Why the Chinese are laughing at the U.S.

In June 1989, Chinese students and laborers by the thousands occupied Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, the central square in the capital city of the most populous nation in the world. A giant portrait of Mao Zedong glowered at them from across the street. There was an ineffable sense back then that history was in the air everywhere””that powerful forces were moving across the world, and that they were moving in the right direction. Mikhail Gorbachev had by then come to power in the Soviet Union, and in the summer of 1989 he would allow Moscow’s client states in Eastern Europe to go their own way politically: toward democracy. That’s what the students in Tiananmen wanted too. Gorbachev had visited Beijing