AP World History — China under Mao and Deng, nonviolent movements and the end of the Cold War

Unit 8 of AP World History: Modern, Cold War and Decolonization, is not only about superpower rivalry. The course framework also asks how communism spread and changed, how people resisted established power structures, and why the Cold War ended the way it did. This material covers those three threads, and leaves aside the proxy wars, the Non-Aligned Movement and the routes to independence that the category's material on the world since 1900 already treats.

China is the first thread. You examine why the Chinese Communist Party won the civil war in 1949, what Mao's Great Leap Forward set out to do and the famine it caused, why Mao launched the Cultural Revolution and unleashed the Red Guards, and how Deng Xiaoping after 1978 opened the economy through market incentives and special economic zones while the party kept its monopoly on power, as the crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests showed in 1989. The Cuban Revolution adds a second case of communism in the Global South.

The second thread is resistance to established power. You study Gandhi's Salt March as a model of civil disobedience, the US civil rights movement and its debt to Gandhi, and the long struggle against apartheid in South Africa, in which internal resistance and international sanctions finally forced negotiations and the elections of 1994. A comparison question asks what these movements shared.

The third thread is the end of the Cold War: Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika, Solidarity's election victory in Poland, the revolutions of 1989 and the opening of the Berlin Wall, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. An invented diary entry from Leipzig in October 1989 asks you to tell that peaceful protest apart from the uprisings crushed in 1956, 1968 and 1981.

The quiz has twelve questions with explanations for every option. The flashcards cover the key terms from satyagraha to perestroika. The written work offers eight open questions to answer by hand, including causation and comparison questions of the kind used in short-answer and long essay questions. The oral exam lets you explain these developments aloud, one question at a time, with brief feedback at the end. Use it during Unit 8 or in spring review before the May exam.

• Explain the Communist victory in China and the aims and consequences of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution
• Describe Deng Xiaoping's reforms and their political limits
• Explain the methods of Gandhi, the US civil rights movement and the anti-apartheid struggle, and compare them
• Explain Gorbachev's reforms and the sequence of events that ended the Cold War
• Interpret a short source about the revolutions of 1989

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the College Board AP World History: Modern course framework, Unit 8 (Cold War and Decolonization): the spread of communism after 1900, global resistance to established power structures after 1900, the end of the Cold War. The Leipzig diary entry is invented for practice.