Authoritarian Reform and Its Limits: Rethinking Tiananmen 1989 from a Developmental Perspective

Jianyong Yue revisits the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown through a developmental lens and invites reflection on the longer-term consequences of privileging stability over political accountability when engaging emerging powers.

On the night of June 3–4, 1989, Deng Xiaoping ordered a military crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square—an act that became a defining moment in modern Chinese history. The violence drew global condemnation, yet it also secured the political stability that underpinned China’s rapid economic rise. Ever since, analysts have debated whether the suppression charted a pragmatic course to prosperity—or foreclosed a historic opportunity for democratic transformation.

But a deeper question endures: Did Deng truly grasp the long-term lessons of Tiananmen? From today’s vantage point, the answer appears more ambiguous than many conventional narratives suggest.

China’s Rise, Russia’s Decline

In the aftermath of 1989, many hoped China would join the “third wave” of democratization sweeping through Eastern Europe. Critics of Deng Xiaoping’s crackdown saw it as a missed opportunity to pair economic reform with political liberalization. Yet the collapse of the Soviet Union and the chaos of Yeltsin’s “shock therapy” complicate this view. Rather than democratic consolidation, Russia endured a painful transition marked by institutional weakness and scant Western support.

China, by contrast, surged ahead. By the early 1990s, its economy was gaining steam. In 1992, Western governments—most notably the United States—began lifting post-Tiananmen sanctions and restored commercial ties. Foreign direct investment exploded, quadrupling by the decade’s end relative to the 1980s. China benefited from a unique moment: global markets remained open even as domestic political reform stalled. “China’s rise, Russia’s fall” became a defining geopolitical contrast of the post–Cold War era.

Yet this outcome was far from inevitable. China’s ascent reflected a rare alignment: bold market reforms at home alongside a permissive international order shaped by a U.S. strategy known as “drawing China out.” In the wake of Tiananmen, Washington prioritized stability over democratization, seeking to preserve an authoritarian but pliable partner—even as it maintained a long-term hope for China’s political evolution.

The Grand Bargain

Although the post-Tiananmen years are often associated with political crackdown, they also marked China’s quiet reintegration into the global economy. This shift was no accident. U.S. policymakers—particularly under President George H. W. Bush—opted for strategic pragmatism over moral clarity. While Washington publicly imposed sanctions, it quietly preserved bilateral ties to avoid pushing Beijing toward Moscow.

In a notable 1989 Time article published shortly after his October visit to Beijing, former President Richard Nixon argued that China’s stability was essential to balancing Soviet and Japanese influence in Asia. U.S. Ambassador Winston Lord similarly advocated maintaining ties with a China that, lacking alternatives, would look westward for its modernization path. Realist logic prevailed. Integrating China into the global economy aimed to foster it not as a peer competitor, but as a pliable status-quo power subservient to American leadership.

This strategic architecture set the stage for Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 Southern Tour, which reaffirmed economic liberalization as the regime’s core priority. Crucially, China shifted from the 1980s model of market socialism to market Leninism: unfettered capitalist economics under tighter authoritarian party control.

A grand bargain emerged: the U.S. would tolerate China’s authoritarian modernization so long as it remained integrated within global capitalist markets. This was no novelty, despite “end of history” rhetoric. Similar patterns unfolded in Pinochet’s Chile and South Korea, where economic liberalization coincided with U.S.-backed repression of democracy movements.

Growth Without Development

China’s market-Leninist path has carried significant long-term costs. Without effective checks and balances, rapid growth fueled the privatization of the state itself. While coercively strong, the Chinese state proved weak in protecting public goods—a phenomenon Gunnar Myrdal described as the “soft state.” Rent-seeking and crony capitalism thrived unchecked. As inequality widened and domestic consumption lagged, China became increasingly dependent on external demand, deepening its integration into global markets.

Put simply, crony capitalism evolved into comprador capitalism. In exchange for access to Western markets, China ceded economic nationalism under U.S. pressure, adopting a Ricardian export-led growth model embedded in global value chains throughout the 1990s and beyond—often sacrificing technological autonomy and wage growth. Despite recent efforts to pivot away from this path amid fears of Western-led decoupling, convergence with advanced economies remains elusive.

Unlike postwar West Germany and Japan—where strong bureaucratic institutions like Germany’s ordoliberal ministries and Japan’s Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) cultivated disciplined technocratic elites capable of long-term strategic planning—China has lacked similarly robust frameworks to drive innovation-led development.

Deng himself acknowledged some of these contradictions. In 1993, he confided to his brother that development might bring “more problems than no development at all.” Yet by anchoring legitimacy in a growth-first agenda, he left little institutional room for course correction. This blurred a vital distinction between mere economic growth and genuine development—assuming rising GDP would naturally produce technological catch-up and structural transformation.

Toward a Democratic Developmental State? A Lesson Unlearned

Could China have taken a different path? While ultimately speculative, the question remains instructive. Had Zhao Ziyang or liberal reformers prevailed, democratic success would have been far from assured—especially absent credible and sustained Western support. Many within the movement leaned more toward neoliberal market orthodoxy than social democratic alternatives, raising the prospect of economic turmoil without even the stabilizing force of authoritarian rule.

The key lesson of Tiananmen, therefore, may lie less in the suppression itself than in Deng Xiaoping’s failure to chart a developmental course that balanced autonomous national development with institutional accountability—a path toward a democratic developmental state. Rather than constructing a truly modern and inclusive state, the post-1989 regime entrenched elite dominance, marginalized independent institutions, and co-opted technocrats into an increasingly insulated power structure.

Now, amid slowing growth, demographic strain, and deepening inequality, China’s externally driven development model shows clear signs of exhaustion. Without democratic checks or a strong middle class, and with leadership still wedded to what economist Ha-Joon Chang calls “anti-developmental globalization,” China’s modernization—rooted more in external integration than domestic resilience—risks stalling. Structural reform is once again essential, but this time authoritarianism may be the chief obstacle—not the guarantor.

Conclusion: A Legacy Still in Question

More than three decades after Tiananmen, China’s development model remains both globally consequential and deeply contested. Deng Xiaoping’s legacy is rightly credited with lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty, yet the political costs of this achievement have received far less scrutiny. The ultimate lesson may be that economic success under authoritarianism can be real—but it is seldom sustainable, especially when it depends heavily on deep external integration paired with internal repression.

For China to achieve genuinely autonomous and equitable development, it must confront the unfinished business of 1989: not merely building a wealthy nation, but forging a just, democratic state dedicated to independent and fair national progress. This remains Tiananmen’s unlearned lesson—and the defining challenge for a new generation

For today’s global policy community, Tiananmen is not only a Chinese legacy—it is a reminder of how the international system interacts with domestic institutional choices, and the long shadows such choices can cast on global governance.

Jianyong Yue is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and previously taught Chinese politics and development at King’s College and LSE. He published China’s Rise in the Age of Globalization: Myth or Reality (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) and Crony Comprador Capitalism: The Institutional Origins of China’s Rise and Decline (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). 

蔡淑芳@sfchoi8964, CC BY 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons