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Movements in contemporary
Chinese political thought
Liberalism Ai Weiwei Bo Yang Gu Su Qin Hui Xu Jilin Xu Youyu Zhu Xueqin Zhang Weiying Wu Jinglian Liu Xiaobo Fang Fang He Weifang Zhang Qianfan Mao Yushi Li Yinhe Zhao Ziyang
Neoauthoritarianism Chen Yuan Wang Huning Zhang Weiwei Jin Canrong Eric X. Li Gan Yang Jiang Shigong Wu Jiaxiang Xiao Gongqin Zheng Yongnian Hu Xijin Chen Ming Jiang Qing Kang Xiaoguang Yan Xuetong Daniel A. Bell Chen Kuiyuan Zhu Rongji (Debateable) Zhao Ziyang (For a time) Bao Tong
New Left Dai Jinhua Deng Liqun Gao Mobo Cui Zhiyuan Li Minqi Sima Nan Wang Hui Wang Lijun Wang Shaoguang Qiu Zhanxuan Yue Xin
Politics of China Socialism with Chinese characteristics Democracy movements
v t e

Democracy movements of China are a series of loosely organized political movements, inside and outside of China, against the continuation of the one-party rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Their origins can be traced back to Liang Shuming's challenge to Mao Zedong at the Supreme Conference of the PRC's Government Administration Council in 1953. In that year, the CCP forcibly changed the ownership of rural land from private ownership to collective ownership, which caused disgust among peasants.

After Mao died, one such movement was launched during the Beijing Spring in November 1978 and it was relaunched during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre.

History

Mao era

Democracy movements of the PRC can be traced back to Liang Shuming's challenge to Mao Zedong at the Supreme Conference of the Government Administration Council in 1953. In that year, the CCP forcibly changed the ownership of rural land from private ownership to collective ownership, which caused disgust among peasants.

Era of economic reform

After Mao died, the democracy movement restarted in 1978, when the brief liberalization known as Beijing Spring occurred after the Cultural Revolution. The founding document of the movement is considered to be The Fifth Modernization manifesto by Wei Jingsheng, who was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for authoring the document. In it, Wei argued that political liberalization and the empowerment of the laboring masses was essential for modernization, that the CCP was controlled by reactionaries and that the people must struggle to overthrow the reactionaries via a long and possibly bloody fight.

Throughout the 1980s, these ideas increased in popularity among college-educated Chinese. In response to growing corruption, economic dislocation and the sense that reforms in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe were leaving China behind, the Tiananmen Square protests erupted in 1989. These protests were violently suppressed by government troops on June 4, 1989. In response, a number of pro-democracy organizations were formed by overseas Chinese student activists, and there was considerable sympathy for the movement among Westerners, who formed the China Support Network (CSN).

Current situation

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (November 2022)

Government's response

Ideologically, the government's first reaction to the democracy movement was an effort to focus on the personal behavior of individual dissidents and argue that they were tools of foreign powers. In the mid-1990s, the government began using more effective arguments which were influenced by Chinese Neo-Conservatism and Western authors such as Edmund Burke. The main argument was that China's main priority was economic growth, and economic growth required political stability. The democracy movement was flawed because it promoted radicalism and revolution which put the gains that China had made into jeopardy. In contrast to Wei's argument that democracy was essential to economic growth, the government argued that economic growth must come before political liberalization, comparable to what happened in the Four Asian Tigers.

With regard to political dissent engendered by the movement, the government has taken a three-pronged approach. First, dissidents who are widely known in the West such as Wei Jingsheng, Fang Lizhi, and Wang Dan are deported. Although Chinese criminal law does not contain any provisions for exiling citizens, these deportations are conducted by giving the dissident a severe jail sentence and then granting medical parole. Second, the less well-known leaders of a dissident movement are identified and given severe jail sentences. Generally, the government targets a relatively small number of organizers who are crucial in coordinating a movement and who are then charged with endangering state security or revealing official secrets. Thirdly, the government attempts to address the grievances of possible supporters of the movement. This is intended to isolate the leadership of the movement, and prevent disconnected protests from combining into a general organized protest that can threaten the Communist hold on power.

Chinese socialist democracy

CCP leaders assert there are already elements of democracy; they dubbed the term "Chinese socialist democracy" for what they describe as a participatory representative government.

Academic interpretations

Academic Lin Chun criticizes the phrase "democracy movement" as typically used in the scholarly and media discourse on China, noting that the term is often used exclusively to refer to the "demands and activism of an urban, educated group of people seeking liberal more than democratic values." She notes, for example, that the political turbulence in universities over the period 1986 to 1989 had specific flash points ranging from anger at the government's "too soft" position on China–Japan relations to poor management of student welfare.

See also

• Protest and dissent in China
• 2011 Chinese pro-democracy protests

References

1. ^ 衍慶, 翁 (2016). 中國民主運動史：從延安王實味爭民主到西單民主牆. Taipei: 新銳文創.
2. ^ 理羣, 錢 (2012). 毛澤東和後毛澤東時代. Taipei: 聯經.
3. "Die chinesische Demokratiebewegung 1978 bis 1981 -– Erinnerungen der damaligen Akteure » the Democracy Movement 1978-1981".
4. Interview with Ambassador Liu Xiaoming On Nile TV International Archived January 11, 2012, at the Wayback Machine
5. ^ Lin, Chun (2006). The transformation of Chinese socialism. Durham : Duke University Press. p. 208. ISBN 978-0-8223-3785-0. OCLC 63178961.

• Chinese democracy movements
• Political movements
• Political repression in China
• Democracy movements by country