Tiananmen and After

After Chairman Mao’s death in 1976, China began a series of reforms that eventually got its economy humming and its society buzzing. These led to a gradual process of liberalization during the 1980s that culminated in a series of protests at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989. Fearing for its own survival, the communist regime cracked down, deciding to suppress the protests and keep power at all costs. A decade later, we at Foreign Affairs were able to publish, for the first time, a trove of secret documents showing why China’s leaders opted for violence at Tiananmen Square that fateful June. Now, 25 years after the protests, we are delighted to bring you Tiananmen and After, which includes those documents along with expert commentary on what happened back in June 1989, what it meant, and how China has—and hasn’t—changed since then. The arguments presented span the ideological spectrum, and the authors include a range of leading experts from several disciplines and countries, including Elizabeth Economy, Evan Feigenbaum, Yasheng Huang, Robert Kaplan, Eric Li, Damien Ma, Andrew Nathan, Lynette Ong, Lucian Pye, John Thornton, Cui Tiankai, and more.