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The Crisis Deepens
COLLAPSE OF COMMUNISM IN EASTERN EUROPE
AND THE USSRThe Failed CCP Defense of Socialism in Eastern Europe
The CCP’s confrontation with a powerful popular protest movement in
spring 1989 and the chilling aftermath of that bloody event changed Beijing’s
policy toward the increasingly besieged communist party governments in
Eastern Europe, especially those of East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia,
and Romania, which seemed prepared to rely on tried and proven Leninist
methods of proletarian dictatorship to stay in power. By June 1989, the com-
munist parties of Poland and Hungary were already well down the path of
negotiated abandonment of their monopoly on state power. But perhaps the
anticommunist tide could be halted at the borders of those countries. The
CCP lent its support to this last-ditch effort to uphold proletarian state power
in Eastern Europe.
The Beijing Massacre hung over the freedom movements that unfolded in
Eastern Europe during the second half of 1989. The Chinese example of how
an entrenched communist party apparatus could resort to old-style repres-
sion befitting Lenin or Stalin to retain their monopoly on state power became
a negative example that helped convince people in Eastern Europe of the ur-
gent need to push forward and finally topple the communist establishment. If
the communist party was not stripped of control over the instruments of re-
pression, the danger remained of a “Chinese solution,” as it came to be called
in East European lands during that fateful year.
Beijing adopted several key policies toward Eastern European develop-
ments in 1989. Beijing responded positively to solicitations of support from
embattled communist regimes. In an attempt to replay an old game first
learned in the 1950s, East European communist regimes that chose to resist
Soviet pressure and growing popular demand for reform (in Berlin, Prague,