From Tiananmen to the 'China Dream'
From the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown through Deng's Southern Tour, WTO accession, and Xi Jinping's 'China Dream'—the arc of contemporary China for the Guokao.
The 1989 Crisis and Its Resolution
The death of reformist General Secretary Hu Yaobang on 15 April 1989 triggered student mourning that escalated into mass demonstrations in Tiananmen Square demanding accountability, press freedom, and an end to official corruption. By mid-May, with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev arriving in Beijing on 15 May, the protests had drawn a million participants and spread to scores of cities. Premier Li Peng declared martial law on 20 May 1989. After internal Party division—General Secretary Zhao Ziyang opposed force and was purged, placed under house arrest until his death in 2005—paramount leader Deng Xiaoping authorised the People's Liberation Army to clear the square. The crackdown on the night of 3–4 June 1989 produced casualties whose true number remains disputed and officially suppressed. The aftermath brought Western sanctions, an arms embargo (the EU embargo of June 1989 remains in force), and the elevation of Shanghai Party chief Jiang Zemin to General Secretary as a compromise figure.
Deng's Southern Tour and the Market Turn
The crackdown empowered conservatives such as Chen Yun who wanted to slow marketisation. To break this stalemate, the 87-year-old Deng undertook his Southern Tour (nanxun) in January–February 1992, visiting Shenzhen, Zhuhai, and Guangzhou. His declarations—that planning and market are merely tools, that 'development is the only hard truth', and his warning against both 'Left' and 'Right' deviations—relaunched reform. The slogan 'to get rich is glorious' captured the mood. The 14th Party Congress (October 1992) formally adopted the goal of a 'socialist market economy', a phrase written into the constitution by the 1993 amendment. Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu Rongji then drove a decade of restructuring: the 1994 tax-sharing (fenshuizhi) reform recentralised fiscal revenue; state-owned enterprises were reformed under the slogan 'grasp the large, let go of the small' (zhuada fangxiao), shedding tens of millions of workers in the late 1990s; and China acceded to the World Trade Organization on 11 December 2001 after fifteen years of negotiation, binding it to global trade rules and accelerating its rise as the 'workshop of the world'.
Ideological Consolidation
Jiang's contribution, the 'Three Represents' (sange daibiao), advanced in 2000 and enshrined at the 16th Congress in 2002, opened Party membership to private entrepreneurs, recognising the new capitalist class created by reform. The handovers of Hong Kong (1 July 1997) and Macau (20 December 1999) under the 'one country, two systems' framework devised by Deng restored the last colonial territories and became showcases of the model later applied rhetorically to Taiwan.