<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-05-31/how-tanks-on-tiananmen-sq...> Western capitals are fuming about Beijing’s actions, Chinese companies face unprecedented sanctions and the nation’s exports are being punished. The same was true in 1989 after tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square on June 4 to crush student protests. In that 30-year interlude, China has gone from global pariah to a nation slugging it out on the international stage with the world’s biggest superpower. Those three decades are a story not just of the transformation of China’s fortune, but of the shift in technology and ideas that altered global politics and is increasingly turning developing nations toward China’s model of central control. [...] But China’s success in fostering economic growth and power while managing to avoid widespread political reform has proven an attractive model for leaders in countries rich and poor who are looking to emulate that creation of wealth. "The Chinese government has become increasingly confident about its mode of governance," said Maya Wang, a senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch. "It increasingly believes that the kind of dictatorship that can be economically powerful and at least on the surface stable could be attractive to other governments." [...] Those changes show that, while China marks the 30th anniversary of Tiananmen by censoring any reference to the event, the world is still grappling with the consequences of the path Beijing took that night. "Free speech was the norm and censorship was the exception" in the early days of the internet, said Lokman Tsui, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and a former Asia policy executive at Google who focused on free expression. "The whole climate has changed. Governments are looking to China as a model."