The United States and China in Power Transition - Strategic Studies ...

The U.S. push for democratic change in China has
a long history. In the early 1950s, John Foster Dulles,
Secretary of State of the Dwight Eisenhower administration,
initiated a policy of “peaceful evolution”
(和平演变) to induce democratic change in the Soviet
Union, China, and other communist nations. 25 Dulles
saw that communism as a political system was repressive
and could not last without forceful government
sanctions. He anticipated that by the third or fourth
generation, the communist leaders would lose their
ideological zeal and gradually turn to the democratic
way of government. Dulles suggested that the U.S.
Government facilitate this change through political,
economic, and cultural penetration into the communist
states. A peaceful evolution, rather than the use of
force, would eventually transform those communist
nations.
Dulles’s anticipation came true with the collapse
of the Soviet camp in 1990-91 (although Mikhail Gorbachev
was already the 5th generation leader of Soviet
communism, counting from Vladimir Lenin [1917-24],
Joseph Stalin [1924-53], Nikita Khrushchev [1953-64],
to Leonid Brezhnev [1964-82], but excluding the two
transitional figures, Yuri Andropov and Konstantin
Chernenko, who only held the Soviet communist
leadership for about 2 years), but encountered strong
resistance from Chinese leaders from Mao Zedong to
Deng Xiaoping and the present ones (China is currently
under the 4th generation of communist leadership;
the Chinese Communist Party [CCP] is making dogmatic
efforts to resist peaceful evolution in China). 26
The United States nevertheless has never given up
the hope and effort to promote democratic change in
China. President Nixon’s opening of China and subsequent
U.S. engagement policies with China have all
been part of these efforts. 27
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