More than once, government negotiators almost reached a truce with students in the square, only to be sabotaged by radical youth leaders seemingly bent on bloodshed. For China, the tragedy triggered the biggest crisis of the Dengist era of reform & opening up. The internal wounds and Western-led international boycotts nearly killed off China’s epic effort to restore national order, rebuild its economy and achieve a modest level of prosperity. Conservative, inward-looking forces gained the upper hand in Beijing and they tried to reverse some of the reforms. By 1992, the program had stalled dangerously […]

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