Liberating Voices from East Germany and China—A Personal Perspective

Authors

Holly Liu, Alma CollegeFollow

Abstract

For many of us, the year 1989 is the year in which world history was rewritten and our lives were changed forever. On June 4, 1989, the month-long student protests on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China, were brutally cracked down, and this marked the end of the premature democratic efforts led by tens of thousands of young students. Several months later, Mikhail Gorbachev’s appeal for Glasnost (transparency) and Perestroika (reconstruction) in his liberating reforms in the Soviet Union had swept through other socialist states, especially the Eastern Bloc countries, and caused an unexpected domino effect in the political landscape. Initiated in Leipzig by the Monday demonstrations, East Germany, having just celebrated the 40th anniversary of its foundation, underwent a series of demonstrations in Dresden, Plauen and Berlin. Eventually, the cry for travel freedom, freedom of speech and the press, and the will of the East German people to reform the socialist state, contributed to the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, and to the collapse of the German Democratic Republic (GDR).

Keywords

Humanities Symposium

Recommended Citation

Liu, Holly (2011) "Liberating Voices from East Germany and China—A Personal Perspective," Belmont Humanities Symposium Journal: Vol. 2, Article 10.
Available at: https://repository.belmont.edu/humanities_symposium_journal/vol2/iss1/10