Impact of the Democracy Movement on China in 1989

This iconic photo shows an unknown figure who has come to be known as 'Tank Man'. This man stood in front of the advancing CCP tanks during the protests, in his left hand is his grocery shopping.

The last dot point in the China option for Change in the Modern World states that students should give some focus to:

• the impact of the events of Tiananmen Square in 1989 on China and its standing in the world. 

The protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 were a distillation of the Democracy Movement that had characterised Chinese dissent throughout the late 1970s and the 1980s up until this point. Chinese artists, intellectuals, and students had gradually increased their demand for political, social, and economic reform under Deng Xiaoping's helming of Chinese leadership, which led to devastating consequences - what many refer to as a historical 'flashpoint'. Through a combination of short and long term causes, tensions built to a point where the opposing ideologies of the CCP and the protestors finally clashed.

This was the point where China 'decided' whether it did want to become a democracy or not. The reverberations of this violent release of pressure would colour the next decade for China both nationally and internationally, and its this examination of the effect that students will need to come to grips with in relation to the last dot point of Option B.

The document attached below offers a summary of the aftermath of the incident, and utilises a scaffolded version of the Cornell note-taking method to guide students in engaging and responding to specific parts of the text. I've found this approach quite effective with mixed ability classes who struggle to read texts of this sort - the note-taking scaffold, with its questions, is helpful because it explicitly focuses students while they read. In essence, it tells them what to look for, and students tend to appreciate this.

Resource: Impact of the Tiananmen Square Incident