The 1989 Democracy Movement: A Review of the Prospects for Civil Society in China

Abstract

T HE 1989 Chinese Democracy Movement is best understood as the Iexpression of a fundamental conflict between a state with totalitarian intentions and an emerging civil society. We will build this argument by examining the practical results of China's decade of reforms and by comparing developments in China with the transformation of Eastern Europe. We think that establishing that the Democracy Movement was a civil disobedience movement representing a growing civil society allows us to rethink the direction of recent Chinese history. If the growth of civil society is a longterm trend which began over a century ago and is still underway, then the Leninist state established in 1949 can be seen as an interruption rather than the inevitable and unavoidable expression of Chinese culture. Our review of the decade of reform examines how decentralization led to the reemergence of civil society. The decreased salience of politics and the diffusion of state power created considerable space for at least defacto autonomy. Reformers proved unable, however, to create new institutions that could effectively manage a market economy or a pluralist polity. The result was a growing conflict between an emerging civil society and an increasingly uncertain and fragmented state. The possibility that an autonomous civil society is reemerging in China suggests a means of linking developments in China with the breakdown of communism in Eastern Europe. In the decade proceeding the revolutionary transformation of Eastern Europe, Eastern European intellectuals selfconsciously made the creation of civil society a tactic and a goal. While the autonomy of post-Communist Eastern European societies is not yet consolidated in stable institutions and may yet be displaced by nationalism and authoritarianism, this project proved far more successful than its leading