35 Years After Tiananmen, China’s Conduct Again Triggers Alarm

China’s 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy activists sparked a seminal crisis in Beijing’s relationship with the West. On the massacre’s 35th anniversary, China’s leaders face familiar international blowback over their conduct.
Instead of gunfire, today’s sources of discomfort about China are a mix of its aggressive industrial policy and militarization toward neighbors, plus a national-security agenda from Chinese leader Xi Jinping that has curtailed personal freedoms at home and shaped affairs abroad.
A poor and relatively backward nation in 1989, China is now an economic powerhouse backed by a formidable military and diplomatic corps vying to reset the global order and impose its will internationally.
Beijing’s image is undergoing “a systematic, progressive, long-term falloff, not a one-time shock” like the one triggered in 1989, said David Shambaugh, a distinguished visiting fellow at California’s Hoover Institution who has studied China for four decades and who sees parallels and differences with the post-Tiananmen situation.
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