Deadly Decision in Beijing: Succession Politics, Protest Repression, and the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre

Su rejects the conventional view—based partly on The Tiananmen Papers, a 2001 compilation of secret Chinese official documents that I co-edited—that the Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping ordered a brutal military attack on pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing in 1989 to suppress what he saw as an existential threat to the ruling party. Instead, the author constructs a lively narrative of elite maneuvering in which Deng first prolonged the crisis and then used excessive force against the protesters in order to purge the liberal faction led by the Communist Party’s general secretary, Zhao Ziyang. The murders of students and the imprisoning of workers were incidental to this political gambit. After the crisis, Deng sidelined the conservatives, led by Premier Li Peng, who wanted to maintain a command economy. By the time he died in 1997, Deng had set China on the course where it remains today, with a closed political system and a relatively open economy.