2012 is a year of the dragon, as were 2000, 1988 and the auspicious year 1976.
1976 was a year of turmoil and tremendous change in China. Both Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong died, leaving a power vacuum. After the Gang of Four was defeated, the innocuous Hua Guofeng was head of the government as Deng Xiaoping consolidated control.
After watching a video on the Berlin Wall one of my students commented that the Americans didn’t need any more propaganda than the wall to show the difference between communism and democracy. In a recent post I remarked that August was the 50th anniversary of the erection of the Berlin Wall, but the wall was only part of the story.
In fact, Berlin remained a center of tension in the Cold war, and a number of historians on both sides of the wall saw it as allaying those tensions. With the Wall, all was fixed it would seem.
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