I remember 1989 vividly, having spent much of that summer in Berlin before the Wall fell. And while largely peaceful revolutions swept through Centra… - Niall Ferguson

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I remember 1989 vividly, having spent much of that summer in Berlin before the Wall fell. And while largely peaceful revolutions swept through Central and Eastern Europe that year (it was only three years later, in Yugoslavia, that the death of Communism sparked war), there was no such turning point in China, where 1989 also saw the Tiananmen Square massacre. With the benefit of hindsight, the survival of Communism in China was a more significant historical phenomenon than its collapse east of the River .

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About Niall Ferguson

Niall Campbell Douglas Ferguson (born 18 April 1964) is a British historian. He is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, University of Oxford and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

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Native Name: Niall Campbell Ferguson
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It was the moment when the British ideal of liberty bit back. It was the moment when the British Empire began to tear itself apart. On the village green of Lexington, Massachusetts, British redcoats exchanged fire for the first time with armed American colonists. It was 19 April 1775.

Beginning in the late 1970s, China overcame centuries of stagnation precisely because Mao’s successors understood that they had to decentralise the People’s Republic, giving economic if not political power to the people. If western commentators are right, Xi Jinping wants to go in the opposite direction. If the Chinese are lucky, he will turn out to be an enlightened absolutist, like Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew. If they are unlucky, he will be just another emperor who fondly dreamt of controlling a fifth of humanity.

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For better, for worse – fair and foul – the world we know today is in large measure the product of Britain’s age of Empire. The question is not whether British imperialism was without a blemish. It was not. The question is whether there could have been a less bloody path to modernity. Perhaps in theory there could have been. But in practice?

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