Question

What structure should be in A+ essay, if my topic is Tiannanmen Square 1989? Describe in details what I should write in Introduction, main body and conclusion? referring to the question: Compare historical texts with reference to crucial contributors to revolution, popular uprising and social movement and their outcomes.

Answer 1

In the 1980s, China was going through huge changes. The ruling Communist Party began to allow some private companies and foreign investment. Leader Deng Xiaoping hoped to boost the economy and raise living standards. However, the move brought with its corruption, while at the same time raising hopes for greater political openness.

The Communist Party was divided between those urging more rapid change and hardliners wanting to maintain strict state control. In the mid-1980s, student-led protests started. Those taking part included people who had lived abroad and been exposed to new ideas and higher standards of living.

From April 1989 people from across China gathered in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to mourn the death of the liberal Communist Party leader Hu Yaobang and share their frustrations about the slow pace of promised reform. The gathering turned into peaceful protests which spread across the provinces of China as demonstrators, mainly students, began to call for an end to official corruption and for political and economic reform.

On 13 May, hundreds of student protesters in Tiananmen Square went on hunger strike in order to speak push for talks with Communist Party leaders. It is estimated that one million people joined the protests in Beijing to express their support for the students on hunger strike and to demand reform.

They called for greater freedom of speech, economic freedoms and curbs on corruption – demands that touched a raw nerve with the conservatives in the Communist Party. The top leadership was divided; while some saw students as patriotic, others saw them as a threat to the regime. The demonstrations spread to hundreds of cities across China.

On 26 April, a publication in the Communist Party's People's Daily condemned the understudy exhibits as a "planned and sorted out connivance and unrest" with "hostile to gathering" and "against communist" thought processes. The following day, a huge number of understudies in Beijing arranged an exhibit to challenge the publication. Socialist Party boss, Zhao Ziyang, a liberal, attempted to moderate the harm by demonstrating his eagerness to hold an exchange with the understudies in a discourse on 4 May. On 13 May, only two days before the appearance of Soviet pioneer, Mikhail Gorbachev for a state visit, several understudies started an appetite strike in Tiananmen Square. The fights constrained the crossing out of the inviting service. On 19 May, in his last open appearance, Zhao visited understudies before first light and made a weepy request for them to leave the square. Zhao was later cleansed and lived under house capture until his demise in 2005. On 20 May, military law was pronounced in parts of Beijing. Troops moved in, yet were obstructed by the civilians and demonstrations proceeded.

After the crackdown, the authorities put student leaders, outspoken liberal intellectuals and workers who played a key role in the movement on its most-wanted list. A number fled to western countries via Hong Kong, but many were arrested and jailed on “counter-revolutionary” charges.

Discussion of the events that took place in Tiananmen Square is highly sensitive in China. Posts relating to the massacres are regularly removed from the internet, tightly controlled by the government. So, for a younger generation who didn't live through the protests, there is little awareness about what happened.

The authorities punish those who try to commemorate the event, placing scores of intellectuals, writers or activists under house arrest ahead of the anniversary of the crackdown. Relatives of the victims who died during the massacre are barred from openly mourning their loved ones.

In the three decades since Tiananmen, the Communist Party has rejected calls for political liberalization, tightened its control on speech and intensified its suppression of dissent to maintain stability and to uphold its own survival. The repudiation of political transparency ushered in an era of rampant corruption, inequality and social instability. The Chinese government has since justified its military crackdown on the movement as necessary for political stability, economic prosperity and its eventual rise.

The democratic movement was too strong, public disgust with the corruption and authoritarian policies of the government too great, and the world tide against communist governments – exemplified by the collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe later that same year – too profound for China to resist for long.

The CCP did restore its dominance over society remarkably quickly. The deep differences of opinion within the party were muted if not eliminated by the purge of Party head Zhao Ziyang and other top leaders. Rather than being a transitional figure, Jiang Zemin continued to head the CCP until stepping down thirteen years later in 2002, and the Chinese economy not only continued to grow but to stir fears that it had become an unstoppable economic juggernaut as China became the manufacturing center of the world. Whereas per capita income at stood at about $250 in 1989, it had grown to some $1200 by 2006, remarkable achievement for a country of 1.3 billion people and putting China well on the way toward becoming a middle-income country. Even China’s diplomatic pariah status had vanished a decade and a half later as China emerged as an influential presence in world councils, especially in Asia