607 Georgina Higueras Spain-China, ten years of strategic partnership to Beijing the following month. Thus, Fernández Ordóñez became the first senior government official from the West to meet with the Chinese authorities following Tiananmen Square. Five years later, King Juan Carlos became the first European head of state to visit China since that fateful fourth of June 1989. Eugenio Bregolat, three times Spanish ambassador to China, claims that he frequently heard Chinese officials say that “Spain is China’s best friend in Europe”. Bregolat bases his claim on the Memoirs of Qian Qichen, the Minister of Foreign Affairs between 1988 and 1998, who said: In a general surge against China at that time, Spain was the country that did not follow the crowd and showed understanding for the situation in this country, it never ceasing to perform the credit agreement, economic cooperation projects between states, and took active measures to resume political exchanges.18 “Spain put itself on China’s map” when González took the decision to send his head of diplomacy, said Bregolat, during an interview with the author of the work. “We understood”, he goes on to add, “that Deng Xiaoping was being hounded by the conservatives who reproached him because the West, in exchange for supporting the economic reforms (markets, capital, technology, admission of Chinese students to Western universities, etc.) was demanding the establishment of a liberal democracy in China, i.e., precisely what the students in the Square had been demanding - the end of socialism. And it was decided, despite the media attention, to help Deng”.19 Spain also had the support of a hugely popular figure in China, Juan Antonio Samaranch, who, when Vice-president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1980, orchestrated the Taiwan-China formula so that the PRC could return to the IOC and promote its sport. In 2001, when Samaranch announced in Moscow that Beijing would host the Olympic Games in 2008, no one doubted his unwavering support. Indeed, China was so grateful that it opened the Juan Antonio Samaranch Memorial Museum in Tianjin in 2013.20 18 BREGOLAT, Eugenio: “Las relaciones bilaterales hispano-chinas: pasado, presente y futuro”, brief epilogue in Xulio RÍOS (coord.): Las relaciones hispano-chinas Historia y Futuro, Madrid: Catarata, 2013, pp. 217 and 218. 19 BREGOLAT, Eugenio: Interview conducted by email on 23 June 2014. The ambassador did not clarify whether China had invited Spain to become a member of the strategic club or vice versa. However, he does say that: “From our point of view, the relationship with China had to be strategic because of China’s present and future importance. I believe that the formula at the time was the right one: to the three traditional dimensions of Spanish foreign policy (European, which is now halfway between domestic and foreign policy, Latin American and Mediterranean), Spain should add a fourth one: Asia-Pacific. This is justified by the economic and geopolitical situation. Failure to understand this is to remain stuck in the last century. The reality is that Spain, as a society and as a country, has (with all the exceptions you want) not understood China at all or how China is changing the world we live in”. 20 Available at http://www.sport.es/es/noticias/mas-deportes/abren-china-museo-juan-anto- http://revista.ieee.es/index.php/ieee
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