Joseph Morris, a former Reagan administration official, recalls a time when he, Attorney General Edwin Meese, and other Americans traveled to China in hopes of helping it to “restructure its laws, build an independent judiciary, and establish law schools worthy of the name.”
They had been invited. They were given a forum, the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Meese and Morris spoke from “the very spot where you see Xi Jinping standing in the attached photograph” (above). And their words were shared with the whole country (“Lessons from Tiananmen Square, 35 Years Later,” Providence, June 6, 2024).
The year was 1988.
We addressed 3,000 assembled lawyers, judges, and legal academics, half American, half Chinese, on themes of the rule of law, individual liberty, property rights, and the efficiency of free markets. Our messages were endorsed from that platform by Mr. Meese’s counterpart, the Chinese Minister of Justice, and by my counterpart, the Assistant Minister of Justice with whom I had worked for more than a year in organizing the conference….
We went to great lengths to explain the logic of Western ideas like federalism, involving the overlapping sovereignties and legal systems of state and national governments….
At the end of the conference we were joined by Zhao Ziyang, then the General Secretary of the Communist Party, as Xi Jinping is today. Zhao had authorized the conference as part of his efforts to change China’s direction, in truth to “decommunize” his country peacefully while continuing its economic development and opening to America and the world….
The speeches by Mr. Meese and me were instantly translated by interpreters on the spot and televised nationally throughout China. In the following days as we walked streets in cities such as Beijing and Shanghai we were recognized by ordinary Chinese people who would throng around us and cheer. Reform was in the air in China and a path forward to freedom, free enterprise, and the rule of law was taking shape.
Seems incredible that there was a time like this in modern China. The use that the CCP now makes of Western ideas about liberty, democracy, republicanism, and rule of law is only to attach catch phrases associated with such ideas to policies consisting of their opposites.
The Chinese Communist Party would soon slam the door that had been partly opened. Horrified by the rallies at Tiananmen Square that took place a year after the Americans’ visit, “China’s hardline communists…exploited the situation to wrest power from Zhao. A crackdown ensued that culminated in the bloody events of 35 years ago this week, in early June of 1989. We remember these events in the West as the Tiananmen Square Massacre.”
Although the hardliners won in 1989, “this does not mean that Chinese history is predetermined…. The sparks of liberty I saw feeding into a flame of republicanism 35 years ago have not been extinguished, and someday China will know what it is to be a republic of, by, and for the people.”
