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Comparative Politics and Government

Notes form of political participation, mass protests are a symptom of regime failure in two senses. First, by
turning to the streets to articulate their demands, protesters demonstrate that official channels for
expressing critical views are not working and that they do not believe the Communist Party claim
that it can correct its own mistakes. Second, protesters are clearly not alienated from politics: while
they reject official channels of participation, they are not politically apathetic; indeed, they articulate
explicitly political demands despite serious risks and the difficulty associated with organizing outside
the system. In short, political protests signify that mass political participation can neither be contained
within official channels nor deterred with liberalization and a better material life.
For the most part, despite some radical elements, the protests have not been blatantly antisystem in
their demands. This does not appear to be merely strategic. Rather, the protests are something of a
rowdy mass counterpart to the official socialist reform movement, exerting more pressure for more
reform, and (while officially unacceptable) often linked with elite reformers. In the Democracy
Movement of 1978-1979, Deng Xiaoping publicly approved many of the demands posted on
Democracy Wall and published in unofficial journals, which called for a “reversal of verdicts” on
individuals and political events. The demands were an integral part of the pressure for reform that
surrounded the meetings of top leaders in late 1978, allowing elite reformers to argue for major
changes in policy and political orientation. The poster campaign and unofficial journals were tolerated.
To be sure, when a bold dissident named Wei Jingsheng demanded a “fifth modernization,” by
which he meant democracy of a sort never envisaged by the communists, the Chinese authorities
promptly sentenced him to a 15-year prison term (ostensibly for revealing state secrets) and introduced
the “four fundamental principles” to establish the parameters of acceptable debate.
When the Communist Party congress convened in late 1987, party leader Zhao Ziyang acknowledged
conflicts of interest in society at the current time. The years 1988 and 1989 were high points for
political liberalization. The political criticism expressed in Tiananmen Square in 1989 largely echoed
public views of elite reformers in the party and government. From the perspective of communist
authorities, the real danger in 1989 was not the content of mass demands but the organizational
challenge: students and workers organized their own unions, independent of the party, to represent
their interests. The challenge was exacerbated by an open break in elite ranks, when Zhao Ziyang
voiced his support for the protesters and declared his opposition to martial law. Other party and
government leaders and retired elders, including Deng Xiaoping, many of whom had been victims
of power seizures by youths in the Cultural Revolution, viewed the problem as a basic struggle for
the survival of the system and their own positions. The movement was violently and decisively
crushed with tanks and machine guns in the Tiananmen massacre of June 4, 1989.
All three protests ended in defeat for the participants: prison for the main protest organizers in 1979,
expulsion from the Communist Party for intellectual leaders in 1987, and prison or violent death for
hundreds in 1989. The defeats extended beyond the mass protest movement to encompass setbacks
to the official reform movement too. When demands for reform moved to the city streets, more
conservative leaders attributed the social disorder to an excessively rapid pace of reform. The result
was a slower pace or postponement of reforms. Twice, the highest party leader was dismissed from
office as a result of the mass protests (Hu Yaobang in 1987 and Zhao Ziyang in 1989), and the official
reform movement lost its strongest proponent.
Self-Assessment

1. Fill in the blanks:
(i) Reactionary theory is given by ............... .
(ii) Elitist Theory stands on the assumption that the ............... are capable of representing people’s
interest.
(iii) Edmund Burk and James Madison supported the theory of ............... .
(iv) John Locke and Thomson Jefferson has given the theory of ............... .
(v) The Ritualist is the ............... .

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