‘Our Friends Don’t Understand Our Policies and Our Situation’: Informal U.S.-China Dialogues Following Tiananmen

During the 1980s, an interlocking complex of U.S. non-governmental organizations (the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Asia Society, and the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations) gradually built up contacts with Chinese elites. By mid-decade, the National Committee and the Chinese People’s Institute of Foreign Affairs began a series of “U.S.-China Dialogues” in which influential figures from both sides met alternately in Beijing and the United States, supposedly informally, to discuss the state of Sino-American relations. Though the outcome of the protests at Tiananmen in June 1989 shocked them, American China-watchers consciously decided that contacts and efforts at communication and understanding must continue. At the Fourth U.S.-China Dialogue meeting in Beijing in early 1990, the American and Chinese participants assumed radically different positions, with the Chinese complaining bitterly about U.S. interference in China’s internal affairs. However, as the meeting ended, both sides agreed that, while there had been little agreement, such contacts and dialogues were valuable and must continue.