What the U.S.-China Experience Can Teach About Iran’s Future

Michael Fuchs, Ilan Goldenberg

Diplomacy,

America's long rapprochement with China offers insights into a possible Iranian future.

The results from Iran’s recent elections indicate that reformists and moderates have made gains in both the parliament and the Assembly of Experts—the body that will pick the next Supreme Leader of Iran. These results are already setting off intensified speculation about the long-term domestic political implications of the nuclear agreement, and whether over time the deal can transform the Iranian political system. While a helpful barometer, one election will not be that predictive of where Iran may go in the next 10-15 years. A more useful exercise is to look at similar historical examples for lessons of how a major geopolitical opening may effect a closed regime. In this regard, the lessons from Nixon’s 1972 opening to China and the ensuing changes in Chinese domestic politics, the U.S.-China relationship, and American alliances in East Asia are highly instructive.

In China’s case, while a diplomatic opening to the world eventually led to internal economic reforms, it did not lead to rapid liberalization of the political system. China’s diplomatic opening with the United States formally began in 1972 and was a pragmatic decision driven by strategic necessity as it looked for partners during its Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. But China’s economic system did not start changing until years later, after its hardline ruler Mao Tse-Tung died.

Only in the late 1970s and early 1980s—when Deng Xiaoping emerged after years of internal political strife as China’s leader—did real reforms begin to take hold, opening China’s economy to the world and beginning the global economic transformation we know so well today. And while Deng was an economic reformer, he was no political liberal. Deng was made by Mao’s Communist system, rose through it, and in his later years defended that system by backing the crackdown on those advocating for more political rights during the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989.