Tiananmen Incident Of 1989 Summary

Tiananmen Incident of 1989 After the death of Mao Zedong in 1976, the cultural revolution movement has ended. Mao Zedong was a dreamer and did not care about practical concerns. He obsession with creating a perfect society and lack of concern addressing more immediate concerns like famine and unemployment has backfired. After his death the country was left in dire economic situation; therefore, someone had to step in to take care of the people. By 1982, Chinese started to criticize Mao Zedong’s work and ideas that he produced towards the end of his ruling. Deng Xiaoping was not prominent in Mao Zedong era because of his differences in political ideologies that were at odds with Maoism. He believed that China should learn from the west and

After Hu’s death, the students started demanding freedom of speech, press, and democracy. The understanding of the democracy concept in the Chinese society at that time was not complete. In Chinese, the word democracy is “power of the people”, so their understanding was literal; therefore, how this new concept would be implemented was less clear. The hard-liners in the government were strictly opposed to practicing democracy of course. They were afraid they would be no longer in power if democratic election would be done. However, having elections was not that simple in China because of poor communication between provinces and people understanding of democracy was

There was a concern that the size of the country is too big for democratization because for a country to be truly democratic there has to be communication between the people and the authority. Vast distances and poor communication infrastructure complicates democratization of the country. Also, because of the size of China, it would require to have a federal democracy in which the regions are self-ruling and the central authority has some power over them just like in the U.S. There was a pressure to democratize China and transition to market economy from within China by the people as well as from outside countries that already transitioned. If people can’t be herd directly by the government they turn to demonstrations, strikes, and other behavior that brings attention. The people that were used to the traditional, but ineffective system with concentrated power tasted the fruits of economic reform and democratic enlightenment; therefore, they are pushing even harder for