Deng constructed a market-economy system, while still remain de facto control over the land by imposing the length of usage of the land, and by 2000 output had increased, population growth ended (by imposing a one-child policy), and mediocre relations were secured with the West. For much of the population, living standards improved and the material choices grew, yet totalitarian rule and the ownership of the Internet still remain firmly gripped.
In 1989, the [[Tiananmen Square democracy protests]] were inspired by an explosion of democracy protests worldwide, resulting that resulted in the [[Fall of the Berlin Wall]], the Czech [[Velvet Revolution]], and the collapse of Soviet Communism. The Chinese protests however were quashed when the so-called "People's Liberation Army" killed over 10,000 Chinese people. The Chinese Communist Party then established a registry of social organizations, in order to head off political upheaval. Falun Gong, a revival of pre-Maoist Cultural Revolution traditions, registered with the Chinese government in 1992. It soon attracted “tens of millions of adherents,” the political-science professor Maria Hsia Chang writes in ''Falun Gong: The End of Days.''' Falun Gong started holding enormous gatherings; by the mid- 1990s, there were more than two thousand Falun Gong practice sites in [[Beijing]] alone. Troubled by the possibility that a large part of the population was becoming more loyal to Falun Gong than to the Communist Party, the government began cracking down on groups and banning sales of Falun Gong publications.
By 1999, the CCP estimated that the group had seventy million adherents; that year, more than ten thousand of them staged a silent protest in Tiananmen Square. An arrest warrant was issued for Li Hongzhi, the group founder, who had by then immigrated to Queens, New York. The Chinese National Congress subsequently passed, and began [[violent]]ly enforcing, an "anti-cult law".<ref>http://web.archive.org/web/20101127131821/https://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/16/world/china-expels-53-foreign-falun-gong-followers.html</ref>