Читать книгу Financial Cold War. A View of Sino-US Relations from the Financial Markets онлайн

27 страница из 137

The use of financial pressure and ‘geo-economic’ power in international diplomacy is nothing new. When Britain and France supported Israel's 1956 invasion of Egypt in a bid to topple Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser and regain Western control of the Suez Canal, President Eisenhower used the threat of dumping British Giltsssss1 to force the withdrawal of the British and French troops. However, in the post-Cold War period, the exploitation of the dollar to achieve US diplomatic and strategic objectives was extended significantly.

Meanwhile, unlike the leaderships of the former Warsaw Pact countries, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continued in power beyond the end of the Cold War. Nevertheless, the CCP had also seen a wave of protests that had threatened its rule in the form of the 1989 student movement. Deng Xiaoping's decision to crack down on that movement in Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989 has been described as ‘one of the most consequential decisions in recent world history’.ssss1 Whatever the morality of that decision, it was influenced both by China's own history of internal chaos when the central government had been weak, and by the experience of Gorbachev's Perestroika movement, which had led to significant political upheavals while failing to generate meaningful economic growth.