Monks, students and military: The 1974 crisis and the beginning of the end for Burma’s Socialist Military Regime

Abstract

Often reduced to the footnotes of contemporary research on Burma, the events of 1974 were crucial in the country’s recent his-tory and subsequent political development. The anti-government protests were violently crushed by the army but marked the first major evidence of the difficulties facing the ‘Burmese Way to Socialism’, a revolutionary and utopian military experiment developed since 1962, and the precedent of the 1988 revolution that would end General Ne Win’s military regime.