By Nicole Solis  September 30th, 2009 2:57 pm  |  Comments (0)

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989

With the anniversaries of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the founding of the People’s Republic of China approaching in October and November, Jeffrey Wasserstrom examines how communism’s biggest defeat helped strengthen China’s Communist Party in an article for Foreign Policy.

Toward the end of the piece, Wasserstrom looks at two key lessons China learned from the end of communism in Eastern Europe:

1. Patriotism is a winning strategy, but it only works for one side.

By capitalizing on national pride, Eastern Europeans were able to unify citizens within each country against Communism, positioning it as a regime imposed on the country from outside forces. Taking control of this powerful tool, the Chinese Communist Party “placed renewed emphasis on patriotic education, stressing the party’s pre-1949 role in chasing out foreign invaders,” Wasserstrom writes.

2. Class divides give rise to dissent, so give people opportunities to bridge those divides.

East Berliners had to merely look over the wall to see how capitalism afforded their West Berlin counterparts a higher standard of living. Within Eastern European countries, Wasserstrom writes, “The only meaningful social divide was between a small privileged coterie of corrupt officials and the rest. And the rest was pretty much everyone.”

China avoided similar problems by encouraging a consumer revolution over the past two decades. As more working Chinese entered the middle class, there was less of a divide between the average Chinese worker and not only the party faithful but also middle-class workers in capitalist Taiwan.

Read the full article here.

Photo by unknown author, released by permission of the Senate of Berlin. CC 3.0.