Death of a Peaceful Revolution

Abstract

‘When I Was Organizing Underground Activities against the Nationalist Party in the 1940s to call for democracy and to attack corruption, I could never have dreamed that forty years later, I would have to demonstrate again for the same causes against my own party.’ Such a comment from a long-term party activist shows how deep the support for the fledgling democratic movement in China went. The massacre of hundreds of Beijing citizens on the night of 3 – 4 June 1989 brought into sharp relief just how out of touch China's top leaders had become with the processes of change which their own reform programmes had set in motion. Many long-term supporters of the party had finally lost faith in the revolution that was being carried out in their name. At the time of writing (July 1989) that goes a long way towards explaining why the old men who now rule Beijing decided to use such crude measures to suppress their own population and China's future leaders.