Gordon Carrera

You'd had the protesters, student protesters, come out in this huge square.

I mean, they've been in it in the center of Beijing.

fill the square for a prolonged period.

For a while, it's so interesting because the leadership equivocates.

There are splits within the Communist Party leadership about how to deal with these reformist movements.

There are some military units which appear unwilling to act against their own people.

But then eventually, the Chinese leadership decides they're going to go and, you know, to use the unpleasant phrase, go big and send in the troops to kind of massacre and kill the students and the protesters.

And I think that there was actually talk in East Germany, you know, in 1989, in November, October, November, when the walls coming down or about to come down, whether they're going to do a Tiananmen.

Because I think they realised that is the only way of doing it is to effectively kill

go big and I think the lesson for some regimes is you either have to go big and go all in and repress or if you kind of half repress it doesn't work because you often just kind of spur more protests and I think you know Ukraine saw that 2013-2014 the Maidan revolution where they kind of they start to repress but they're not willing quite to do the kind of Tiananmen style massacres and as a result the government is overthrown in Ukraine and you get a more democratic regime and

So I think it's so interesting because you look between China, East Germany, both 1989, the two communist regimes, the East German and the others collapsed.

But in China, we still got the Communist Party ruling the country because of what they did in Tiananmen Square.

So, yeah, talk us through that because you were in the CIA at the time as an analyst.

So, I mean, that felt on the outside like it caught everyone by surprise.

I mean, it started in Tunisia, didn't it, with a kind of street vendor protesting about corruption.

Kind of interesting parallel about ordinary people protesting about economic oppression, a bit like Iran and the mobile phones and the bazaars, and yet led to this kind of revolutionary bandwagon across the kind of Arab world, didn't it?

It is interesting, isn't it, because the Syrian regime was facing protests.

And it looked like it was, you know, teetering on the edge.

And yet it survived, didn't it?

So what do you see as the kind of parallels or the differences between Iran and Syria?