The Causes of the Tiananmen Square Massacre

The Causes of the Tiananmen Square Massacre

I have been asked to look at the Tiananmen Square massacre and to find

the long and short term causes for the unfateful event in which

thousand of people were killed.

The main political party in china was the Kuomintang this was a

nationalist party who supported capitalism.

In 1935 Mao Tse Tung became the chairman of the communist party.

By 1946 conflict between the communists and the Kuomintang (the party

that was ruling) turned into a full-scale civil war. This raged on for

3 years, in 1949 the Kuomintang was defeated Mao Tse Tung and his

party had won, china now became a communist country it became known as

"the peoples' republic of china".

When china became a communist country the people faced not only a

redistribution of wealth but great repression. There was a secret

police that went round and would arrest anyone who spoke ill of the

communist regime or Mao Tse Tung. The people had to live their lives

in fear that maybe tomorrow they would never see their wife and kids

again.

People weren't allowed to openly criticize communism those that did

would have been arrested and re-educated. However in the 1950's and

60's they would have been arrested and shot, people's freedoms

therefore become less and less.

In 1966 the cultural revolution took place what this basically

consisted of was cleansing the communist party, Mao Tse Tung believed

that many party members and ordinary Chinese people gad lost interest

in communism. To get the people back on track Mao Tse Tung decided

that young people should be trained up to reinforce communism. The red

guards as they became k...

... middle of paper ...

...ey started hunger strikes. They

probably thought as the police gave up attempts to contain the crowds

and Beijing slid into anarchy that Deng would fear a civil war. As the

students called for deng's resignation at the same time that Mikhail

gorbachev was visiting china possibly expected that the extent of his

humiliation would result in him giving into their demands. However

instead the army was called into break up the demonstrations and the

massacre followed.

The whole event rejected discontent, for some it had gone back over

many years for example those who lived through the Cultural Revolution

for some of the younger demonstrators their reasons for protesting

were more short term. Perhaps each member of the protest group had

their own agenda for being in the square. None however got what they

set out to get.