What Xi Jinping, the CCP Leadership, and Other People in China Learned from June Fourth

What did Xi Jinping learn from the Tiananmen protests and Beijing massacre of 1989? How did the events of 1989 shape his leadership and thinking in the years that followed, through the present day? These are challenging questions to answer. Unlike Jiang Zemin, who in 2000 had a remarkable exchange with Mike Wallace on 60 Minutes about “tank man,” Xi Jinping has not had public dialogues about 1989. Nor was Xi a major political figure in 1989, when he was serving as party secretary of Ningde Prefecture in Fujian Province. This paper begins by discussing how a retrospective account of Xi’s time in Ningde shows what he wants the world to know he learned as a local leader in 1989. As for what broader lessons Xi learned, we can only speculate based on how the Chinese Communist Party’s approach has changed or deepened since Xi became China’s top leader in 2013. I explore how Xi’s leadership during crises reveals lessons that Xi learned from June Fourth. I conclude with thoughts about what other people in China, inluding non-elites, have learned from June Fourth.