The rise of nations, the decline of dissent: How Tiananmen paved the way for China's global ascendancy

Deng Xiaoping

The rise of China poses an enduring question: Can prosperity flourish without freedom? Can a world-class market economy be engineered not through the expansion of democratic rights, but through their systematic suppression?

Modern China offers a stark and unsettling answer.

In June 1989, the Chinese Communist Party unleashed its military upon its own people. In Tiananmen Square, thousands of pro-democracy protesters—most of them students—were met not with dialogue, but with tanks and assault rifles. The square, which for weeks had pulsed with the hopes of political reform, was reduced overnight to a symbol of crushed dissent. 

The massacre was swift and brutal, but it achieved its intended aim: it extinguished, with cold efficiency, the possibility of political pluralism.

From the standpoint of liberal democratic theory, such an act should have consigned China to pariah status and economic isolation. But history, as always, moves by different laws than moral theory.

In reality, the massacre ushered in a new phase of political stability—one secured by fear and silence. China had already begun to liberalize its economy a decade earlier, under Deng Xiaoping’s market-oriented reforms initiated in 1979. The ideological contradiction was apparent even then: economic openness without political openness, markets without freedoms. 

But foreign investors, ever pragmatic, did not flinch. In the aftermath of Tiananmen, global capital flowed into China with even greater speed. The blood in the square had barely dried when the boardrooms of the West resumed their calculations. Stability, however achieved, was good for business.

For multinational corporations, political repression was no disqualifier. On the contrary, it offered a kind of security—no labor unions, no strikes, no elections, no populist reversals. The Chinese state could promise infrastructure, cheap labor, and docile social conditions, uninterrupted by the turbulence of democratic accountability. The authoritarian state became the perfect incubator for global capital.

By 2010, China had overtaken Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy—a transformation that occurred not in spite of Tiananmen, but in its long shadow.

The historical irony is profound. While the democracy hypothesis often posits that prosperity and freedom are twin virtues—that the flourishing of markets goes hand-in-hand with the flourishing of rights—China charted a different path. It demonstrated that an authoritarian regime, if disciplined and strategic, can harness the engines of capitalism without surrendering control. In Beijing’s model, economic dynamism coexists with political absolutism. The state does not merely permit the market; it orchestrates it.

Philosophically, this forces a reckoning. What is freedom if a people can be enriched but not empowered? Can human development be reduced to GDP? Is prosperity without dignity a success—or merely a gilded cage?

The Tiananmen Square massacre was not just a political event. It was a civilizational marker. It signaled that the 21st century would not necessarily be shaped by free-market triumphalism. The so-called “end of history” thesis, so confidently advanced in the West after the Cold War, failed to anticipate that authoritarian capitalism might not be an aberration—but an enduring model.