Published in
Advance.

On the night of 3 June 1989 the Chinese army entered Beijing and fired on crowds in the streets. At least a thousand civilians were killed. China had applied to rejoin the world trading system three years earlier, on 10 July 1986, and was admitted on 11 December 2001 on terms set out in a protocol with expiry dates written into it.

Between those dates ran an annual American vote. Under the Trade Act of 1974, China’s most-favoured-nation treatment in the United States ran on a twelve-month presidential waiver that Congress could disapprove. From 1990 the House of Representatives voted on that disapproval every year. In 1993 the renewal was made conditional by executive order, and the order names the Tiananmen Square movements in its text. In 2000 the annual vote was abolished by statute.

Beijing,
3–4 June 1989.

On the night of 3 June 1989 the Chinese army moved into Beijing from the west and fired on the crowds that had built barricades to stop it. The worst of it was at Muxidi, about four kilometres west of Tiananmen Square. Amnesty International, which investigated for a year and published in 1990, records hundreds killed or wounded in that area alone and people shot inside the apartment blocks that line the road; its finding on the total is at least a thousand civilians, against an official Chinese figure of about two hundred.

The rounds

The ammunition is in the record three times, written down by three kinds of witness.

4 June 1989, one in the morning. The United Press International correspondent David R. Schweisberg files from the Monument to the People’s Heroes. His dispatch carries a young Chinese photographer with a two-inch gash in his abdomen, holding up a camera lens shattered by a bullet: “The lens was on his belt in a bag and took most of the force of the steel-jacketed round.”

5 June 1989. Sir Alan Donald, Britain’s ambassador in Beijing, files a telegram to London about twenty-four hours after the shooting. Four words of it read: “27 Army were using dum-dum bullets.” They sit beside “27 Army ordered to spare no-one and shot wounded SMR soldiers” and four wounded girl students who “begged for their lives but were bayoneted.”

3 June 2014. Group Captain Peter Everett, Australia’s military attaché in Beijing in 1989, holds one up to a television camera for the ABC’s Foreign Correspondent. He collected seventy-two of them out of the flats of embassy staff near Chang’an Avenue, the avenue the troops came down. He calls them dumdum bullets: “That’s the core — solid steel. The core is surrounded by lead and then surrounded again by a thin copper sheath which peels apart like a banana when it hits something.”

Twenty-five years separate the first account from the last. The detail was carried the whole way.

What follows is the American trade record attached to that week, and the dates on it.

The sanctions,
June to December 1989.

The American measures taken after 3 June 1989, and what became of each.

• 5 June 1989. President Bush suspends all government-to-government and commercial arms sales to China and all military exchanges. Roughly $600m of government contracts and perhaps $100m of commercial sales are affected.
• 20 June 1989. All high-level government exchanges suspended. The United States says it will seek postponement of new loans to China from the multilateral development banks.
• 1–2 July 1989. Brent Scowcroft and Lawrence Eagleburger fly to Beijing in secret to see Deng Xiaoping. The aircraft’s air force markings are removed and it refuels in the air so that it need not land; the American embassy in Beijing is not told.
• 7 July 1989. Thirty-two days after the embargo, the State Department waives it — to authorise the sale of four Boeing 757-200s whose navigation systems are convertible to military use.
• October 1989. Chinese military officers return to work at two American facilities, where they are upgrading China’s F-8 fighter with American avionics.
• 2–3 December 1989. Scowcroft and Eagleburger return to Beijing, this time announced, to brief the Chinese leadership on the Malta summit and to discuss a route back to normal relations.
• 19 December 1989. On the day he signs the act containing it, the President waives the prohibition on Export-Import Bank financing for China. The same day he waives the export-licence ban so that three American-built satellites can be launched on Chinese rockets — about $300m of business for American firms.

Six and a half months separate the embargo of 5 June 1989 from the waivers of 19 December. Within that period the same administration waived it for aircraft navigation systems, fighter avionics, Export-Import Bank financing and satellite launches, and sent two missions to Beijing. The trade relationship itself was not suspended at any point.

The annual
renewal, 1990–2000.

Under the Trade Act of 1974, a non-market economy could only hold most-favoured-nation treatment in the American market through a presidential waiver that had to be renewed every twelve months, and Congress could vote the renewal down. For China, from 1990, that is exactly what happened: once a year, in public, the House of Representatives debated whether to take away the country’s access to the largest consumer market on earth, and recorded every member’s name on the result.

Each year’s vote is set out below against that year’s goods imports from China. Move the year to read both.

Executive Order 12850,
and what followed it.

The renewal of 1994 was made conditional by executive order the year before. The order names the event in the text of the condition.

The order required the Secretary of State to report before 3 June 1994, and the President to decide on the twelve months beginning 3 July 1994. The report was delivered and the decision announced on 26 May 1994, three hundred and sixty-three days after the order was signed.

The conditions were found unmet, the renewal was granted, and the linkage was ended the same afternoon. In the same statement the President extended the Tiananmen sanctions and added a ban on importing Chinese guns and ammunition. Six years later the annual vote itself was abolished.

The terms of
accession, 1986–2016.

China applied to resume its place in the trading system on 10 July 1986, three years before Tiananmen, and was admitted on 11 December 2001. The terms are a published protocol, and two of its clauses carry expiry dates.

Those two clauses are the measurable price of admission: twelve years during which other members could apply a safeguard against Chinese goods alone, and fifteen during which they could price those goods off a third country’s costs in dumping cases. In 2001, the year of accession, China sold the United States $102bn of goods.