It's impossible to know for sure, but the alternate to Deng staying in power seems to have bad parallels to the fall of the USSR two years later, which was not so much a revolution as a societal collapse.
Deng didn't necessarily have to lose power anyway. Zhao Ziyang supported the protesters and he was Deng's closest ally.
Drawing parallels to the USSR two years later, what we think we can achieve quickly derails into the unexpected in situations like these. Gorbachev also thought he could remain in power and be at the helm of gradual reforms. That belief didn't stop the collapse of the USSR and the disintegration of its economy and territorial integrity.
...Of course every human desires freedom. You are missing my point entirely, the PRC does not espouse freedom in the same way that the US government does. Anyway, the main thrust of that point, which you seem to have ignored, is that the West is pro-democratic in a way the PRC isn't, so the opinions of the people are taken more seriously. Doesn't mean they aren't still met with violence, but they aren't met with violence to the same degree.
The British Empire wasn't terribly pro-democratic, either. No one back then was saying that the opinions of average Indians were worth taking seriously as equal members of the British commonwealth. Back then, the homegrown class barriers in London alone would have made an American weep. Lady Chatterly slept with a
commoner! How scandalous! Ban that book!
There was something else involved in why Gandhi's form of resistance resonated in the west. It wasn't a unique affinity toward viewing everyone as equal and valuing democracy, because that wasn't universally true back then. It was a respect for passive resistance and sacrifice, standing up to government authority, undergoing the rituals of martyrdom. Gandhi even fasted. The western media ate that shit up like it was gravy. It resonated because of a similarity to Christianity's beginnings.
You act like that isn't done in the West. If the West didn't do that to a ridiculously huge degree we wouldn't have the drug problems we do.
Well, it's worse than that. By orders of magnitudes. Every small law and regulation is broken if you can get away with it. Even if adhering to the law is perfectly sane. You can routinely see a woman with a stroller hanging out in the middle of the street as cars whiz past in both directions. Drug laws ironically are well-kept in China, because the dealer gets swift death.
So because Chinese Nationalism is on the rise they don't know about the Cultural Revolution? Especially, because Chinese Nationalism is on the rise now they didn't know about the Cultural Revolution in the 80s?
Not that I'm aware. My wife was born in 1986, and I don't feel comfortable talking about these things with other Chinese that don't have a vested interest in keeping me healthy as a revenue stream. She hadn't heard of the Tiananmen incident at any point in her life. She dimly knows that there was a famine in the 1950s and that's why everyone greets their friends today with "Have you eaten?" instead of "Hello" but why this famine happened is pretty vague. It certainly wasn't because of Mao. She knows that Mao was 3 parts wrong and 7 parts right. Deng corrected the parts that were wrong. Everything's cool now. The end.
The top 5% of every graduating class automatically is inducted into the Chinese Communist Party, so my wife--being a good little student feverishly studying 17 hours a day--is a card-carrying chi-com by dint of her grades. But she doesn't know these things.
Old people have their stories, but the puzzle pieces here in china don't fit together. Mao is on all of the money except the small change, and he's a national hero. The cultural revolution probably wasn't any better known or understood in the 80s than it is today. A million personal anecdotes simply never congealed into a popular understanding of what was happening back then. Most people got their first televisions in the 1990s and its was still black and white.
Not really, no. In Europe, we litter on purpose. We're that badass
In terms of citizens, China is not Japan, but still more law-abiding than some/most western countries.
Also, Tian'anmen wasn't about to put a new government in place. It was about reforms. They even sang the Internationale. It was the effect of the political division in the Party : conservative or reformer.
Deng decision was made because he wanted reforms, but thought that the situation should be stable.
And Tian'anmen was hugely broadcast (at least in the beginning), even in China. I doubt all the Chinese that lived at this time already died.
That's awesome. What european country? I've often wanted to shrug off my middle-class American upbringing and do as the Chinese can, reveling in my environmental sacrilege. Unfortunately, I can't do it. We generally don't litter, if we're well-raised middle class that watched cartoons on Saturdays. "Give a hoot, don't pollute." I still carry my trash for several city blocks until I find a rare trash bin.
Again, about Tiananmen, I think everyone underestimates how completely the government controlled the media during that incident. No chinese person has seen tankman. He is not a recognized icon of protest in China.
Crime in China is different, but common enough. It tends toward less violent crimes, but a Chinese co-worker just got her purse stolen last month by a man riding a motorbike, who grabbed it while racing past her. I've been pickpocketed twice in buses in Xi'an. My empty suitcase was stolen in Yuncheng when I left it at the deposit counter in a department store. Once a chinese cabbie drove me out to the countryside and demanded money, or he'd leave me there. I was tea-scammed at the Forbidden City. That's a great tale, btw.
Yeah, it's pretty bad here.