Opinion30 years after the Berlin Wall fell, China’s digital barriers are stronger and protectionism is making a global comeback

The end of the cold war failed to reshape China, which used the free market and technology to build a prosperous surveillance state

Now, a US-led coalition of democracies are ranged against the world’s last major communist power in a new cold war

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Facial recognition surveillance technology on display at a Shanghai conference in August. The new walls are bigger and harder to tear down. Photo: Bloomberg

Published: 12:00pm, 20 Nov 2019Updated: 12:15pm, 20 Nov 2019

The fall of the Berlin Wall was widely seen as having changed the trajectory of history in several ways. It marked democracy’s triumph over communist tyranny, ushered in an era of globalisation with free markets and open societies, and most importantly, ended the cold war.

But 30 years on, the world is still far from what political scientist Francis Fukuyama called the “end of history”, as new barriers are built and new battlegrounds laid.

The fall of the Berlin Wall helped to trigger the global collapse of communism but failed to reshape China, despite many in the West then anticipating that the one-party state was on borrowed time.

In fact, China has surpassed the Soviet Union as the longest-lived communist regime. China’s communist leaders have systematically learned lessons from the collapse of communism in the Soviet bloc by rejecting Mikhail Gorbachev’s policies of “perestroika” (restructuring) and “glasnost” (openness). China’s authoritarianism has survived precisely by adapting the free market and global capitalism to its own designs.

China’s spectacular rise after 1989 is proving to be as significant a historic event as the collapse of Soviet Union, if not more so.

Meanwhile, hopes that, with the vanquishing of walls, the world will begin to build a global community of openness, characterised by free markets and democracy, have failed to realise. While economic globalisation has made significant progress, it appears to have lost momentum in recent years with the revival of nationalism, isolationism and protectionism, as witnessed by Brexit and the trade war between the United States and China.