In the 1950s, social scientists popularized an idea that would go on to shape geopolitics: modernization theory, or the belief that economic development leads to the growth of liberal democracy. The theory was powerfully supported by the second and third waves of global democratization in regions such as Eastern Europe and Latin America, and it drove international support for China’s opening up from the late 1970s. Western expectations for China’s trajectory were boosted by the collapse of the communist bloc and Francis Fukuyama’s thesis that the triumph of liberal democracy was “the end of history.”
China seemed to be on track into the early 2000s. The theory’s predictions inspired U.S. policy from Bill Clinton (“[trade] will liberate the potential of its people”) and George W. Bush (“economic freedom creates habits of liberty”) to first-term Barack Obama, who went from supporting China’s rise to seeing it as a trade and security threat. In China, democratic ideals had simmered well before the bloodily suppressed Tiananmen protests in 1989 and were renewed after it.