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Similarities
- Both attempting to over throw communism in their country.
- Both in 1989.
- Only one violent in east - Romania. Ceausescu refused reform. Fired into crowds.Killed hundreds. However he was forced to flee, the army turned on him and caught him, trailed and executed. China - An unknown number of Chinese protesters were killed (estimates range into the thousands) during what came to be known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
- Both on TV - Tank Man and Berlin Wall.
- Both wanted democracy. Thousands of Chinese students continue to take to the streets in Beijing to protest government policies and issue a call for greater democracy in the communist People’s Republic of China (PRC).
- Both wanted an end to corruption.
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Differences
- One over threw government - Communist Bloc. China did not.
- Why communism failed in East? - Capitalism responds to the nature of "man"--acquisitiveness, competition, egoism and the insatiable need for more. Socialism stands in the way of initiative, creativity and competition. Going by its nom de guerre, communism, it proposes radical equality in a world of unequals. Therefore, it can be maintained only by the coercive power of an entrenched elite and a repressive state.
- New Labour Union - Solidarity - Poland. Follwing strikes over the economic conditions. Underground vote (free elections, a new senate etc) - got a crushing electoral victory.
- Hungary - Most liberal - Was allowed free association and assembly - It opened its borders (move to the West, especially East Berlin) - Nagy was the new leader (Reformist leader of earlier revolution) - New constitution (multi party and competitive elections)
- Economic collapse of East Berlin saw them migrating to the West via Hungary. Gorbachev removed Honecker, as he was advised to reform and did not. Decided to open borders, wall pulled down - Kohl pressed for unification.
- The rest began to fall - Prague and Bulgaria (former reformist of earlier revolutions would become in charge) - 1990 new elections.
- All replaced with democratically lead institutions. Right parties took power.
- Cold War now buried in the Mediterranean.
- Political conditions - New Soviet leader - proposed perestroika(restructuring) and glasnost (transparency) further legitimised popular calls for reform from within. Gorbachev also made clear that the Soviet Union had abandoned the policy of military intervention in support of communist regimes (the Brezhnev Doctrine).
- The Nobel Peace Prize 1990 was awarded to Mikhail Gorbachev "for his leading role in the peace process which today characterizes important parts of the international community".
- Economically - Dictatorship - 20% on military - less for QofL. Huge resources were put into building a secret police and spying on the population.The concentration camps and Gulags were enormously expensive and starved the rest of the economy. Money that could have been better spent rebuilding Eastern Europe was instead spent on repressing the people.A dictatorship restricts information and makes it had for regimes to discover and correct their mistakes.
- Economically - Absence of Market -This was because the absence of a market meant Communism was enormously wasteful with resources. Despite having some of the highest levels of investment, they had some of the lowest returns. This was due to the absence of market forces and signals, the primacy of political influences and a lack of accountability. Consumers had very little choice so they would buy the shoes even if they hated them. Thus there was no way to know what was a good or a bad investment. Factories would be built and products made even if no one wanted them.The lack of transparency meant large amounts of money could not be accounted for. No demand for supply.
- Incentives - When there are no extra incentives available—such as in a Communist state, where all reap an equal share in what some have worked harder to sow—the people in difficult jobs quickly lose their motivation. For example, workers would stop caring about how thoroughly they inspect the cars on the assembly lines, since it makes no difference to them either way. They are also likely to grow bitter at the government for failing to give them recognition when they do a good job.Productivity and efficiency are difficult to achieve without profit motive for the workers.
- Unorganised- In this climate corruption flourished.Without a market there is no way to accurately make economic decisions, to maximise economic efficiency or to use resources in the best way. There is no innovation, incentives, creation - all repressed. Did not allow people from the West to aid the economy. The system was notable for it's crippling inefficiencies and gross mismanagement. There was no way to improve because the free market could not state when there was a bad investment because people had no choice.
- Gorbachev himself said his reforms were needed due to the economy.
- China - economy more liberal? - During the mid-1980s, the communist government of the PRC had been slowly edging toward a liberalisation of the nation’s strict state-controlled economy, in an attempt to attract more foreign investment and increase the nation’s foreign trade.The economic reforms that were inaugurated after the death of Mao opened the country to foreign investment. This development strategy was designed to rapidly overcome the legacy of poverty and under-development by the import of foreign technology. In exchange the Western corporations received mega profits. The post-Mao leadership in the Communist Party calculated that the strategy would benefit China by virtue of a rapid technology transfer from the imperialist world to China. And indeed China has made great economic strides. But in addition to economic development there has also developed a larger capitalist class inside of China and a significant portion of that class and their children are being wooed by all types of institutions.The first reforms consisted of opening trade with the outside world, instituting the household responsibility system in agriculture, by which farmers could sell their surplus crops on the open market. Member of international monetary fund and world bank.
- USA Reaction - Good in USSR - Bad in China - The U.S. government temporarily suspended arms sales to China and imposed a few economic sanctions, but the actions were largely symbolic. Growing U.S. trade and investment in China and the fear that a severe U.S. reaction to the massacre might result in a diplomatic rupture limited the official U.S. response.
- Who? Chinese, mostly young students, crowded into central Beijing to protest for greater democracy and call for the resignations of Chinese Communist Party leaders deemed too repressive. - East - Everyone.
- Two leaders - however one worked (USSR) Hu Yaobang was a reformist, who served as General Secretary of the Communist Party of China from 1980 to 1987. He advocated rehabilitation of people persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, greater autonomy for Tibet, rapprochement with Japan, and social and economic reform. As a result, he was forced out of office by the hardliners in January of 1987, and made to offer humiliating public "self-criticisms" for his allegedly bourgeois ideas.One of the charges leveled against Hu was that he had encouraged (or at least allowed) wide-spread student protests in late 1986. As General Secretary, he refused to crack down on such protests, believing that dissent by the intelligentsia should be tolerated by the Communist government.
- China were remembering the god awful happenings of the Cultural Revolution - rid opponents. Purges went as far as army generals. (those who spoke against regime)
- People violent in China - On one avenue in western Beijing, demonstrators torched an entire military convoy of more than 100 trucks and armored vehicles. Aerial pictures of conflagration and columns of smoke have powerfully bolstered the [Chinese] government’s arguments that the troops were victims, not executioners. Other scenes show soldiers’ corpses and demonstrators ********* automatic rifles off unresisting soldiers,”The Chinese government’s account acknowledges that street fighting and armed clashes occurred in nearby neighborhoods. They say that approximately three hundred died that night including many soldiers who died from gunfire, Molotov cocktails and beatings.
- Result - USSR - Becomes capitalist, new states formed, new democracies, etc. China - Still communist - Red
Patriotic Education Campaign
Beijing
called upon the entire nation to study China’s humiliating modern history and
how much the country has been changed by the Communist revolution. The
CCP has set the entire propaganda machine in motion for this initiative, the con-
tent of which has become institutionalized in China—embedded in political
institutions and inaugurated as the CCP’s new ideological tool.Western nations have suspended military relations for the most part, although some low-level contacts involving the sharing of intelligence, discussion of strategic issues, and design of weapons systems appear to continue. There have been dramatic declines in revenues from tourism (down 20 percent in 1989), direct foreign investment (down 22 percent in the first half of 1990), and foreign lending (down 40 percent in 1989), although Beijing has been able to protect its foreign exchange balances by imposing strict controls over imports.
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