For the events of 1989 have become less salient as Chinese history accelerated during the last two decades. In India, our challenge is to understand the nature of political change in China and how a changing China is transforming our political environment.

In the past, the romanticism of our Sinophiles and the paranoia of our Sinophobes have together prevented India from developing a realistic appreciation of either China’s strengths or its weaknesses.

The first step towards understanding the changes in China since Tiananmen must be the recognition that the Western propaganda has little in common with the Western policy when it comes to Beijing.

While the Western media castigates Beijing for crushing a non-violent students’ movement two decades ago, the Western chancelleries are begging for China’s cooperation in managing the current global financial crisis.

That the Chinese Communist Party might be the unlikely saviour of Western capitalism underlines the extraordinary economic interdependence that has taken hold of Sino-US relations since Tiananmen.

In 1989, Communist China appeared to be on the brink of collapse and its ideological legitimacy seemed to evaporate after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Twenty years later, the talk around the world is about China’s emergence as a potential manager of the global financial order in conjunction with the US, the so-called Group of Two.

It is not just the CCP that has reinvented itself by discarding many shibboleths of communist orthodoxy. The Chinese youth have changed even more remarkably.

Unlike their predecessors in Tiananmen, the current generation of Chinese youth is not enamoured of all things Western and American. They are intensely nationalistic, ready to take offence at the mere suggestion of a slight from either the Western powers or China’s Asian neighbours.

... contd.