ABSTRACT
The German Democratic Republic was a unique case within the Eastern Bloc as confronting the ruling communist government was not only about removing Erich Honecker’s Socialist Unity Party, but also about reunifying the country. There were two turning points in the communist world on 4 June 1989, and they had two very different outcomes. The first occurred in China where the democracy movement was brutally crushed in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, just as China’s policy of Kaifang was inspiring hope that political liberation would follow Deng Xiaoping’s economic freedoms. The communist world’s second turning point happened on the same day as the massacre in Tiananmen Square. Mikhail Gorbachev’s dismantling of the state-led socialist model as practised in the Soviet Union was also part of the wider turn towards the market economy ideal which was defining the economic policies and ideologies of parties across the socialist world.
