Wild lily, prairie fire: China's road to democracy, Yan'an to Tian'anmen, 1942-1989

Abstract

This is a sourcebook of documents of democratic dissent under Chinese communism. The essays range from eye-witness accounts of a massacre to theoretical critiques of Chinese Marxist thought. The introduction maintains that the documents reveal a tradition of democratic thought and practice that traces its descent to the New Culture Movement of the 1910s and the founding generation of the Chinese Communist Party. Far from being a late 20th-century import (along with capitalist economics) from Europe, Japan and the United States, this tradition of dissent is deeply embedded in the experience of China's revolutionary movements. This book calls into question many of the usual beliefs about the relation between democracy and communism, at least in the Chinese case, which may now be seen to depart from the Soviet model in yet another crucial respect.