1989 Tiananmen Square Incident

In 1987, Harry Harding, a fellow of the Brookings Institution, discussed what he called China's "second revolution," or the extensive political and economic reforms undertaken by Deng Xiaoping after Mao's death in 1976 (Harding, 1987, p. ix). When Harding's monograph appeared in 1987, the term "new authoritarianism" had not come into wide use. Harding, after H. Gordon Skilling, referred to post-Mao China under Deng as existing under a culture that was a "'consultative authoritarian' regime, a significant departure from the totalitarianism of the recent past, but not a truly pluralistic, or even quasi-democratic, political system. It increasingly recognizes the need to obtain information, advice, and support from key sectors of the population, but insists on suppressing dissent, cultivating its vision of public morality, and maintaining ultimate political power in the hands of the party" (Harding, 1987, p. 200). It was in a political culture heated by a history of suppr

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ne 4 transformed the problem of theory into one of fact, when party-line ideology institutionalized the condemnation of both democracy and new authoritarianism, which were denounced, as they had been in 1986, as "bourgeois liberalization." By this time too, party advocates of new authoritarianism, the most prominent of whom was Zhao, had been purged, and leaders of the Democracy Movement who had not been jailed had gone either underground or into exile (Han, 1990). In his description of the background to the Beijing People's Movement, of the reasons that the students took to the streets in 1989, of the decision of nonstudents to join the protest, and of the CCP's response, Saich (1990) charts a gradual radicalization of students as their naive perceptions of the value of being morally correct and reasonable were met by the extreme and highly effective response of a government that feared its people would find common ground outside its direct control. In addition to the many written communiques issuing from the students, there were nonverbal communications at the center of reformism. That the 1989 student-led protest was built around occupation of Tiananmen Square--the symbolic center of Chinese communist politics--was a signal
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Approximate Word count = 2738
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)

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