property—and every other kind of property—would be a recurring issue in China.29

But for the first time many Chinese were able to build wealth, and millions were being pulled out of poverty. The size of the Chinese economy would more than double during the 1980s, and the world was paying attention.30 Beijing’s formula for success was inspiring admiration in the most unlikely places. Even Russia’s prototypical communist government, which had criticized China’s deviations from Marxism, began hoping that a little market magic could revive the Soviet economy, too.31 Mikhail Gorbachev, who had taken over as communist party boss in 1985, began trying to save the Soviet regime by relaxing the iron grip of central planning and allowing some private business activity. Unable to compete any longer against the vibrant, high-tech economy of the United States, Gorbachev was trying to open the communist system to new ideas while avoiding fundamental reform. But he wasn’t moving quickly enough, and the captive peoples in Russia and the rest of Eastern Europe weren’t going to be satisfied with a slightly less repressive tyranny.

In June of 1987, U.S. president Ronald Reagan traveled to Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate and called Gorbachev’s bluff. Standing defiantly at the concrete frontier of the Soviet empire, Reagan told a huge crowd of West Germans:

Behind me stands a wall that encircles the free sectors of this city, part of a vast system of barriers that divides the entire continent of Europe. From the Baltic, south, those barriers cut across Germany in a gash of barbed wire, concrete, dog runs, and guardtowers. Farther south, there may be no visible, no obvious wall. But there remain armed guards and checkpoints all the same—still a restriction on the right to travel, still an instrument to impose upon ordinary men and women the will of a totalitarian state. Yet it is here in Berlin where the wall emerges most clearly; here, cutting across your city, where the news photo and the television screen have imprinted this brutal division of a continent upon the mind of the world. Standing before the Brandenburg Gate, every man is a German, separated from his fellow men. Every man is a Berliner, forced to look upon a scar.

Beyond the assembled crowd in front of Reagan, no doubt many Germans on the other side of the wall were also able to hear his speech on radio, despite attempts by the communist East German government to block it.

“We hear much from Moscow about a new policy of reform and openness…,” Reagan went on to say. He then spoke the words which would shake the foundations of the communist empire. “There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalization: Come here to this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, open this gate! Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”32

Two years later the wall collapsed as jubilant Germans poured across the border. One after another, communist regimes fell across Eastern Europe. By Christmas Day of 1991, the Soviet Union was no more.33 “Ronald Reagan won the Cold War without firing a shot,” concluded Margaret Thatcher, who served as Britain’s prime minister in the 1980s.34 Worldwide, hundreds of millions of people were liberated from tyranny. Market economies were rising and new democracies were being born.

Communism was failing all around the world. Perhaps Washington policymakers could be forgiven for thinking that it probably wouldn’t last much longer in the place that had become conspicuous for its new embrace of capitalism.

But as much as China’s communists wanted to benefit from economic growth, they had no intention of surrendering political power. In early June of 1989, just as the communist government in Poland was losing its grip on power and only months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, student demonstrators in the heart of China’s capital were standing in front of Mao Zedong’s portrait and demanding liberty. The demonstrations had been allowed for weeks, in part because they were originally presented as a memorial to a senior government official who had advocated reform. But the crowd in Tiananmen Square was growing.

Young people demanded an end to corruption and fashioned a “Lady Democracy” monument that looked like a papier-mâché rendering of the Statue of Liberty. The university students in Tiananmen were inspiring protests in other parts of the country. Chinese tyrant Deng Xiaoping, friendly as he may have been to market liberalization, decided that he could not tolerate demands for political freedom. Deng ordered the army to take Tiananmen.

Tanks rolled through the city, over homemade barricades, and into the square. Ground troops joined in the slaughter. “You never forget watching young people, some of the nation’s best and brightest, full of passion and idealism, stand up to machine guns—and then in an instant crumple bloody and lifeless on the ground,” recalled Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times on the thirtieth anniversary of the massacre. In June of 1989 he was the paper’s Beijing bureau chief and witnessed the carnage in Tiananmen. He remembers soldiers “firing not only on the crowds but even on families watching in horror from balconies. Troops fired at ambulances rescuing the wounded.” He also recalls rickshaw drivers who bravely pedaled their bicycle carts into the square during pauses in the shooting to retrieve the wounded. Kristof particularly remembers one such driver: “He had a couple of bleeding people on the back of his cart and was pedaling furiously, his legs straining. He saw me and swerved toward me so that I could bear witness to his government’s brutality. As he passed, he pleaded with me: Tell the world!

“And tears were streaming down his cheeks.”35

One of the protest leaders, Rose Tang, managed to survive the assault and then make her way to the United States. In 2019 she told the Wall Street Journal about the exciting days before the crackdown when protesters believed that their

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