Figure 72. Students demonstrate for democracy on the streets of Shanghai, China. Image courtesy of Department of Defense and Department of the Navy Imaging Command.
JUNE 1989 Tiananmen Square Protests and Massacre
The Tiananmen Square protests of 1989 were immortalized in the West by the photograph of a lone man defying a column of tanks. The origin of these protests was a series of reforms initiated by the Communist Party in 1978 to facilitate the introduction of a market economy and liberalization of the system established by Mao Zedong. The transition resulted in erratic change, increased economic uncertainty, and much unemployment. During the late 1980s the economic turmoil, frustrations over stalled political reform, and widespread corruption led to student protests in cities and universities across China. Joined by leading Chinese intellectuals, students demanded political democracy, freedom of speech and assembly, and elimination of special privileges enjoyed by elites. On June 4, 1989, after some indecision, communist leaders suppressed the democracy movement by imposing martial law and forcibly removing students from Tiananmen Square, taking actions that resulted in a large number of deaths. Chinese relations with the West were seriously and negatively affected for several years. SEE FIGURE 72
NOVEMBER 1989 Berlin Wall Comes Down, the Cold War Ends
Constructed by East Germany in 1961 to shut off the flight of its citizenry into the West, the massive wall around West Berlin came to symbolize the Cold War and communist control of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. By 1989, however, the forces of political and economic change unleashed in the Soviet Union by Mikhail Gorbachev, the General Secretary of the Communist Party, had spread to Eastern Europe. Popular uprisings pressed for an end to state repression, one-party rule, and economic stagnation. The de-stabilization of communist regimes led to their collapse in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania, and to a dramatic climax when the East German government, acting independently of Moscow, opened its border with West Germany. On November 9, 1989, joyous Germans climbed onto the Berlin Wall and destroyed it with whatever instruments and tools they could find. German unification followed in October 1990. As Moscow’s empire in Central and Eastern Europe melted away, the Cold War disappeared as well.
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