Daily quote by 1989 Tiananmen Square protests

• I remember 1989 vividly, having spent much of that summer in Berlin before the Wall fell. And while largely peaceful revolutions swept through Central and Eastern Europe that year (it was only three years later, in Yugoslavia, that the death of Communism sparked war), there was no such turning point in China, where 1989 also saw the Tiananmen Square massacre. With the benefit of hindsight, the survival of Communism in China was a more significant historical phenomenon than its collapse east of the River Elbe.
  • Niall Ferguson, "We have seen very few years in history that have been truly pivotal. This could be one.", The Mail on Sunday, March 20, 2022.
• "Everyone was so sick of singing the praises of Brezhnev that it now became a must to chide the leader," Gorbachev recalled. "Being disciplined people, my Politburo colleagues did not show that they were unhappy. Nevertheless, I sensed their bad mood. How could it be otherwise when it was already clear to everybody that the days of Party dictatorship were over?" However true that might be in Hungary, Poland, and the Soviet Union, it was not the case in China. There Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms had brought pressures for political change, a course he was not prepared to take. When former general secretary Hu Yaobang, whom Deng had deposed for having advocated openness, suddenly died in mid-April, student protesters began a series of demonstrations that filled Tiananmen Square, in central Beijing. Gorbachev, on his first trip to China, arrived in the midst of these. "Our hosts," he observed, "were extremely concerned about the situation," and with good reason, for the dissidents cheered the Kremlin leader. "In the Soviet Union they have Gorbachev," one banner read. "In China, we have whom?" Shortly after his departure, the students unveiled a plaster "Goddess of Democracy," modeled on the Statue of Liberty, directly across from Mao's portrait over the entrance to the Forbidden City and just in front of his mausoleum. Whatever Mao might have thought of this, it was too much for Deng, and on the night of June 3-4, 1989, he ordered a brutal crackdown. How many people died as the army took back the square and the streets surrounding it is still not clear, but the toll was several times greater than that for the entire year of revolutionary upheavals in Europe. Nor is there a consensus, even now, as to how the Chinese Communist Party retained power when its European counterparts were losing power: perhaps it was the willingness to use force; perhaps the fear of chaos if the party was overthrown; perhaps the fact that Deng's version of capitalism in the guise of communism had genuinely improved the lives of the Chinese people, however stunted their opportunities for political expression might be. What was clear was that Gorbachev's example had shaken Deng's authority. Whether Deng's example would now shake Gorbachev's authority remained to be seen.
  • John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (2006), pp. 242-243