Tiananmen and Long March
After Tiananmen, the US suspends all space cooperation with China. Long March commercial launch deals freeze, US satellite components are barred from PRC payloads, and the freeze in effect never fully thaws.
A working catalogue entry, kept current. Each paragraph is drawn from the publicly documented record.
Following the 4 June 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square, the United States imposes broad sanctions on China — including suspension of military and dual-use technology exports. American satellite components are barred from PRC payloads, and commercial Long March launch services that had been growing since 1985 freeze.
Although some restrictions are episodically relaxed, the Tiananmen-era sanctions become the political baseline for every US-China space-cooperation conversation since. The Wolf Amendment of 2011 and the entity-list designations of the 2020s rest on the legal scaffolding first erected in 1989.
Each entry is publicly documented. Have a correction or a stronger source? Send it to the editorial team via the contact form.
