“When men speak of the future, the gods laugh,” runs an old Chinese proverb.
In the aftermath of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, China’s policy of “reform and opening” seemed to many to be in peril. Conventional wisdom was that it and much of the communist world were retreating into isolation, threatening a new Cold War.
But within months the Berlin Wall fell, and soon the Soviet Union evaporated. And China changed at the speed of light.
A country where phones were rare 20 years ago now has more internet users than any other. City skylines have morphed from grim barracks into glittering skyscrapers and a still officially Marxist society has become one of the most unequal on earth.
After 1989 China produced perhaps the biggest economic boom in history, until it could even lend America enough cash to ruin itself. In June 1989, all that would have seemed mad fantasy.
Then, the pundits had misunderstood what was happening. The democracy or human rights demanded by the 1989 student rebels were out of the question, but economic reform would forge ahead.
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