In the wake of the lethal use of force by China’s military against demonstrators in Tiananmen Square and citizens of Beijing on June 4, 1989, the United States and other governments were confronted with a series of vexing moral and policy questions. What to say publicly and how to say it? What to convey privately to the Chinese leadership and through what channels? How to balance the immediate moral indignation with consideration of longer-term national interests? What to do about the extensive set of linkages between the U.S. (and other nations) and China’s Party-governmental authorities and military—as well as the extensive ties among private sector actors? Should foreign citizens be evacuated? Should official exchanges be frozen or terminated, or should doors and private channels of communication be left open? What sanctions should be enacted to penalize China’s government without hurting the Chinese people? How broadly should such steps be coordinated among foreign governments, how many would cooperate, and was the reaction in the West shared by governments in Asia and elsewhere? What to do about Chinese abroad who did not wish to return to China under current circumstances?

I had always wondered about the internal deliberations inside the U.S. government, and with China’s government, following Tiananmen. On a recent trip to lecture at Texas A&M University, I visited the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library to read through the relevant declassified White House documents. I took photographs of those that I deemed most pertinent to reconstructing how President Bush and other senior officials assessed the situation and decided to proceed in the weeks and months ahead. Not included in this selection is an enormous file of so-called “sit reps” (situation reports) from the U.S. Embassy in Beijing and intelligence agencies in Washington covering the periods of the April 15-June 4 demonstrations and the post-suppression climate. I only selected documents that dealt with the U.S. Government response to the events.

As the documents reveal, President Bush initially made the decision to send his National Security Advisor General Brent Scowcroft and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger on a secret trip to Beijing to engage Deng Xiaoping directly, after Bush’s attempts to reach Deng via telephone hotline were rebuffed. As a way of marking the 30th anniversary of that secret trip and this decisive moment in U.S.-China relations, ChinaFile has published the documents in full and invited U.S. diplomats and national security officials who have covered China, as well as several longtime observers of the bilateral relationship, to read the documents and reflect on their significance. I prefer to let the documents speak for themselves, but I nevertheless join the Conversation below, with a couple brief observations of my own. —David Shambaugh