cut off joint military R&D with China, and denied the issue of new multilateral loans. There would be no more business as usual.

Scowcroft wondered whether everything they had worked for was “going down the drain.”³⁸⁸ But many members of Congress, media commentators, and Chinese students in the United States cried out for further sanctions. All notable Chinese scholars but one, Michel Oksenberg, abandoned the administration. And other politicians, policy experts, and pundits, meanwhile, questioned the very purpose of US-China relations, wondering whether the two countries were simply too different culturally, politically, and ideologically to get along.³⁸⁹ President Bush later remarked that “a lot of people wanted to cut China off,” including some members of Congress, and that “in the beginning,” the administration “had no support” for its moderate tone.³⁹⁰ Whereas public opinion had been 69 percent favorable toward China in mid-February 1989, by mid-June only 16 percent of Americans had a favorable opinion of China; 78 percent had an unfavorable opinion.³⁹¹

But Bush’s “gut instinct”—one Scowcroft fully agreed with—was that however deplorably the Chinese had behaved, “the relationship with China was a crucial relationship and we shouldn’t let it flounder on [their] one mistake.” The United States “had too much invested in the China situation to throw it away in one stroke.”³⁹² Former president Nixon agreed. Early in the morning of June 5, he called the White House precisely because he feared that if the United States responded with harsher measures, it would unravel years of careful diplomacy and inflict lasting damage on US-China ties. The former president wanted to be sure Bush didn’t panic, since, in his analysis, from a “long range strategic standpoint, the United States has no choice but to strengthen its relationship with China.”393

In fact, it seems that the Chinese may have viewed US-China relations in much the same way, as bleak as their relationship seemed. As one State Department analyst wrote to Secretary Baker on July 1, 1989, “Chinese leaders have consistently signaled their desire to minimize damage to US-Sino relations in the wake of the Tiananmen crackdown. Public statements have been carefully formulated to present China’s position on the Fang Lizhi issue without committing Beijing to respond in any particular way.” Scowcroft, too, was surprised that the Chinese didn’t try to stop the cooperative intelligence program on the Soviet Union.³⁹⁴

Nonetheless, the pressures on the administration remained intense. Further straining US-China relations was the dissident Fang Lizhi, who’d secretly taken refuge in the US embassy. Initially—and mistakenly—Fang was refused asylum. But a savvy State Department official alerted Washington, and the embassy was ordered to grant Fang asylum. Ambassador Lilley then hid Fang and his wife in the nurses’ station, a small outbuilding in the compound with blacked-out windows, where the couple had to reside twenty-four hours a day with only minimal outside contact. They stayed there for almost a year, with only Lilley and a handful of others knowing where they were. As “China’s leading dissident,” Fang was “with us as constant reminder of our connection to ‘bourgeois liberalism’ and puts us at odds with the regime here,” Lilley said. “He is a living symbol of our conflict with China over human rights.”³⁹⁵

But Fang’s presence at the embassy made things that much more difficult for administration, and Lilley, Scowcroft, and Bush were furious at the imposition—especially since Fang had been outspoken in his condemnation of the president and the United States after having been prevented from attending the hotel banquet.³⁹⁶

Chinese officials soon discovered Fang was at the US embassy, and they responded angrily, insisting that the United States was interfering in China’s internal affairs. But since Fang was on a list of people who were to be arrested, the US embassy had little choice. If the embassy had released Fang, he would have been picked up quickly by Chinese authorities and imprisoned, at minimum. Chinese officials stationed guards armed with automatic weapons around the perimeter of the embassy grounds in order to prevent the Americans from smuggling him out.³⁹⁷

The Chinese made things difficult for the Bush administration in other ways. They continued the crackdown against dissidents and arrested thousands, ferreting out those in the universities and the bureaucracy who had supported the demonstrations. They pressured citizens to inform on one another, to admit to their own errors, and to declare their support for the repression. They purged the media of individuals who had expressed support for the protesters. They inflamed the Chinese public by publishing and televising news stories blaming the massacre on the United States and warning of the evils of “bourgeois liberalism.” They also talked of shutting down the intelligence facilities that China and the United States had been jointly using to monitor Soviet missile and nuclear tests.398

Throughout this period, information about what was actually happening in China was murky. Scowcroft himself conceded that the Bush administration knew little about the structure, goals, and organization of the demonstrators and that it did not understand the forces at work resulting in the Tiananmen Square massacre.³⁹⁹ Sometimes Deng Xiaoping appeared in charge, at other times he was wholly absent. Elderly members of the politburo acted indecisively or seemed out of touch. And for a while no one even knew the whereabouts of Deng Xiaoping and Li Peng. Rumors swirled that the Chinese leaders were ready to flee.⁴⁰⁰

The day after he learned of the massacre, President Bush repeatedly tried to telephone Deng Xiaoping—against the advice of his NSC staff—but he couldn’t get through. Chinese leaders were unaccustomed to doing business over the telephone and uncomfortable doing so. So Bush drafted a private message for Deng Xiaoping in which he expressed his respect for Deng and China and spoke of his hope that Deng would show “clemency” toward the students. When Chinese officials responded with a bland admonition that the United States had to stop taking sides, Scowcroft went over to the Chinese embassy on June 21 to meet the ambassador, Han Xu, a friend of his since 1971. Scowcroft explained that President Bush wanted to discuss US-China relations and to send over a special envoy from the administration to deliver Bush’s letter. Deng replied on June 24, agreeing to receive Bush’s envoy.⁴⁰¹

The president considered sending Nixon or Kissinger, but after thinking how famous each of them was and how much attention each would receive, he decided on a less conspicuous alternative. He would send Brent Scowcroft, who knew Deng Xiaoping better than anyone in the White House except Bush himself.⁴⁰² Secretary Baker asked that someone from the State Department accompany Scowcroft, and Bush chose Scowcroft’s colleague and close friend Lawrence Eagleburger. President Bush said the idea was “mainly mine, but it was strongly supported by Scowcroft” as well as “to some degree Jim Baker.”403

While Bush and Scowcroft were planning the trip, Secretary Baker announced the suspension of high-level contacts with China. He meant to refer only to commerce secretary Robert Mosbacher’s trip scheduled for later that month, but his statement inadvertently implied that all high-level visits were off. With the politics of the time, neither President Bush nor Baker was in a position to issue a correction.⁴⁰⁴

At five o’clock in the morning of June 30, barely three weeks after the massacre and under conditions of extreme secrecy, Scowcroft, Eagleburger, a small support staff, and an Air Force crew took off from Andrews Air Force Base. They traveled in a converted C-141 Starlifter military transport, disguised as a commercial carrier, that contained special voice and data communications equipment so Scowcroft and Eagleburger wouldn’t have to rely on the State Department’s communications system. In order to further safeguard the mission’s secrecy, the aircraft was refueled in the air over Seattle/Tacoma. Even Ambassador Lilley wasn’t briefed on Scowcroft’s secret mission until after the national security advisor arrived back in Washington. Neither did Colin Powell, Robert Kimmitt, nor other senior administration officials know of the trip.⁴⁰⁵ And the NSC staff was told that Scowcroft was off to visit his sister in Utah. China’s foreign minister, Qian Qichen, observed that Scowcroft’s visit was even more secretive than Kissinger’s trip of October 1971, because at least the US ambassador in Pakistan had known of Kissinger’s trip.⁴⁰⁶

Scowcroft reports in A World Transformed that Chinese air defense officials spotted an unidentified aircraft penetrating Chinese airspace. It was a moment fraught with potential for a disastrous misunderstanding. Fortunately, Chinese officials checked with President Yang Shangkun before taking any action, and the plane was allowed to proceed unimpeded. An hour later, at 1:00 P.M. on July 1, Scowcroft and Eagleburger landed in Beijing and began their quiet one-day visit—a stay conspicuous for the absence of any ceremony or public display of American flags on cars, on the walls of their hotel, or in the streets.⁴⁰⁷

Scowcroft and Eagleburger met with Deng Xiaoping the next day, and then talked with Li Peng and Qian Qichen. Scowcroft described Deng’s reception as very warm and very friendly, as though he were greeting an old friend. Yet Deng’s message was anything but friendly (although he said that President Bush had been “wise and cool-headed” to send Scowcroft). He refused to make any concessions whatsoever on the Tiananmen Square massacre, which he described as the suppression of a “counterrevolutionary rebellion”; it was an internal Chinese affair, he emphasized, and no one else’s problem. Deng said that China didn’t fear the United States and it wasn’t going to back down now—not after the Communist Party had already proven its mettle in its twenty-two-year war for the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. China had no choice but to punish the instigators of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations, he continued, and under no circumstances would China tolerate outside interference. The United States, and not China, was at fault for endangering US-China ties.408

Scowcroft replied that George Bush was an old friend of China’s who was doing all he could to resist attempts by Congress to adopt harsher anti-China policies. Unfortunately, the Chinese government’s actions had left President Bush and the United States with little choice except to impose sanctions.

Deng replied that while he considered Bush a friend and while he hoped that the two of them could treat each other as friends, he didn’t agree with what was being said. He then left the room.⁴⁰⁹

Scowcroft remembered being struck by Deng’s insistence that he wasn’t going to be the chief policy maker any longer, even though he was still in charge and appeared in good health.⁴¹⁰

In Scowcroft’s meeting with Li Peng and Qian Qichen, Li denied the reports concerning the Tiananmen casualties in the Western press, saying that only 310 people had died—just thirty-six of them students—and maintained that Chinese authorities had been restrained in their actions. Scowcroft explained again that, while he accepted that the Chinese government’s action was a “wholly internal affair,” China’s actions created grave problems for President Bush and threatened the US-China relationship.⁴¹¹ He pointed out that as long as China continued to impose martial law, repress its citizens, and publicly and stridently criticize the United States and American values, nothing could happen, as much as the Bush administration hoped to preserve the security ties between the countries and continue US-China military and commercial relations. He further explained that the president could do only so much, the US Congress had a key role in setting US-China policy, and Bush also had an obligation to consider the views of the American public. The Tiananmen Square incident had effectively become a joint problem for China and the United States, Scowcroft pointed out; both states needed to work at overcoming what had happened.⁴¹²

Scowcroft’s meetings with Deng Xiaoping, Li Peng, and Qian Qichen were less about the content of US-China relations than about the principles underlying their ties. The goals were to let each country know where the other stood and restart a dialogue while signaling President Bush’s good intentions toward Deng Xiaoping, his fellow party leaders, and China itself. In this limited sense, the visit, as tense and strained as it was, paid off. At a minimum, the trip helped keep the administration’s relationship with China from deteriorating further.413

Scowcroft and Eagleburger returned to Washington as secretly as they had left. (Months later, the Pentagon found out about the secret visit after being given an invoice from the Chinese government for refueling the C-141, journalist James Mann reports in his book About Face.)⁴¹⁴ Scowcroft and Eagleburger downplayed what they’d been able to achieve in their subsequent conversations with President Bush and Secretary Baker, and they made no claims that the Chinese had since relaxed their political repression or become more favorably disposed toward the United States.

Ambassador Lilley was similarly equivocal about the prospects of US-China relations. “Today the Chinese are engaged in a massive campaign to discredit U.S. influence to the Chinese people. At the same time China wants our trade our technology and enough of a security connection so that it does not end up facing the Soviet Union alone,” he cabled on July 9. “China now confronts a severe erosion of popular trust and confidence in the leadership, the probability of economic stagflation and possibly recession, and a shattered image to the outside world. The overall prospects are grim and the techniques China uses to deal with its crises are backwards and conservative but still occasionally cunning,” he wrote. “Hardliners dominate temporarily, but there are constant signs of a leadership struggle between forces representing an outward orientation and those that prefer to turn inward.”⁴¹⁵

A few weeks later, Bush wrote Deng, thanking him for hosting the visit and assuring him he was doing everything he could to preserve their friendship. But the president stressed that it took two to make the relationship work—the Chinese had to help.

In his reply, Deng expressed his frustration with the United States and again scolded Bush for the United States’ interference in China’s internal affairs. Deng and Bush each thought the other had “tied the knot”—that his counterpart was hindering progress in their relationship—and each therefore believed his counterpart had the responsibility to untie the knot and fix the relationship.⁴¹⁶ Yet as Scowcroft rightly observed, it was President Bush who was going the extra mile to revive the US-China relationship, not the Chinese party leaders.⁴¹⁷

A CIA analysis of China’s attitudes toward the United States “in the wake of the Tiananmen crackdown” suggested that Chinese leaders were “preoccupied . . . with the daunting task of shoring up regime legitimacy and restoring bureaucratic discipline,” and officials “consistently have held out the olive branch, stressing China’s desire for friendly relations with all countries.” The report found that “Beijing has deliberately avoided the appearance of a crisis in US-China relations” and did not publicize the news “that China would reciprocate for the US halt in military contacts and cooperation.” Instead, “the vast majority of press articles mentioning outside support for democracy activists, including articles attacking VOA [Voice of America] and maligning Fang Lizhi and his wife and student leaders with US ties, have been aimed at an internal audience. Their primary aim is not to send threatening messages to the US . . . but to justify Chinese government actions” and to discredit “alternative (negative) assessments and sources of information.” In sum, “the more difficulty the regime has in efforts to shore up its legitimacy, the greater the temptation to ‘prove’ that outsiders with evil anti-China intentions are behind regime critics.”418

As for the attacks on the foreign media, “especially the American media and the VOA,” Lilley attributed these to the Chinese desire to avoid the negative coverage associated with controversial human rights policies. “They realistically understand that continuing public violence against their own people risks foreign support,” Lilley said. “This was the lesson for them of media coverage of Tiananmen.”⁴¹⁹

Since official visits between the two countries were temporarily discontinued, Bush and Scowcroft used separate private visits by Nixon and Kissinger to learn more about the Chinese thinking and to keep the dialogue open.⁴²⁰

Nixon’s visit had been planned for some time, then delayed until October 1989 because of Tiananmen Square. (According to Kissinger biographer Walter Isaacson, when Kissinger communicated with him about coordinating their travels, Nixon deliberately chose not to respond with his travel dates to ensure that his visit would come first.)⁴²¹ Because of the high regard with which he was held in China, Nixon received “remarkable access” to Chinese leaders and was received by Deng Xiaoping, Li Peng, Jiang Zemin, Yang Shangkun, Qian Qichen, and Zhu Rongji (mayor of Shanghai at the time), among others.

In his meeting with Deng Xiaoping, Nixon forcefully explained how the massacre had immobilized the United States and how it was in the mutual interests of the United States and China to move their relationship forward. Deng insisted that the United States was in the stronger position and China in the weaker one; it was therefore up to the Americans to take the initiative. Nixon was able to secure one concession, however: he got the Chinese authorities to stop posting armed guards around the perimeter of the US embassy grounds.422

After receiving Nixon’s report in early November and having him for dinner in the residence, Bush wrote Deng Xiaoping once more, this time to express his interest in sending another envoy for the ostensible purpose of updating Deng on the talks scheduled with Gorbachev the first week of December. In the letter, Bush reassured Deng that the Malta summit would not adversely affect US-China relations and that he still valued the US-China bilateral relationship. Deng replied—via a letter that the Chinese ambassador handed to Scowcroft on November 15—that he, too, wanted an improved relationship and that he would welcome another visit.⁴²³

Kissinger’s early November visit to China, his fifteenth overall, combined commerce and politics. He was accompanied by Maurice Greenberg, the chairman of the multinational insurance giant AIG, and by Judith Hope, a prominent Washington lawyer and member of the Harvard Corporation and of the Union Pacific board of directors. Kissinger, still a celebrity, was one of the few statesmen who could straddle the political, business, and cultural worlds. In honor of his arrival, the US embassy hosted a gala reception, with many of China’s business, cultural, and political leaders in attendance.⁴²⁴

Kissinger met with Deng Xiaoping, Li Peng, and the new party general secretary, Jiang Zemin. He spoke of his support for Bush’s message and conveyed the administration’s interests (and his interests) in seeing US-China relations flourish. Kissinger also tried to help out on the most contentious issue dividing the two governments, the Fang Lizhi situation, which Bush himself had called “a real stick in the eye to the Chinese.”⁴²⁵ Deng proposed a package deal: he would allow Fang to leave China if the United States promised not to exploit the dissident for political purposes, agreed to resume economic cooperation with China (that is, to continue with business deals, loans, and military sales that had all been put on hold), and consented to host a visit by Jiang Zemin.⁴²⁶

The Nixon and Kissinger visits reaffirmed the fact that the Chinese leaders were interested in renewed dialogue with the United States and confirmed to the Chinese rulers the importance that President Bush and national security advisor Scowcroft assigned to nurturing their ties with China. The two trips thus prepared the ground for Scowcroft’s second visit to Beijing in December, 1989, shortly after the US-Soviet summit in Malta.

With his role in the Nixon and Ford presidencies, his subsequent private visits to China in the late 1970s and 1980s, his focus on the United States’ long-term strategic interests, and his very close relationship with President Bush, Scowcroft was perfectly positioned to serve as the point man for US-China relations from 1989 to 1993. In this area, Secretary Baker took a backseat, especially after the Tiananmen Square massacre.427

But controversy was to surround Scowcroft’s second China trip. On November 30, shortly before the president, Baker, and Scowcroft were to leave for Malta, Representative Nancy Pelosi’s Emergency Chinese Immigration Relief Act had landed on Bush’s desk for his signature. (It was the first time Pelosi’s name would become familiar to any significant numbers of Americans outside her own California congressional district.) The bill would allow Chinese students to stay in the United States when applying for a change in their visa status, rather than having to return to China before applying (which had been the normal practice). Scowcroft feared that if the bill passed, China would stop allowing students to come to the United States for study. And given that the Chinese government also opposed the bill, neither Scowcroft nor Bush wanted to put any more barriers in the way of a recovery of US-China relations.

For these reasons, Bush wanted to veto the bill, but it did not appear he had the votes in Congress to prevent an override, given the veto-proof margins by which Congress had passed the bill (by 403–0 in the House, and a voice vote in the Senate). Bush decided to preempt Congress by issuing an executive order to virtually the same effect, thereby achieving unilaterally what Congress wanted to do through law, but with the advantage that the executive order allowed him to retain his executive authority and to later rescind the waiver if he so chose. So on November 30, Bush vetoed the Pelosi bill, stating that it constituted “congressional micromanagement of foreign policy.”⁴²⁸ Soon thereafter, he departed for Malta.

The issue did not die there. Now the challenge was to find the votes needed to sustain the veto in the Democratic-controlled Senate. (There was no chance of sustaining the veto in the House.) Scowcroft and others in the administration worked ceaselessly in the attempt to prevent the override. They contacted individual US senators, discussed at length with them the condition of and the prospects for US-China relations, and consulted with their political allies and acquaintances in the press so as to further promote the administration’s position. Scowcroft said he’d never worked so hard in his life.⁴²⁹

The efforts paid off. On January 25, the Senate sustained the president’s veto by a vote of 62 to 37.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration were continuing to push ahead on the diplomatic front. On December 9, Scowcroft and Eagleburger arrived in Beijing, accompanied by Ambassador Lilley as well by Douglas Paal and Chase Untermeyer, the president’s director of personnel and a longtime aide. Untermeyer explained that for him to go along with Scowcroft and Eagleburger on the trip—an unusual decision by the president—indicated to the Chinese just how committed Bush was to the relationship.430 The inclusion of Lilley and Paal likewise showed that both the NSC and the State Department were strongly invested in the US-China relationship. The central goal of the trip was to establish a road map for improving US-China relations.⁴³¹

But Scowcroft and Bush miscalculated how the American media would react to news of this trip. With the US-Soviet summit just concluded and with the level of anti-Chinese sentiment around the country at the time, there was no good moment to announce the upcoming trip, which was to be low profile though not secret. As a result, the White House delayed announcing the trip as long as it could and didn’t release the news until Scowcroft and Eagleburger were already en route to Beijing. With the two envoys arriving in the middle of the night in the United States and with the news breaking on a weekend, the press, members of Congress, and the public were immediately suspicious of the Bush administration’s motives and its apparent pro-China agenda.⁴³²

Scowcroft first debriefed the Chinese leaders on the Malta summit, with the discussion centering on the development and implications of Soviet Union’s weakened condition. He found that the Chinese had been surprised at Gorbachev’s request for financial assistance during the May summit in Beijing; Qian Qichen went so far as to predict the collapse of the Soviet economy, since he didn’t see the Soviet Union undertaking any meaningful economic reforms to address its serious underlying problems.⁴³³ Scowcroft then raised the topic of Fang Lizhi, mentioned some of the unresolved military and commercial issues the United States had with China, and talked about the specific steps the two governments might take to improve their relationship. Deng restated his offer of a package deal for Fang’s release. He also asked that China be allowed to launch three Hughes Corporation satellites for its Australian and Hong Kong corporate clients, and that the suspended World Bank and Japanese loans be resumed.

For his part, Scowcroft requested that martial law be lifted, that the Chinese stop jamming the popular Voice of America—listened to by tens of millions in China—and that China halt its sale of M-9 (Silkworm) missiles to the Middle East.434 Although the status of Fang Lizhi remained the largest sticking point in the normalization of US-China relations, Scowcroft refused the package deal tying Fang’s freedom to specific US actions. He argued that the resolution of Fang’s situation and the lifting of the economic sanctions should be disconnected; he wanted the United States and China to proceed on separate timetables, with each side doing what it could to improve the relationship gradually rather than moving in unison.⁴³⁵

The release of Fang Lizhi did happen on its own schedule, as Scowcroft planned, without being explicitly linked to the lifting of economic sanctions. And on the same day as the US invasion of Panama, the administration announced the authorization of the satellite launch (Paal joked, “we invaded Panama in order to launch the satellite”).

Scowcroft would be the last foreign visitor to be received by Deng, who retired from public life soon after the visit (with the important exception of his southern tour in early 1992) and became increasingly reclusive until his death in 1997.⁴³⁶

Scowcroft’s second trip to Beijing became notorious for the toast he gave his Chinese hosts. At a banquet held on December 9, his first evening in China, Scowcroft was about to toast foreign minister Qian Qichen and the other Chinese leaders when, to his “total surprise,” several photojournalists entered the hall. The sudden presence of the cameras forced Scowcroft to make a difficult decision. He could go ahead and make the toast with the likely outcome that excerpts from the speech would be replayed to millions of Americans under headlines to the effect of “Bush’s National Security Advisor Toasts the Butchers of Tiananmen Square.” Or he could decline to give the toast and dishonor his hosts, but thereby spare the Bush administration a public relations disaster.⁴³⁷

He “swallowed his pride,” he said, and made the toast. In the speech, drafted by Lilley and Paal and not intended for either American or international audiences, Scowcroft spoke of trying to overcome the difficulties in the bilateral relationship. He acknowledged the different values and distinct ideologies separating the two countries, saying, “Speaking as a friend, I would not be honest if I did not acknowledge that we have profound areas of disagreement—on the events at Tiananmen [and] on the sweeping changes in Eastern Europe.” But he went on to assert China’s central importance to the United States and to recognize the need for both countries to protect the other’s “face.” He reminded his hosts of the good-faith efforts that Bush had already made—restarting the Peace Pearl project (upgrading the electronics on China’s F-8s), defeating the congressional sanctions bill, and vetoing the Pelosi bill. The United States and China could either revert to the personal exchanges and ping-pong diplomacy of the 1970s or move forward with a new strategic and economic partnership.438

A CNN news crew photographed Scowcroft and Qian beaming at each other after the toast and clinking their glasses. The news footage stunned the American public and audiences worldwide. Members of Congress of both parties, journalists, and other opinion leaders vilified Scowcroft and Bush for conducting an amoral foreign policy and sanctioning tyranny. One member of Congress called the toast “obscene.” Another called Scowcroft and Eagleburger’s trip “embarrassing” and said it was a slap in the face to freedom-loving people. Senator Mitch McConnell called the visit “the wrong message at the wrong time.”⁴³⁹

News commentators said the trip contradicted the administration’s own ban on high-level meetings between the countries and claimed Chinese officials were reveling in the attention. The Washington Post’s Mary McGrory compared Scowcroft and Eagleburger’s “inexplicable and indefensible” mission to Robert McFarlane and Oliver North’s ill-considered trip to Iran. The New York Times’ A. M. Rosenthal reminded readers that Scowcroft and Eagleburger were both former associates of Henry Kissinger, first in the Nixon and Ford administrations and then with Kissinger Associates, and described them as essentially kissing Deng Xiaoping’s bloodied hand. Similar criticisms reverberated in the US heartland: the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, for example, editorialized that the Bush administration was kowtowing to the Chinese and discarding human rights as a concern of US foreign policy. The White House was disgracing American ideals, the Post-Dispatch’s editors concluded.⁴⁴⁰

Scowcroft himself felt “sandbagged.” He had previously come to an understanding with his Chinese hosts that the American media weren’t supposed to be at the dinner. And he knew the camera crews could have entered the banquet hall only with official permission. However, he refused to speculate on the motives of the Chinese for reneging on their understanding.⁴⁴¹

Fang Lizhi had no such reticence. The “obvious objective” of Chinese leaders was to document Scowcroft’s words as proof of the United States’ endorsement of China’s Communist Party and to show the Chinese people and the world that US-China relations were again on track.⁴⁴²

Nine days after the news broke of Scowcroft’s trip to Beijing and his infamous toast, Scowcroft and Eagleburger’s secret July visit became public knowledge, pouring more oil on the flames. Former ambassador Winston Lord, who’d turned “very hostile” to the Chinese government after the Tiananmen Square massacre, condemned the Scowcroft trips as “pilgrimages” and called the Bush administration’s China policy weak-minded and misguided. He also repeated the charge that the administration was practicing a double standard on human rights, treating China one way and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union another.443

For George Bush, a seasoned politician and a national figure for fifteen years, the criticism from members of Congress and in the press was nothing new; if he was bothered by the attacks, he never let on. But Scowcroft wasn’t a politician; he was a consummate foreign policy professional, a dedicated public servant, and occasionally the president’s personal agent. The fierce condemnations were new for him.⁴⁴⁴ While he was more than willing to stand up for President Bush’s—and his—China policy and accept the consequences, the public attacks stung.

At almost the same time, however, Scowcroft and the Bush administration were succeeding on another foreign policy front.