The End of an Open Era

In the aftermath of the Tiananmen crackdown, the Chinese Communist Party moved rapidly to resolve the political struggle within its own leadership. On June 23–24, 1989, the Fourth Plenum of the 13th Central Committee formally removed Zhao Ziyang from all of his senior Party positions and elected Jiang Zemin, then Party Secretary of Shanghai, as General Secretary of the CCP. Zhao's removal represented far more than a change of leadership: it marked the defeat of the reformist political course he had come to represent.

The immediate aftermath of 1989 brought a period of political retrenchment and economic uncertainty. Conservative forces gained influence, ideological controls tightened, and some of the momentum behind market-oriented reform slowed. Yet Deng Xiaoping remained determined that the political crisis should not reverse China's economic transformation. He continued to insist that reform and opening must proceed, even while making equally clear that Communist Party rule would not be challenged.

By 1992, frustrated by the hesitation and caution that had followed Tiananmen, Deng embarked on his famous Southern Tour, visiting Shenzhen and other centers of economic reform. His intervention sent an unmistakable message to the Party leadership: market-oriented reform and opening to the outside world were to continue. The tour helped break the post-1989 political impasse and accelerated a new wave of economic liberalization.

Jiang Zemin subsequently embraced that economic direction. Under Jiang and Premier Zhu Rongji, China undertook extensive restructuring of state-owned enterprises, expanded private and foreign investment, reformed major areas of the financial system, and deepened its integration into the global economy. China's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 symbolized the extraordinary extent to which economic reform had resumed.

Political reform, however, followed a very different path.

The experiments with greater political openness associated with the 1980s—including efforts by Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang to encourage intellectual liberalization, reduce arbitrary political interference, reform Party and state institutions, and expand limited forms of public participation—did not resume on anything approaching their previous trajectory. Later leaders continued to pursue administrative, legal, and institutional reforms, but the prospect that economic liberalization might gradually be accompanied by substantial political liberalization largely receded after 1989.

When Hu Jintao succeeded Jiang Zemin as General Secretary in 2002, China entered another decade of extraordinary economic expansion. His leadership emphasized collective decision-making, economic development, social stability, and attempts to address some of the inequality and social disruption produced by rapid growth. Yet political liberalization remained tightly constrained. Independent political organization, challenges to Communist Party rule, and open reconsideration of the events of 1989 remained beyond the boundaries of permissible politics.

The transition to Xi Jinping in 2012 marked another major turning point. Rather than continuing the increasingly institutionalized and collective leadership practices that had developed under Jiang and Hu, Xi progressively concentrated authority around himself and strengthened the Communist Party's control over government, the military, the media, universities, civil society, and significant areas of economic life. His extensive anti-corruption campaign removed large numbers of officials while simultaneously strengthening the authority of the central leadership.

In 2018, China abolished the constitutional two-term limit on the presidency, removing one of the institutional restraints established during the post-Mao era. In 2022, Xi secured a third term as General Secretary of the Communist Party, breaking with the succession pattern that had governed China's top leadership for several decades. The result has been an increasingly centralized and personalized form of authoritarian rule, accompanied by greater ideological discipline and a stronger assertion of Party leadership throughout Chinese society.

The political trajectory that began in 1989 therefore cannot be understood simply as the end of "reform." Economic reform survived the Tiananmen crisis and, beginning in 1992, accelerated dramatically. What suffered the decisive defeat was a different possibility: that economic modernization might be accompanied by a continuing expansion of political openness and institutional constraints on Party power.

Hu Yaobang's dismissal in 1987, Zhao Ziyang's removal in 1989, and the suppression of the Tiananmen movement together marked the closing of that political era. China would continue to transform economically, technologically, and internationally, eventually becoming one of the world's most powerful states. But the political opening that had briefly appeared possible during the reformist atmosphere of the 1980s never returned in the same form.

More than three decades later, the legacy of that choice remains visible. The China that emerged after 1989 demonstrated that market development and global economic integration could coexist with continued one-party rule. Under Xi Jinping, the balance has shifted further toward centralized Party authority, making the unresolved political possibilities of the 1980s appear increasingly distant.

For that reason, 1989 was not the end of China's reform era. It was the end of an open era—the moment when economic reform survived, but the possibility of sustained political liberalization was decisively curtailed.