U Nu’s faction of the AFPFL won the 1960 election easily, helped by the aura of Aung San and Nu, the promise of making Buddhism the state religion, and some strong-arming from the military. The last Nu government appeared more chaotic and incompetent than ever, as his divisive push for a Buddhist Burma took most of his interest. The Tatmadaw, committed to a centralized revolutionary vision, was particularly disturbed by บ Nu’s attempt to accom¬modate the Shan sawbwas, whom Ne Win’s first stage in power had pushed side, and who now threatened departure from the Burma Union unless there was a transition to federalism. Ne Win launched his military coup on Anarch 2, 1962, arresting the cabinet and dismissing the Parliament. Declaring that parliamentary democracy had been proven unsuitable to Burma, the Tatmadaw proclaimed its own “Burmese Way to Socialism,” which would have a single state party, nationalization of all key sectors of the economy, and state control of land, but would be superior to Marxism-Leninism in representing all of Burmese society, not only workers and peasants. Though beginning with some high-sounding reversal of Nu’s policies on Buddhism, the press, and minority relations, it quickly moved to monopolistic total control of the press, and crackdowns on any expressions of opposition. Whatever claims it had to revolutionary legitimacy were lost in May 1962, when troops invaded Rangoon university to suppress political activity, and in the ensuing melee killed over a hundred students and blew up the Student Union building, hallowed site of the nationalist movement of the 1930s. The Tatmadaw established Southeast Asia’s most enduring and uncompromising military dictatorship, in the name of the Revolutionary Council (from 1962), the Burma Socialist Program Party state party (BSPP, progressively from 1971), and the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC) after a brief democratic experiment in 1988. These governments responded to the Cold War with a neutrality that involved drastically reducing foreign engagement, training, and assistance, and securing their long endangered boundary with China by carefully avoiding public disa¬greements with Beijing.