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“The Chinese government used economic benefits to persuade people they can live a good life under the CCP’s control,” says Joanne Ng, a Guangdong native who was nine years old at the time Tiananmen crackdown and who now lives in Hong Kong. At the time of the Tiananmen rallies, China’s GDP per capita compared unfavorably to Gambia’s by 2030, if not before, many indicators predict China’s economy will eclipse the U.S.

By some measures the trade-off was tremendously successful. To survive the upheaval, its leadership rewrote their social contract the post-Maoist effort of “reform and opening up,” whereby China established its own brand of market-economy socialism, was ultimately accelerated but at the expense of political freedoms. Thirty years later, many are still waiting for the Middle Kingdom to liberalize, though the CCP’s grip on power has arguably never been tighter. And yet in the West, a certainty remained that China would eventually resurrect the dream of democracy that was deferred that night.