Happy hour, Polish sausage with shiso and nuts, and a couple ounces of Hendrick’s gin...
1: “Not in many years had Communist China encountered the kind of domestic and international difficulties that it faced after the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
The leadership, according to Chen Youwei, a former political counselor at the Chinese embassy in Washington, was thrown “into a state of near panic, hesitant and indecisive.”
In memoirs published in Taiwan, Chen wrote the party’s first move was to blame the United States for both the unrest and the collapse of socialism across the globe.
As Communist Party elder Li Xiannian told a meeting of high-ranking Communists two days before the crackdown, the United States was waging “a smokeless world war” against China.
“We had better watch out,” he said.
“Capitalism still wants to beat socialism in the end.”
Geopolitically, China responded to the rise of what it perceived to be a revamped threat from America by turning to an old enemy for help.
In April 1990, Premier Li Peng visited Moscow.
Li and the Soviets agreed to reduce military deployments on their borders.
A month later, Liu Huaqing, the chief of China’s navy, arrived in Russia and began negotiations to buy an advanced Russian fighter, the Su-27, heralding the beginning of a security relationship that would see China purchase more than $20 billion in Russian weaponry over the next twenty-five years.
China also hoped, Chen Youwei wrote, the US-led effort to oust Saddam from Kuwait would weaken the United States.”
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2: “In August 1990, Jiang Zemin gathered members of the Politburo Standing Committee three times to discuss the crisis.
The Politburo concluded Bush’s vow to roll back the invasion was nothing more than a “hegemonistic” plot to control Persian Gulf oil.
Jiang ruled China would not actively support the US-led coalition.
The party believed it was in China’s interests for America to get bogged down in another quagmire, Chen wrote.
Saddam’s ignominious defeat was a rude wake-up call for the Communist Party and especially the People’s Liberation Army.
The use of smart-bomb technology and the high-tech invasion that liberated Kuwait in days, not months, shocked China’s generals.
What the PLA called a “revolution in military affairs” had occurred while it was not looking.
Almost overnight, Chinese military authorities overhauled the military budget, their weapons procurement policy, and their concept of warfare.
The People’s Liberation Army cut its massive ground forces while funneling the lion’s share of its resources into its navy, air force, and rocket units.
In PLA military exercises and expenditures, the United States became the imputed enemy, even as PLA doctrine adopted the high-tech American way of war.”
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