[Marxism] China: Looking back on the 1989 democracy movement and the Tiananmen Square massacre | Links

[glparramatta]

To mark the 20th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, 
/Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal <http://links.org.au> 
/reproduces an excerpt from an analysis by an eyewitness to the 1989 
democratic upsurge that preceded the brutal attack. The writer is an 
Australian socialist who was studying in China at the time.

* * *

The mistake, intentional or otherwise, of many foreign journalists who 
had flown in for the Gorbachev visit during April and had stayed on to 
cover the events in the square, was to assume that "democratisation" 
implied a general desire of the students to embrace Western 
bourgeois-democratic models within the context of a capitalist system. 
In reality, few students at the time had more than a very hazy 
theoretical notion of "bourgeois democracy". Many felt that, given 
China's poverty and other problems, transplanted "bourgeois-democratic 
models" were not appropriate.

With hindsight, the movement and subsequent massacre and crackdown in 
Beijing possessed far more in common with earlier democracy movements in 
Hungary (1956) and Czechoslovakia (1968), and their outcomes under 
Stalinism, than with a general urge to adopt a US bourgeois "democratic" 
system. Few at that time were willing to swap the dictatorship of the 
Stalinist CCP for an outright "dictatorship of the bourgeoisie".

http://links.org.au/node/1083

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