China's Transition: Chapter 6

China's Transition, by Andrew J. Nathan

6
The Democratic Vision

From China a friend elliptically writes, so as to avoid alarming the postal censor, "I remember what you said in your letter of June 1989 about 'I still believe that in the long run. . . .' I think you were right because I myself still believe that in the long run. . . ." Scholars in China privately continue projects that were canceled after the crackdown, believing that their recommendations on political reform will be heeded later. Local party officials around the country make fun of the latest campaign to emulate a revolutionary model hero. A university refuses to turn in students who participated in the democracy demonstrations.

The Chinese, in short, are outwaiting their rulers. In 1988 the controversial television series River Elegy likened Chinese civilization to the stagnant Yellow River that must find its way to the cosmopolitan blue sea. Today the Chinese Communist Party is no longer the river god that it once was, able to turn back the current. It issues directives on vigilance against foreign ideological subversion, but they are like paper boats that face upstream and float downstream. China is finally joining the world--economically, culturally, and politically. It will, eventually, become a democracy. But of what sort? New documentation on the movement for democracy that stirred the world in 1989, in the volumes published by M. E. Sharpe, provides a clearer idea of what the movement stood for, of its limits, of its prospects.¹ And the views of three of China's most influential prodemocracy intellectuals can now be read in English.²

Fang Lizhi, a physicist and academic administrator, was expelled from the Chinese Communist Party in 1987 because his campus speeches in favor of academic freedom were deemed largely responsible for the student demonstrations of December 1986 and January 1987. Fang's continued criticisms of the regime helped create the atmosphere for the movement of spring 1989. Although he played no direct role in it, the government was poised to arrest him as a "backstage manipulator" when he took refuge in the American Embassy in Beijing. He was released after about a year, and is now conducting his research in the United States.

Yan Jiaqi, founder and former head of the official Institute of Political Science in Beijing, was a high-level political adviser to reformist Party Secretary Zhao Ziyang when the democracy movement broke out. He tried to encourage the government to accede to the demands of the students for dialogue. When this failed, he sided with the demonstrators and had to flee China after the crackdown. He now lives in New York.

Wang Ruowang is a senior Shanghai writer. Although relatively little known in the West, he was important enough to share the distinction with Fang and the journalist Liu Binyan of being among the first victims of Deng Xiaoping's purges in January 1987. (Only one prominent intellectual, Ruan Ming, now at Princeton, had been expelled earlier under Deng for dissidence. Scores, of course, were purged subsequently.) Wang had already been expelled once before, during the anti-rightist movement of 1957. In both cases, his crime was writing honestly. He, too, now lives in New York.

China is one of the great world civilizations, but one whose integration with modern international culture has been most protracted and painful. It is engaging it slowly and on its own terms. It will eventually produce a version of that culture that is distinctively its own. What Chinese culture will look like is partly visible in Taiwan and Hong Kong, but the mainland is much vaster and internally more diverse. It is likely to Westernize less. The shape of Chinese democracy is not easy to detect from the universal-sounding slogans--science, democracy, human rights--that its advocates employ. The sameness of language, itself a phenomenon of the international culture, masks significant differences in assumptions and values.

Considering the national scope of the 1989 movement, we generalize about its meaning at risk. There were not scores of localities where demonstrations occurred, there were hundreds. Except for the Sichuan city of Chengdu, about which both The New York Times and Amnesty International reported, almost nothing is known about any location beyond the ten described in The Pro-Democracy Protests in China . All of these are big cities, except for one small town in Hunan province whose story Anita Chan uncovered through interviews in Hong Kong. The reports give some sense of variation. In Chan's small town, a local schoolteacher advocated direct elections of central government leaders, a proposal not heard in Beijing so far as I know. In Xi'an, as reported by Joseph Esherick, a mixed crowd of demonstrators became unruly in a way that did not happen in Beijing, where the students by and large kept the movement under tighter control. In tropical Fujian, obsessed with business across the Taiwan Strait, as Mary S. Erbaugh and Richard Kraus report, the demonstrations were low-keyed, and the demands even vaguer than in Beijing.

In Beijing itself, as the Australian scholar Geremie Barmé observes about the Beijing scene of May and June 1989, there was predominantly a movement of intellectuals (a term that in China includes college students). Barmé saw a cohort of writers who "had draped ribbons across their chests like contestants in a beauty pageant and had written on them their names and most famous works." Demonstrators in Tiananmen Square collected autographs from the most famous student leaders and from any foreigner whatsoever, including Harrison Salisbury (who, Barmé devastatingly notes, was under the illusion that they wanted his signature because they admired his book on the Long March). As the hunger strike dragged on, and martial law signaled the hardening of the official position, students dreamed of dying in the poses of the revolutionary heroes immortalized on the Monument to Revolutionary Martyrs where they were gathered. Floral offerings were placed on a makeshift altar before an immobilized bus that sheltered the students who refused food and water. The hours that they had fasted were posted on the side of the bus.

Other social groups were more or less rigorously excluded by the student leaders. Esherick tells of young men from the countryside who joined the crowds in Xi'an, and the same thing must have happened elsewhere, since the Chinese cities are full of young men from the villages looking for work. Still, we have little sense of how deeply into the countryside the movement penetrated, or what the peasants thought. No peasant organizations are known to have been formed. To differing degrees in different places, the demonstrations were joined by workers and getihu --the new class of small-scale individual entrepreneurs spawned by the reforms. Lawrence Sullivan, in Tony Saich's collection, refers to these forces as an emergent civil society; but they do not yet have the level of coherence and social autonomy that that term implies.

The intellectuals tried to limit the agenda to their own issues of freedom of speech and dialogue with the government. Frank Niming explains the exclusion of other social groups as one of several expedients that demonstrators adopted to avoid provoking the government. They kept the focus initially on mourning for Hu Yaobang, a leader symbolizing not opposition to communism but the good side of communism, and later they shifted to the equally mom-and-apple-pie question of the health of young, hunger-striking students. They preferred nonstudents to play the role of supportive bystanders rather than the more confrontational role of demonstrators. When nonstudents did demonstrate, moreover, they marched mostly in formation with their work units rather than as a mass of individuals, again signaling the lack of challenge to the social order. As one wall poster said, the Party is like a donkey, which should be prodded to move forward but not poked so hard that it kicks.

Barmé notes that although some of the lower-class demonstrators referred to themselves as shimin , as urbanites or "civilians," a term that is still fairly new in China, the intellectuals continued to call them by the old communist terms "masses" and "common people." In view of all this, Erbaugh and Kraus charge that the democracy movement was "an elitist movement." In Fujian, they say, many of the activists seemed to equate democracy with little more than the recruitment of educated people into government on the basis of merit rather than political connections. As Yan Jiaqi's editors David Bachman and Dali Yang put it, the intellectuals have accepted the "self-defined mission of saving China," intending not to distribute power but to exercise it. The intellectuals in sum, want democracy without the demos.

This charge draws support from the fact that the theory of "new authoritarianism" continues to be actively promoted by some among the democrats now in exile. One section of Michel Oksenberg and Marc Lambert's collection is devoted to documents that illustrate this theory, which was originally associated with thinkers around Zhao Ziyang and endorsed by Deng Xiaoping. Its proponents argue that China can move toward democracy only by passing through a phase of authoritarianism, during which painful economic and political reforms will be accomplished by strong-arm methods. Such authoritarianism would be "new" because its goal would be democracy. Many analysts have concluded that the theory was a tool in Zhao's bid for greater power in the Deng regime, but its persistence in China and among the exiles suggests that it draws on a deeper ambivalence among the intellectuals about democracy.

When the transition to democracy in China starts, the other social classes will face a long struggle to establish their place in it. And they will be further impeded by the fact that China's democrats have devoted little effort to designing the institutions of a democratic China. Among the numerous wall posters, speeches, and poems in Cries for Democracy , one finds almost no discussion of electoral systems, of the division of powers, of the role of parties, of the judiciary.3 During his service as a political adviser, Yan Jiaqi limited himself to a handful of modest proposals, especially fixing terms of office for government officials, involving technical experts in decisionmaking, and strengthening the people's congress system and proceduralism in policymaking, no matter what the procedures might be. He devoted more attention to arguing what democracy could do for China than to discussing what it would be or how to introduce it.

Keeping the institutional vision of democracy vague was, again, partly a tactic. It did help to disarm the regime for a while. Beijing Spring, 1989 provides the full texts of the "dialogues" granted to the students by State Council spokesman Yuan Mu and by a group of officials headed by Premier Li Peng. The government men all insisted that the regime shared the students' concerns, that a free press and dialogue channels already existed, and that any crackdown that might be necessary to preserve social order would affect only a handful of bad elements who had wormed their way among the patriotic students. But as Melanie Manion points out in her introduction to the book, overlapping terms and symbols disguised divergent stances. The Party could accept the students' slogans, but could not compromise on power.

A noteworthy exception to the dearth of practical proposals was the last-minute call by followers of Zhao Ziyang, who lost power with the declaration of martial law, to summon an emergency meeting of the National People's Congress or its standing committee to rescind martial law and dismiss Li. Yet the ineffectiveness of this effort shows well enough why such steps were not tried earlier or more often. The main organizer of the attempt, Cao Siyuan, was jailed without charges for a year, and was then for years prevented from traveling outside of China.

But the avoidance of institutional proposals was, unfortunately, more than a tactic. It was also a consequence of deeper habits of thought, particularly of the idea that democracy is something much more and much greater than an improvised and unstable and flawed compromise among competing forces that can never be satisfied. Chinese democrats dream of something better than what Winston Churchill called "the worst political system except for all the others." Three times in his collection of essays and speeches, Fang recalls an incident that occurred while he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, a year before he was expelled from the Chinese Communist Party. "I was obviously neither an immigrant nor a citizen," Fang remembers, "but nonetheless I received a report from my congressman giving an account to the citizens of just what he'd been up to." This showed that "in democratic countries, I am the master and the government is responsible to me." It may be hard for Americans to suppress a smile at Fang's response to a newsletter. But we should remember that while members of China's National People's Congress sometimes make "inspection tours," they never even pretend to account to their constituents.

Nowhere are the hopes placed on democracy higher than in the largest country that doesn't have it. According to Fang, if democracy were implemented in China, policy would reflect public wishes, decisions would be implemented smoothly, corrupt leaders would be removed from office, government would serve the interests of all classes and nationalities. Yan Jiaqi believes that democracy would unleash creativity and initiative, allow for social trust and cooperation, create "love for the collective," and promote modernization. The "New May Fourth Manifesto" issued by the Beijing Students' Federation in 1989 declares that democracy would bring to bear the collective wisdom of the people for modernization while allowing the full development of each individual's abilities and the protection of each individual's interests.

This view of the potentials of politics has roots in early Chinese thought, in which the human world was seen as an integral part of a cosmos ordered by moral rather than physical consistency. Cosmic harmony was thought to descend from the heavens to the natural world to human society and finally to the mind of the individual--and then to extend back, for the Chinese saw the entire cosmos as responding to the moral or immoral behavior of human beings, especially the ruler. So strong was this belief in the cosmic unity of the human and natural worlds that Fang uses it to explain why the Chinese failed to develop science. He points out that they did not expect nature to exhibit physical regularity. Since they could explain such anomalies as floods, earthquakes, epidemics, eclipses, and shooting stars as responses to moral irregularities at court, there was no need to chase down the complicated physical explanations that produced the scientific breakthroughs of Galileo, Newton, and Einstein.

In the same way, when Chinese in the late nineteenth century began to ponder the international strength of democratic countries, they explained it by saying that democracy was a political system in tune with the order of the universe. As Hao Chang of Ohio State University has shown in Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis ,4 the seminal thinker Kang Youwei (1858-1927) declared that the ideal society, which he called the Great Unity, would be a democratic, federal welfare state of material abundance and technological advancement, devoid of private property, free of inequalities based on class, gender, and race, and unified by the innate moral consciousness shared by all its members.

Kang's influence on Mao Zedong is obvious. Through Mao, if not directly, Kang and his generation have also influenced the current generation of thinkers. Given the continuing link between the cosmos and the polity in Chinese thought, it is no coincidence that one of China's leading democratic thinkers is a professional cosmologist, and that James Williams, a graduate student at Berkeley specializing in the history of science, begins his collection of Fang's essays with selections from Fang's cosmological writings.

Fang was trained as a physicist, but he turned to cosmology during the Cultural Revolution, when he was deprived of laboratory facilities. In the early 1970s he was criticized for advocating the Big Bang theory of the origins of the universe, which was labeled "bourgeois idealism" by Chinese ideologues. The experience of battling interference in his scientific work confirmed Fang's commitment to academic freedom, but the impact of this episode went deeper. Fang was both a Communist and a cosmologist, and he believed in both bodies of theory.

Chinese Marxism has never admitted to being what the West calls an ideology. As a field of study, it was referred to as "philosophy" in the schools. This term was not meant to convey the Western sense of speculativeness, or a divorce from reality. It denoted a master science--"dialectical materialism"--which could guide the development and integrate the findings of all other sciences. Fang's conflict with the ideologues led him to conclude that "philosophy is constantly withdrawing from areas that were once within its domain, while natural science moves into them one by one."

I do not think that this was just a politically cautious way of saying in 1982, while he was still a party member, that philosophy is bunk. It reflected a particular conception of science as being able to provide certain knowledge about an ever expanding circle of issues. So far as one can tell from the nontechnical excerpts provided here, Fang's view of science is not at all Popper's or Kuhn's; he does not construe science as an approximation, as provisional knowledge that is true only to the extent that it has not yet been falsified, as a constructed paradigm that will hold sway for a limited historical period. For Fang, science is able to make the same kinds of all-embracing claims to certainty as did the dialectical materialism that it displaces. Even the old idea of cosmic harmony reappears when Fang argues that the beauty of a certain mathematical concept is evidence for the inevitability of democracy, on the grounds that both the formula and democracy demonstrate the principle of harmony that is the essential nature of the universe.

In the 1980s, under Deng, "philosophy" retreated not only from the realm of natural sciences, but also from the fields of economic and social policy, from foreign policy, to some extent from literature, and, cautiously, from discussions of how to reform China's political institutions. Many Chinese believed, like Fang, in the ability of science to move in where philosophy moved out, not only in dealing with questions of the natural world but in solving those of the human world as well. Fang writes that "the basic principles and standards of modernization and democratization are like those of science--universally applicable. In this regard there's no Eastern or Western standard, only the difference between 'backward' and 'advanced,' between 'correct' and 'mistaken.' "

And many of China's other proponents of democracy have also come from scientific backgrounds. Lu Xun, the famous left-wing writer of the 1930s, was trained as a physician. Wang Juntao, sentenced to thirteen years as the alleged backstage eminence of the Tiananmen incident, graduated in physics from Beijing University. Chen Yizi, former head of a major reform think tank, studied physics before he was sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution. (He now heads the Center for Contemporary China in Princeton, which produces policy papers for post-Deng China.)

Nor is the scientism of the democrats a recent phenomenon. The May Fourth Movement of 1919, conventionally viewed as the beginning of China's democratic revolution, was based on the slogan of "science and democracy." In Cries for Democracy , the "new May Fourth manifesto" alludes to democracy as "the spirit of science." A poster at Beijing University called for a government with science as its "sole guiding ideology." When Chinese democrats speak of democracy as scientific, or defend it as mandated by "natural law," they mean that democracy is the only ontologically correct political system, the only kind of system that is compatible with the nature of the universe. Institutional questions are secondary, because democracy carries the inevitability and the perfection of science. In retrospect, one can see that Mao's anti-intellectual policies grew out of a well-founded fear of science as the only ideology prestigious and ambitious enough in China to challenge Marxism for hegemony.

In contrast to the Soviet Union, the idea of human rights has so far been less corrosive in China. As a scientist who traveled from an establishment position to dissidence, Fang has often been called China's Sakharov. But the Fang we meet in this book is more like Dorothy addressing the Wizard of Oz. While Sakharov tangled with the Soviet leadership over nuclear weapons, the invasion of Czechoslovakia, political trials, religious repression, the falsification of history, and other issues, Fang got into trouble just by saying that "Marxism is no longer of much use," or that people suspected the Chinese leaders of putting money into Swiss bank accounts, or that a Beijing deputy mayor who accompanied a scientific delegation overseas was unqualified. In December 1988 he wrote a short letter to Deng suggesting the release of political prisoners.

Fang has bravely demonstrated the solvent effect of plainspeak on dictatorship, but neither he nor other leading democrats confronted the regime with a firm idea of human rights as something inherent and inalienable. Yan, in office at the time and perhaps constrained in his speech, states that the content of human rights "varies according to country and time." Fang defends rights as universal and grounded in scientific truth, but then falls right into the Marxist trap of saying that rights are granted in exchange for a citizen's exercise of his or her duties.

Chinese thought has always proceeded from the premise that society rather than the individual is primary. The few Chinese who have looked carefully into Western thought see mostly nonsense in the Hobbesian or Lockeian notion that man is, in some original way, an isolated individual. Any Chinese can see that this is not true, that people are born into society, that from the beginning they have social values and goals. It remains a real question for Chinese, perhaps especially for those committed to democracy, how it is that human rights can become so important that, in Ronald Dworkin's term, they can "trump" other social values.

Regardless of the lack of a rights-oriented philosophical tradition, Chinese are as strongly motivated by the desire for personal liberty as people anywhere. And nowhere has this impulse been more eloquently expressed than in the life and the writings of Wang Ruowang. Although abstractions like science, democracy, and human rights may have different meanings in China than in the West, a stubborn 73-year old who wants to say what he thinks is the same everywhere. Wang was expelled from the Party, first in the 1950s, for describing the "conceit and arrogance" of party members toward nonparty intellectuals, and then again in 1987, for calling for liberty when the Party was criticizing "bourgeois liberalization."

Wang treats eloquently the meaning of freedom in Hunger Trilogy , his memoir of three encounters with extreme hunger. His translator, Kyna Rubin, shows how Wang uses the battle with hunger as a symbol for the process of discovering truth, and food as a symbol for the freedom to express it. In his first chapter Wang and his cellmates conduct a winning hunger strike against their Kuomintang jailers in the 1930s; in his second chapter, still animated by patriotism and Communist ideals, they keep up one another's spirits as they face starvation in the wilderness while fleeing from Japanese invaders in the 1940s; in his final chapter, Wang returns to the same Shanghai jail, where he is imprisoned as a counterrevolutionary during the Cultural Revolution. He discovers that conditions are worse than they were under the Nationalists, that a hunger strike cannot succeed against a regime that no longer cares whether prisoners live or die.

In the course of his meditations on food, Wang uncovers two senses in which food is like freedom. It is a source of satiety and satisfaction, and it is a focus of self-control and moral identity. He comes out of his last experience of hunger with no more compelling goal than to tell what he has seen. In Wang's case, as in Fang's, truth-telling proved mortally threatening to the regime, which detained him without charges for a year after the demonstrations in 1989, and for years kept him under a version of house arrest in Shanghai, unable to accept invitations to leave the country. He was given a passport in 1992 and came to live in New York.

The democracy movement's abstention from institutional proposals was matched by the paucity of its criticism of existing institutions. Instead the movement chose to focus its attack on Chinese culture. Fang blamed China's "feudal culture" for the country's absolutism, narrowmindedness, and love of orthodoxy. Yan blamed what he called China's "dragon culture" for the persistence of autocracy and personalized authority. A poster-writer in Cries for Democracy stated that "the character of the Chinese consists of two outstanding traits: slavishness and sectarianism." And the democrats in exile since 1989 have been conducting an inquest on "Communist culture" and "Communist discourse."

To some extent the attack on culture, like the avoidance of a multiclass alliance, was a tactic to discourage government repression: culture was a euphemism for political institutions that were too dangerous to attack openly. Still, euphemisms sometimes become habits of thought. The obsession with culture has been characteristic not only of the Deng era, but also of democratic discourse in China throughout the century. The early-twentieth-century democrat Liang Qichao, for example, argued that the trouble with the Chinese was that they were slavish, ignorant, selfish, dishonest, cowardly, and passive. Lu Xun personified his countrymen by the self-deceiving braggart and weakling Ah Q. The May Fourth democrats called for a "new culture."

The criticism of Chinese culture usually starts as an attack by cosmopolitan Chinese on parochial Chinese, develops into a savaging of the intellectual class by its own members, and spirals back into merciless individual introspection. All three stages were encapsulated in a remarkable essay by the young literary critic Liu Xiaobo, written just before he returned to China from New York in May 1989 to join the demonstrations (and translated by Barmé in Problems of Communism ). Liu writes:

I face an agonizing dilemma. I now know that in using Western values to criticize Chinese culture I have been attacking an ossified culture with only slightly less ossified weapons. I am like someone who, though partially paralyzed himself, mocks a paraplegic. Having transplanted myself into a completely open world, I am suddenly forced to acknowledge that not only am I no theoretician, but I'm not a famous person anymore. All I am is a normal person who has to start all over again from the beginning. In China, the backdrop of ignorance highlighted my wisdom. My courage was thrown into relief by the cowardice of others. I appeared healthy in comparison with the congenital idiocy of my surroundings. Yet, in the United States, now that this backdrop of ignorance and failing has disappeared, so has my wisdom, courage, and vigor. I have become a weakling unable to face myself.5

The final hunger strike declaration issued by Liu and three colleagues on June 2 is reprinted in Cries for Democracy . (After June 4, Liu spent about a year in jail, then was unemployed in Beijing.) Issued when the original hunger strike was petering out, it has been interpreted as an attempt to breathe new life into the confrontation with the regime. On rereading, however, it is a document of Calvinist severity. It begins: "We protest! We appeal! We repent!" It criticizes the intellectuals for spinelessness, the students for disorganization, emotionalism, and elitism, the government for autocracy and inflexibility, and all Chinese for a mentality of mutual hatred and violence. Calling for "the birth of a new political culture," the document ends by saying that "We all must carry out a self-examination!"

The intellectuals' criticism of national character sometimes becomes so intense that it ironically aligns them with the official view that the people are too backward to deserve the democracy that the intellectuals are demanding. After all, democracy would entail the exercise of power by peasants and workers who might turn out to be anti-Western, anti-scientific, anti-intellectual. This is another reason why discussion of specific political institutions is deemed premature.

As capitalism and democracy sweep the world, there are only two governments crowing that their policies have been right all along: the Americans, for promoting democracy, and the Chinese, for staving it off. In the eyes of the Chinese leaders, everything that has happened since Tiananmen confirms the wisdom of their authoritarian ideology. The free fall of the Soviet economy, the agonies of transition in Poland and East Germany, the political disorder in Albania and Yugoslavia, the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, the collapse of the Marxist regime in Ethiopia

--almost anything that occurs in a world of rapid change shows to their satisfaction the overweening importance of order. And attacks on China's human rights record in Congress and in the media, and even the Presidential defense of extending most-favored-nation treatment as the best way to promote Chinese human rights, demonstrate to Chinese leadership that the West still seeks to subvert their society.

Shortly after his flight from China, Yan predicted that the regime of Li Peng and Deng Xiaoping would fall within two years. His optimism was widely shared among his colleagues. But today the exile movement is at a low point. Membership has eroded, funding is hard to find, the movement is fragmented into scores of organizations. The younger leaders are learning English and entering graduate school, while many of the older ones are living from year to year on fellowships. Many in the overseas community criticize the movement as divided, demoralized, rudderless, even corrupt. But this harshness is misplaced. The democracy movement abroad needs to be evaluated for what it is: not a political party with a program to hasten the fall of the Deng regime, but a community of intellectuals who are suffering the personal frustrations of exile yet also taking advantage of the opportunity to rethink. They are not the ones who will overthrow the regime, but they will be prepared with new ideas when it finally falls.

Yan Jiaqi, Fang Lizhi, and Wang Ruowang, and many other democrats are more or less heavily marked by the ideas of the CCP out of which they came. The movement includes some more radical thinkers (the best example is Wei Jingsheng), but with the breakdown of the old order, ex-Communists have become the main force. Their most subversive ideas--the hegemony of science, the yearning for liberty, the faith in the ability of democracy to create a vital collective, the claim of a special mission for the intellectuals--are only loosely Western as they interpret them. And that is what accounts for their appeal in China. In this sense, the regime's accusation that these dissidents are "total Westernizers" is unfair. Nobody need fear, or should hope, that China will become less Chinese for becoming more democratic.

Note 1: Michel Oksenberg and Marc Lambert, eds., Beijing Spring, 1989: Confrontation and Conflict, The Basic Documents (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1990); Tony Saich, ed.., The Chinese People's Movement: Perspectives on Spring 1989 (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1990); Jonathan Unger, ed., The Pro-Democracy Protests in China: Reports from the Provinces (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1991). Back.

Note 2: Fang Lizhi, Bringing Down the Great Wall: Writings on Science, Culture, and Democracy in China , ed. and trans. James Williams (New York: Knopf, 1991); Wang Ruowang, Hunger Trilogy , trans. Kyna Rubin with Ira Kasoff (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1991); David Bachman and Dali L. Yang, ed. and trans., Yan Jiaqi and China's Struggle for Democracy (Armonk: M.E. Sharpe, 1991). Back.

Note 3: Han Minzhu and Hua Sheng, eds., Cries for Democracy: Writings and Speeches from the 1989 Chinese Democracy Movement (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). Back.

Note 4: Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987. Back.

Note 5: Liu Xiaobo, "The Inspiration of New York: Meditations of an Iconoclast," trans. Geremie Barmé, Problems of Communism 40:1-2 ( January-April 1991), p. 118. Back.

China's Transition