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