THOMAS W. ROBINSON

In the 1970s and 1980s, it became fashionable to speak of interdepen-
dence as one of the major determinants of international, and therefore
foreign, relations. As a result principally of the two oil crises of the 1970s,
the manifestation of various global issues, and the emergence of a global
trading regime, decisionmakers discovered that more than the Cold War
was important to global affairs. This notion--and the several assump-
tions and ideas at its base--were applied by theorists and statesmen alike
to China. ¹ Beijing's post-Mao turn toward rapid economic development
and the associated foreign policy of peace and opening toward the outer
world was coterminous with this new emphasis. Analyses of Chinese
foreign policy thus incorporated the assumption that Deng Xiaoping and
his associates were equally susceptible to these global currents and
equally eager to modify China's foreign policy in the benign directions
pointed out by the interdependence thesis. Overall foreign policy moder-
ation appeared to supply proof that China's reentry into the family of na-
tions would be reasonably gentle and that China would end up with the
same domestic structure (market democracy) and foreign policy (peace
and internationalism) as other developed nations.

The 1989 Tiananmen massacre, the 1990 breakup of the Soviet empire
and the resultant end of the Cold War, and the 1991 collapse of the Soviet
Union and the American-led victory in the Gulf War called seriously into
question at least some of the underpinnings of this way of thinking.
Tiananmen made clear that the road to democracy would be much longer
and more difficult that initially presumed. The subsequent Chinese re-
traction of some of the market reforms gave pause to those who argued

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