Tiananmen remembrance reveals the fallacy of the US-China ideological competition narrative
Politicians stand with the Tiananmen students for democracy in China while they work to undermine democracy at home
On June 4 we commemorated the 35th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Activists, advocates, columnists, politicians, government officials made statements of remembrance. They portrayed the students’ calls for democracy, fundamental freedoms, and constitutional rule of law as representing the latent aspirations of the Chinese people smothered by the oppressive Chinese Communist Party.
Many of these same politicians convey a related narrative (including through their June 4 statements) of an ideological competition between the United States and China – a struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, between freedom and tyranny.
In one sense, this narrative is a contradiction. If, as we said on June 4, the people of China want the same thing we want – democratic freedoms – then it isn’t a competition of ideas or values. We are on the same side.
Or so we pretend. Disillusionment with democracy is growing among young Americans, with more than half finding it “in trouble” or “failed.” One poll finds 81 percent of Americans think democracy is under threat. How can we claim to know that the people of China aspire democracy when we can’t even acknowledge that our own people are losing faith in it?
In another sense, this narrative is a fallacy. Because many of the same politicians who claim that the United States stands on the side of democracy are helping to undermine it at home.
Hostility to democracy has become endemic among half the American electorate. Presidential nominee Donald Trump refuses to accept the result of an election he lost, one of the core definitional elements of a democracy, and institutionalize election denial within The Party’s operations. He pressured officials to fix an election result in his favor. His supporters have intimidated and threatened election officials across the country, forcing them to quit. Party-run legislatures have passed laws to turn election oversight from administrative offices to partisan entities. His allies have crafted a plan to weaken election oversight and give The Party’s cadres greater control over government.
Along with this, members of The Party demand the use of state security to quash student and civic protests whose messages they find threatening. “Send in the Troops” to remove justice protectors. Bring in the police to clear out pro-justice (pro-Palestinian) students. Crush the protestors and deport them, as Trump promised, and give the military greater authority to do so.
Eerie echoes of Tiananmen, as Yangyang Cheng wrote in her excellent piece, Grieving Tiananmen as US Cops Crush Campus Protests. To be clear, I am not drawing equivalency between the Tiananmen Square crackdown and the response to today’s student protests. But it is a shared impulse to view students and their speech as threats that justify state power to suppress.
All this does a grave disservice to the Tiananmen generation and their message. It’s a rotten thing for politicians to use them as a prop for democracy virtue-signaling while simultaneously insulting their message by undermining democratic freedoms in the United States.
It’s a demoralizing thing to do to the people of China today. Why should they believe us when we speak of their right to enjoy democratic freedoms unshackled from the dictates of the CCP, when half of the U.S.’s political establishment is signaling that Americans don’t deserve democratic freedoms and are working to shackle democratic institutions under the dictates of The Party?
How do we explain to the people of China that the form of democracy that their Party leaders are peddling (“whole process people’s democracy”) isn’t actual democracy, when Party leaders in the U.S. are doing the same thing?[1]
The notion of ideological competition between the United States and China is, at face value, compelling. But it is a fallacious narrative. It fails the test of authenticity, per above. It lazily derives from a nostalgic and outdated Cold War mindset, and Yangyang eloquently argues. And it deceives (possibly intentionally) by making us think the threat to democracy is only over there rather than here inside our own house too.
A week ago I wrote about International Relations Heuristic Bias and how we tend to categorize big ideas and ideologies by country (vertically) rather than analyze them as they flow across countries (horizontally). The U.S.-China ideological competition narrative is a prime example of how we fall into that trap.
The whole of point of this Unexemptional blog is to argue that double standards in our foreign policy prevent us from achieving a vision of international relations based on respect for human rights and democratic freedoms. I can’t think of a better example of this problem than the politicians who say they stand with the Tiananmen students for democracy in China while they work to undermine democracy at home.
[1] For a documentation of how the CCP and far-right parties around the world, including in the U.S., are engaged in the same behaviors, see The CCP is a conservative party