Charles Kraus, a China specialist and Program Associate with the Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program, sat down with Stapleton Roy, former US Ambassador to China and Director Emeritus of the Kissinger Institute, to talk about China and the break-up of the Soviet Union. Ambassador Roy joined the US Foreign Service immediately after graduating from Princeton in 1956, retiring 45 years later with the rank of Career Ambassador, the highest in the service. During a career focused on East Asia and the Soviet Union, his ambassadorial assignments included Singapore, Indonesia, and of course, China. He arrived in Beijing in August 1991, just as the coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev was taking place in the Soviet Union. In 2008 he joined the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars to head the newly created Kissinger Institute

Their conversation focused on the collapse of the Soviet Union and the tense diplomatic atmosphere in which Ambassador Roy assumed his post in 1991. The communist world was crumbling, and it was unclear to outside observers whether China would be the next domino to fall—speculation of which the Chinese leadership was keenly aware. The conversation below covers developments both within and outside of China at the end of the Cold War, painting a picture of domestic tumult and existential questions within China itself but also of a United States which fundamentally misunderstood China’s trajectory at this critical juncture.

 Ambassador Roy, you arrived in China in August of 1991. This was only two years after the tragedy at Tian’anmen Square, and the bloody crackdown on student protests. The Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Zhao Ziyang had also been purged. Can you describe what it was like to go to China at this time, what was the sting of the Tian’anmen tragedy, and how did it affect US-China relations, and your work on the ground in Beijing?

 It was a very exciting time when I went to Beijing….During this period we had the coming down of the Berlin Wall, and we had the gradual loosening of the Soviet grip on Eastern Europe, but at that time it was not anticipated that the Soviet Union itself would dissolve. When I arrived in Beijing in August of 1991, it was right at the time of the August Coup against Gorbachev, that began the process of the breakup of the Soviet Union, and in fact when I presented my credentials to the president of China, it was during the coup and both of us had been watching the events in Moscow on CNN and that was the topic of the conversation I had with him after presenting my credentials. The breakup of the Soviet Union was very significant, it had a domestic impact in China, and it had an international impact. Domestically, there had been a sort of glamor about the US-China relationship because even though China and the United States achieved a great breakthrough that led to the establishment of diplomatic relations, during the final stages of Cultural Revolution, when conditions in China were terrible, but everybody recognized that this was a breakthrough of enormous significance, and in fact it was the turning point of the Cold War. Psychologically after 1972 when President Nixon went to China the United States became self-confident that the trend of history was on our side. Even though we didn’t expect there to be breaking up of the Soviet empire.

When the events in June of 1989 occurred, it essentially destroyed the image of China in the United States. James Lilley our ambassador to China at that time had a very difficult time because one of the dissidents had achieved asylum at the US embassy attitudes were very hostile to our embassy in Beijing. As a result Ambassador Lilley’s assignment ended after two years and I was sent in as his replacement. Attitudes in the United States were hostile to China. The issue of China was being used by Democrats in Congress to attack a president whose big strength was foreign policy. On most issues they had no ability to criticize his handling of things. They seized on the China issue which was of course of particular interest of his because of his earlier assignment as the head of the offices in Beijing. So I arrived in China under these circumstances, and the first thing that occurs after I arrive there is the beginning of the process of the unraveling of the Soviet Union .

So this had two important consequences: One was domestically in China. The events in June of 1989 had undermined the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party and some of the people watching what was taking place in Beijing in 1989 thought that communist rule in China might be coming to an end. In fact that was not the case. And China was able to restore stability in China, so when I arrived in China the legacy of Tian’anmen was no longer an active event in China. But the international impact of the events in Tian’anmen were still very alive and as the Soviet empire began to unravel, with the loosening of Soviet control over the Eastern European satellite states and then the gradual declarations of independence by the individual republics of the Soviet Union. It looked as though communist rule was collapsing globally, and that meant many people wondered whether this was going to have an impact on China. The Chinese leaders were very conscious of this. So this was a very delicate time in China. Because not only not only was the communist world losing the position that it had occupied since world war 2, but China itself was in the spotlight as to what might happen.

So one of my early challenges in China was to convince Washington that it should not base policy toward China on the assumption that communist rule in China was about to collapse because in fact, our understanding of the situation in China in that time was that stability had been restored and that the ruling group in China was not under any immediate challenge that might threaten its rule.

So one of my early challenges in China was to convince Washington that it should not base policy toward China on the assumption that communist rule in China was about to collapse because in fact, our understanding of the situation in China in that time was that stability had been restored and that the ruling group in China was not under any immediate challenge that might threaten its rule. The second impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union was it removed the Soviet threat. I think we all know that the breakthrough to China occurred in 1971 and ‘72 because the United States and China were both so concerned by the Soviet threat that they decided that cooperation between them was worth doing even though we had a hostile relationship up to that point and from ’72 until we established diplomatic relations in 1979, and then from the decade after that, we had been busily trying to expand our relationship with China based on our common sense that the Soviet threat still was a potential danger to our national interests.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, all of the sudden that rationale was removed, and this occurred at a time when the image of China had turned hostile in the United States, and so that meant, with a new administration coming in in Washington the strategic underpinnings of the US-China relationship had been removed, and as you recall the Clinton administration began with the sense that the primary focus of our relationship to China would be human rights. And early in my assignment there, the President made the decision to attach human rights criteria to the US decision as to whether or not we would renew their Most Favored Nation trading privileges for China. So not only did I have hostile public opinion in the US that affected the relationship, but I also had an administration that no longer had a clear sense of what the strategic basis for dealing with China should be. So there was a significant impact on the US-China relationship from both of these developments

 You had mentioned that, as you were presenting your credentials you watched on TV with your Chinese counterparts, news of what was happening on in the Soviet Union. How else did you keep appraised of what China and Chinese leaders were thinking about what was going on in the Soviet Union? Was this a frequent topic of conversation you had with Chinese counterparts, or were you mostly reading the tealeaves in the media, in the Chinese media?

: Embassies do both. Our embassy was still relatively small but it was very, very competent, and naturally we had contacts throughout the Chinese government, we had contact throughout the diplomatic community, there was a Soviet embassy in Beijing at the time and the US embassy was in touch with them, so we could not only go out and talk to Chinese to get their impressions of what was going on, but we also could talk to our diplomatic colleagues some of whom were Eastern Europeans or neighbors of the Soviet Union, some of them were the Soviets themselves, and we had contacts with all of those people, plus we had access to the international news media, and we had the experience that many of the officers had already developed over the decades before that.

CK: And based on what you had previously said, you had sensed that stability would prevail in China, even as communism was collapsing in the Soviet Union. On the other hand, many people held different views; many people thought the same thing could happen in China. What was the source of your view that China would endure and continue to be led by the Chinese communist party even after 1991.

I remember when I arrived in China in 1978 we had to bring with us all of the everyday necessities you would expect to use in a post, and when I went back to China 10 years later, all of those commodities were available freely in China. So the price reform had had a dramatic impact on what was produced in China but at the same time it resulted in enormous increases in the prices of everyday commodities. And the result was it wasn’t simply the political ferment that was made possible by the opening up of the domestic environment in China but there were also these economic difficulties that people had to cope with because of the changes in price structures that affected their everyday lives.

: The principal change was on the part of the Chinese themselves. What made the 1989 events so difficult for the Chinese Communist Party to deal with was there was considerable sympathy for the desire of the student demonstrators in Tiananmen for an opening up of the political system. And if you recall the demonstrations occurred because of the death of Hu Yaobang who had been liberal-minded General Secretary of the communist party in the early 1980s he was removed in 1986 by Deng Xiaoping because the reform and openness process had resulted in some instability in student populations around China and Deng felt that Hu had not been handling that with sufficient rigor to maintain stability so he was replaced by Zhao Ziyang who up to that point had been the premier. So in the lead up to Tian’anmen we had this ferment taking place in China, and in the middle of the decade China carried out a price reform which completely transformed the economic system in China, up to that point the desirable goods in china were all in scarce supply. I remember when I arrived in China in 1978 we had to bring with us all of the everyday necessities you would expect to use in a post, and when I went back to China 10 years later, all of those commodities were available freely in China. So the price reform had had a dramatic impact on what was produced in China but at the same time it resulted in enormous increases in the prices of everyday commodities. And the result was it wasn’t simply the political ferment that was made possible by the opening up of the domestic environment in China but there were also these economic difficulties that people had to cope with because of the changes in price structures that affected their everyday lives. So it was the combination of these things that came together, and what it did was it produced a split in the communist party leadership over how they should be managed, with some people such as the General Secretary Zhao Ziyang believing that China should accommodate this process and others believing that it had already gone too far, and there should be a crackdown. And it was the events in the lead up to the Tian’anmen events of June of 1989 when this split became acute and this led to the removal of Zhao Ziyang as the Secretary General of the Chinese communist party. So this was a period of great ferment in China. While the students were in the square, many people in the bureaucracy in China were sympathetic to what the students were doing. But when I returned to China in 1991, I found that that sympathy had changed. The conclusion of the people who had been most sympathetic to the student demonstrations was that it had gone too far, it had set back the reform process in China, and that the government was justified in cracking down in order to maintain stability, because there is a general feeling in China, based on its modern history during the 20th century that instability is the biggest threat to China. Therefore, anything that threatens stability tends to cause people to support efforts to intervene in order to maintain stability. So that was the prevailing mood when I came back. So I had been in China in 1989 on visits, and when I went back in 1991 I found the mood had changed very significantly.

: So it sounds like in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, you believe the United States got its China policy wrong in the sense that the administration failed to come up with an overarching priority for the relationship that could replace the former Soviet threat. What would you say the United States got right in its china policy in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union?

SR: Well we have to differentiate here. I think the technical aspects… I thought it was a mistake at the time, but I did my very best to carry out the president’s decision to achieve improvement in various areas of human rights. And in fact, I found the Chinese were willing to work with us on that question, but this was during the Clinton administration. In the Bush administration, the real problem for the President was trying to salvage the relationship because of the damage caused by the television coverage of the bloody crackdown in Beijing in June of 1989. The Clinton administration came in with an ideological view of China as opposed to a carefully considered objective view of what the circumstances were in China. If you recall during the presidential election campaign in 1992, candidate/governor Clinton compared Beijing to Baghdad. Well in fact the comparison between Beijing and Baghdad was not an accurate one. Beijing was very, very different, Beijing was carrying out a… even though the reform process had been pushed back, but… before the president took office you had the 14th Party Congress in China, in the fall of 1992, and it had pushed the Tiananmen freezing of the reform process in China behind it, and it had strongly reaffirmed the reform and openness policies that Deng Xiaoping had initiated at the beginning of the 1980s. So the Clinton administration came into office critical of China for its crackdown on Tiananmen at a time when China was putting Tiananmen behind it and moving rapidly toward economic development. The American business community spotted this trend immediately. Washington was not interested in that trend. Washington still saw China as a pariah state, with a bad domestic human rights situation, and it wanted to use the economic leverage that we had with our trade relationship in order to force China to bring about significant improvements in various human rights areas within one year. That was an unrealistic goal, but my judgment as ambassador was- it would be possible to make progress in all of the areas, but how significant that progress would be remained to be seen. My problem was, there was a dispute in Washington, between those who, having put the linkage between human rights and Most Favored Nation treatment of China in place, they didn’t to remove them. So in their view, no matter what China did, they wanted to keep those linkages in place, whereas other people in the administration recognized that China’s economy was growing rapidly again, and we ought to be trying to expand our trade relationship with China. So there was a dispute in Washington, which made it impossible for me as American ambassador to get guidance from Washington that I could use in working with China in trying to get human rights improvements, because if you want somebody to do something, you have to be able to tell them what you will do, if they are prepared to do what you are asking them to do, and Washington was frozen up on that process. So this was a very difficult time in managing the US-China relationship, but the general intent of the Clinton administration was to improve our relations with China, and after the President made the determination in 1994 to break the linkage that we had put on in 1993, we actually began to resume visits to China at the cabinet secretary level; our secretary of Defense came, our secretary of Commerce came, our secretary of Labor came, and finally our relationship began to be slowly moving back toward a more normal situation.

So the Clinton administration came into office critical of China for its crackdown on Tiananmen at a time when China was putting Tiananmen behind it and moving rapidly toward economic development. The American business community spotted this trend immediately. Washington was not interested in that trend. Washington still saw China as a pariah state, with a bad domestic human rights situation, and it wanted to use the economic leverage that we had with our trade relationship in order to force China to bring about significant improvements in various human rights areas within one year.

: What do you think the key lesson that China drew from the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe was? If they drew one, big, broad lesson from this experience, what was it for China?

 They did a thorough assessment of what it was that caused the Soviet regime to collapse so suddenly in the Soviet Union, because China had no more anticipated this than other outside observers. Their conclusion was that the villain was Gorbachev. They felt that he had opened up the system much too rapidly without delivering any economic benefits. In other words, they saw his reformasi and glasnost policies as increasing instability factors in Soviet Union without delivering the benefits that could shore up the wisdom of the changes that were taking place. So in their minds, Gorbachev became the symbol of what China itself wanted to avoid, so while they were rapidly implementing very far reaching market reforms in China’s handling of its economy they kept a very tight grip on the political system, in order to avoid making what in their view was the mistake that Gorbachev had made.

 Ambassador Roy, thank you very much for sharing your thoughts on the end of the Cold War and the changes in the US-China relationship.

a China specialist and Program Associate with the Wilson Center’s History and Public Policy Program. 

 is former US Ambassador to China and Director Emeritus of the Wilson Center's Kissinger Institute on China and the United States.

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As the communist world was crumbling, China stood alone. Stapleton Roy, former US Ambassador to China, gives insight into his post to Beijing 25 years ago and the global geopolitical currents that were roiling at the time.

The Communist Domino That Would Not Fall: China’s Resilience at the End of the Cold War 

More than any other individual, Deng Xiaoping made China’s modern rise possible. History is replete with examples of great leaders who made their mark through force and conquest. Far rarer, at least in the public mind, are those leaders who earned their reputations not through feats of arms but through their positive transformative actions while in power. Deng Xiaoping, whose life spanned most of the 20th century, was such a leader.

Deng spent much of his career in the shadow of Mao Zedong, the revolutionary leader who was the driving force in bringing the Chinese Communist Party to power in 1949 but then proved to be a disaster as a national leader, repeatedly plunging his country into chaos through his quixotic policies, his erratic vision, and his cavalier disregard for the welfare of the common people. Purged for the third time in 1976, as Mao approached death, Deng emerged from the convulsions of the Cultural Revolution to become China’s supreme leader in fact if not in name. In the space of less than 15 years, from 1978 to 1992, Deng set China on the course that has regained for it the wealth and power it enjoyed through much of the last two millennia. This course, if sustained, could position China to challenge the economic and military position of the United States as the world’s leading superpower.

Quite a few highly competent biographies of Deng have been written over the years. Many were published during the 1990s, when the full impact of his openness and reform policies was becoming dramatically evident. To one degree or another, all of these works have suffered from the limitations of the source material: abundant official documents, but almost no personal papers. (Deng relied on his excellent memory, and left no paper trail.) More often than not, these biographies necessarily focused on particular aspects of Deng’s long career, adding useful insights but falling short of a well-rounded portrait of the man.

In an authoritative biography of Deng, Harvard sociologist Ezra F. Vogel, a renowned specialist on China and Japan who rose to international prominence in 1979 with the publication of 

, has attempted the difficult task of providing a comprehensive look at the experiences and influences that shaped this remarkable individual. He has succeeded superbly. To compensate for the dearth of personal written material, Vogel drew on extensive interviews he conducted over several years with Deng family members, former associates, officials, scholars, former ambassadors, and Chinese and foreign political leaders to add texture to his assessment of Deng’s career.

Regrettably, there is still a paucity of information about Deng’s formative years. Born in 1904 to a family in a rural village, Deng apparently excelled in school. In the 1920s he lived for about five years in France as a destitute student, during which time he joined the Chinese Communist Party. After he left France in 1926, he spent a year studying in the Soviet Union.

When Deng Xiaoping rose to power in the 1970s, he was of an age when many Western politicans would have withdrawn into retirement.

Upon his return to China, the party sent Deng in 1929 to lead an effort to establish a Communist base in Guangxi Province, where his initial small successes were negated when the local warlord used his superior forces to overrun Deng’s cohort. Deng submitted a self-criticism of his failures, which was used against him decades later during the Cultural Revolution. He was then dispatched to join the Soviet base area carved out by Mao Zedong’s military forces in the southeastern province of Jiangxi. While there, Deng developed a strong admiration for Mao. In an episode that gave him valuable protection in later years, he was punished by the party’s central leadership for, among other offenses, allegedly heading a “Mao faction.” This was the first of the three purges he suffered during his career. We know too little about these episodes, as well as Deng’s performance during the Long March (1934–35), the war of resistance against Japan (1937–45), and the first two turbulent decades of the People’s Republic of China, which was formally established on October 1, 1949.

In a book of more than 800 pages, only 30 are devoted to Deng’s life from his birth until 1969, when, amid the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution, he was banished after two years of house arrest to work as a machinist in a tractor repair station in Jiangxi. (Though Deng and his family suffered abuse and indignities during this purge and again in 1976, Mao protected Deng from efforts by radicals to expel him from the Chinese Communist Party. “Mao twice purged Deng, but he never destroyed him,” Vogel writes. “He set him aside for possible later use.”)

The skimpy treatment of Deng’s early history is no fault of the author, who diligently mined previous biographies, archives, and interviews for what little material was available. But Vogel’s research does provide a wealth of detail about the most important period of Deng’s career, from 1969 to 1992, after which ill health and physical frailty forced him into the background. He died in 1997.

By the time Deng emerged as China’s most influential leader, in the late 1970s—at over 70, he had reached an age when most Western politicians would have withdrawn into retirement—he became the first Chinese leader in more than 150 years to combine the necessary power, experience, and vision to thrust China onto a successful modernization trajectory. Vogel’s book provides extensive insights into how Deng was able to use his experience, his network of associations among China’s aging revolutionaries, and the force of his personality to direct China’s course, all while allowing others to hold the top government and party titles.

What are the traits of this unusual man who succeeded where so many before him had failed? Whereas Mao, like Lenin, was a pamphleteer and prolific writer, churning out lengthy tracts setting out his vision, Deng’s strength lay in organization and implementation. He shared Mao’s revolutionary credentials, but not his economic vision for China’s future. He saw in Marxism-Leninism an ideology that combined organizational discipline, military forces under tight party control, and a practical commitment to bettering the lives of the working class. The victory of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 provided practical confirmation that a small, tightly organized party could be the motive force for overcoming insuperable odds to seize the reins of power. Deng’s belief never wavered that unchallenged rule by the Chinese Communist Party was the only method that could provide the stability necessary for China to grow and prosper.

Deng’s pragmatism is well known. For those of us who witnessed the ideological excesses of the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), including the glorification of the “little red book” filled with excerpts from Mao’s articles and speeches, and the narrowing of China’s cultural expression to a few red operas and revolutionary songs, Deng’s no-nonsense practicality was a refreshing change. Yet it also represented a weakness in his understanding of human nature. Once Deng was clear in his own mind about what needed to be done to accomplish important goals, he was impatient to the point of intolerance with those who saw things differently or had other priorities.

In the lead-up to the Tiananmen Square protests, Deng was contemptuous of the respected astrophysicist Fang Lizhi, who advocated greater freedom of expression and a more open political system, because in Deng’s mind loosened strictures would undermine China’s ability to sustain its rapid economic growth. Two of Deng’s handpicked and highly competent choices to become general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Hu Yaobang (1980–87) and Zhao Ziyang (1987–89), lost his confidence because he regarded them as lax in enforcing domestic stability.

Deng’s backing for the suppression of the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in June 1989 (which were precipitated by Hu’s death after his forced resignation two years earlier) was predictable. He had no use for people he saw as impractical visionaries with no idea how to translate their high-minded ideals into the policies and actions that could overcome China’s backwardness and poverty. He was unapologetic about quashing what had developed into a high-profile challenge to the authority of the Chinese Communist Party. Once stability was restored, he lent his personal authority to the effort to overcome the resistance to his economic policies exerted by conservative ideologues who had become entrenched in influential positions in the party after the Tiananmen events. This was his last hurrah.

Diminutive in stature and unassuming in his personal style, Deng was a study in contrasts. He possessed neither photogenic good looks nor charisma, and he showed no taste for playing the role of an inspirational national leader, preferring to exercise his influence from behind the scenes. He never sought or held China’s topmost party and government positions, his highest titles being chairman of the Central Military Commission and vice premier. Yet on his visit to the United States in 1979 he displayed a flair for public relations, wearing a cowboy hat without embarrassment and acting with assurance in his public appearances.

What he lacked in looks and charm, Deng made up for in self-confidence and decisiveness. In my capacity as the deputy to Ambassador Leonard Woodcock in the U.S. Liaison Office and later the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, I was present on two occasions when Deng resolved disputed issues of great consequence. The first was his decision in December 1978 to proceed with establishing diplomatic relations with the United States even though the Americans had confirmed explicitly that the U.S. government intended to continue arms sales to Taiwan. After the establishment of U.S.-China diplomatic relations in 1979, this issue quickly resurfaced as a core problem in the relationship, prompting the negotiation of the third U.S.-China Joint Communiqué, issued on August 17, 1982. This communiqué contained the issue for a decade, but U.S. arms sales to Taiwan re-emerged as a particularly vexing sticking point in the 1990s and remain one today.

The second instance of Deng’s decisiveness was his approval in May 1979 of an agreement settling the private claims of American citizens against China for property confiscated following the Chinese Communist Party’s assumption of power, under terms that were vigorously opposed by elements within the Chinese government. In giving his assent, Deng overrode a cabinet-level official who had argued against the terms in a key meeting. After the meeting, a foreign ministry official rushed up to me urging that we quickly get the agreement signed because of the danger the decision would be reversed.

In both instances, Deng subordinated short-term considerations to longer-term strategic goals. He recognized that there was no prospect for a quick resolution of the Taiwan arms sale issue. As Vogel plausibly speculates in his biography, Deng probably recognized that the implementation of China’s new economic reform policies would labor under a significant handicap without access to U.S. knowledge, capital, and technology, especially in the initial stages. In all likelihood, an additional motivation was Deng’s concern about Soviet inroads in Vietnam; in a brief, bloody invasion in February 1979, Deng had attempted to teach the Vietnamese a military “lesson.” He may well have felt that the new diplomatic relationship with the United States would deter Soviet retaliation on behalf of Moscow’s Southeast Asian client.

In the case of the claims settlement, the $81 million China paid to the U.S. government for distribution to American claimants was trivial compared to the benefits provided by the 1979 trade agreement, for which the claims settlement was a precondition. The trade agreement granted most-favored-nation treatment to Chinese imports to the United States and greatly facilitated the rapid expansion of bilateral trade.

For those of us who as U.S. government officials participated in or monitored many of the developments in China and in the bilateral relationship Vogel describes, he has illuminated events in ways that would have been invaluable to us had we had such a clear picture at the time. The transformation of China that Deng set in motion is likely to confront the United States with its most significant foreign-policy challenge over the next several decades. We are fortunate indeed that Vogel has written this timely and highly informative biography of Deng Xiaoping, which provides a wealth of insights into one of history’s great leaders.

 is the director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Woodrow Wilson Center. He has served as the U.S. ambassador to Singapore (1984–86), China (1991–95), and Indonesia (1996–99), and as U.S. assistant secretary of state for intelligence and research (1999–2000).

Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China

 by Ezra F. Vogel, Bellknap/Harvard, 2011, 876 pp.

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More than any other individual, Deng Xiaoping made China’s modern rise possible.

J. Stapleton Roy