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The People’s Republic of China

The speedy surrender of Japan in 1945 came as a shock to China. Civil war had ravaged the Chinese
provinces since the Chinese Nationalist party split into left- and right-wing factions. The depletion of
Kuomintang troops during the second Sino-Japanese war left the country ill-prepared to prevent a
communist takeover after Russian troops withdrew from China.

A tentative truce between the nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek, and the communists did not even last
a year. With Soviet backing for the communists and the United States supporting the nationalists, an all-
out war raged within China. The political and economic chaos facilitated Mao Zedong's proclamation
that China was officially a People’s Republic. Communism in China endured throughout the cold war until
a pro-democratic enlightenment took hold there. This movement reached a peak at Tiananmen Square on
June 4, 1989, when over seven thousand reform protesters were killed, solidifying the worldwide,
unfavorable reputation of the government of the People’s Republic of China.

The Eastern Bloc

Uprisings in Communist strongholds such as China and the USSR were foreshadowed by smaller
revolutions inPoland (1952), Hungary (1956), and Czechoslovakia (1968). The desire for independence
from Soviet control drove protectorate countries to resurge throughout the 1970s and '80s. Many formed
new free market economies. Not every consequence of the slow slip away from imperial communism was
a good one. Some states had roguish tendencies and despite the Anti-Proliferation Treaty of 1968
became potential nuclear threats. Many of the freshly sprung republics needed much foreign aid to
achieve domestic stability.

Voices of the Eastern Bloc Independence Movement

• Czech president Vaclav Havel
• Physicist and social reform philosopher Andrei Dmitrievich Sakharov
• Novelist and Nobel laureate Aleksander Solzhenitsyn
• Unionist, activist, and Polish politician Lech Walesa

The Developing World

Nation building was the order of the century in the 1900s. On a platform of nonviolence and civil
disobedience, Mohandas K. Gandhi fanned fires set by British oppression to bring independence
to India and Pakistan . Nelson Mandela crusaded against apartheid in South Africa from his prison cell
from 1964 until 1990. Revolutions sprang up in the Middle East, Latin America, and China. Socialist,
anarchist, and nationalist conflicts powered the Mexican Revolution from 1910 to 1928. The Mexican
Constitution of 1917 recognized the labor rights and social orders of the people. The rise of democracy
in Latin America was challenged by years of civil war, political repression, and social as well as ethnic
divisions.

The United States and nations surrounding Iran opposed the Iranian Revolution in 1979. The revolution, a
struggle between extravagant monarch Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the populist theocratic
dictatorship of Ayatollah Khomeini, left Iran isolated from the capitalist world and beleaguered
by U.S. trade sanctions. The 1980 Iran-Iraq War was a result of concern around the world. People
worried that Ayatollah Khomeini and his Islamic regime might affect the tenuous balance of alliances
within the Muslim world. Revolutionaries in Afghanistan were inspired by the movements, and the radical
Taliban was funded by the United States in the effort against the Iranian Revolution.