THE TIANANMEN PAPERS, compiled by Zhang Liang; Andrew J. Nathan and Perry Link, eds., afterword by Orville Schell (2001, Perseus Books, 489 pages). 

Among the events that Chinese communists would like to forget if you mention it, including the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward of 1958 is the series of events at Tian An Men during March through June 1989.  Starting in March after the death of Hu Yaobang in Beijing, the country’s regime teetered for weeks under the pressure of widespread university student protests and demonstrations, as many at one time as 300 , 000 people in Beijing an d then other similar demonstrations elsewhere in the P.R.C.  At the time, major protests for political reform along the lines of Western – style democracy took place for a number of weeks in over 160 main Chinese cities.  Many of the leaders of the pro – Democracy movement in China that culminated in the 1989 demonstrations and protests in Beijing are now in Western countries – this after they were vetted for arrest by Chinese officials at home and many served time in detention in P.R.C. before emigrating. 

The China pro – Democracy movement came at a time when the founders of the communist regime had passed away or retired, Mao Zedong among them, and the regime was in retrospect of the rule of Mao tightening its authoritarian grip on the populace.  Mao Zedong thought was taught in the schools and universities and students and their professors at many major universities came out demonstrating against authoritarian rule as advocated by Mao, and by the octogenarian leadership of China at the time of the pro – Democracy movement.  The pro – Democracy movement was more than a simple backlash against civic and political – societal control by the Chinese Communist Party.  The demonstrations and protests it organized, including mostly those organized by Wang Dan and his friends in Beijing that provoked and inspired intellectual and administrative defiance and rebellion against repression and authoritarianism, served to bring the issues of Democracy and freedoms to an awareness level in the minds of Chinese who attended school, and threatened the very existence, for a while, of the communist regime under Deng Xiaoping and the C.C.P. 

The Beijing policies of the P.R.C.  under Deng promised a more open and resourceful China economically and politically, though not to the extent demanded by Chinese students and their professors in March 1989 and for a few weeks thereafter.  The Deng Xiaoping regime was supposed to renew the hope of the Chinese people, in a very populous and underdeveloped country -- hope in their system and its adaptability to the modern world.  This was especially true since at the time and separately, the main political and economic partner of the Chinese regime was slowly and then more rapidly collapsing.  Political and economic pressures placed upon the soviet union to support its greatly militarized, very expensive state - sponsored economy, and to continue its tradition of bolshevism had been greatly increased given the flagship image of communism portrayed in Eastern Europe.  Not only was the soviet state under pressure to support ghastly military expenditures, but its intelligentsia was dissenting to authoritarian communism that for Eastern Europe had turned out, essentially and fundamentally, to be a corruption and distortion of proper state rule and a horrible socioeconomic and political deal overall for most people there.  In a disastrous state visit to Beijing during 1989, soviet Premier Gorbachev on his visit to Beijing encountered massive student protests, students at Tian An Men Square on a lengthy hunger strike and all this amid the regime’s unsuccessful orders to the students to disperse and call of the demonstrations and hunger strike.  Gorbachev still met with the Chinese leadership, but this important meeting was path marked and overshadowed by the pro – Democracy movement. 

As is typical of the far – left, read communist, political model of things, when one is fed – up and exhausted from the administrative, diplomatic and political grind, one resorts to force, and yes the pro – Democracy movement was repressed by violence and then once broken up, the P.L.A. pursued the pro – Democracy leaders and other main cast of characters including Fang Lizhi and Li Shuxian, Wang Dan, Wuerkaixi, Liu Gang, Chai Ling, Zhou Fengzuo, Zhai Weimin, Liang Qingdun, and still many, many others.  These students and academicians, gifted intellects as they were to have organized a nation – wide protest in China against repression, were subject to arrest and detention – to be charged with rioting and counterrevolutionary activities, and offenses against China’s internal state and public security laws.  This contraption of violently sweeping the student movement aside in June 1989 and then structuring more repression given the effect, social, institutional, and otherwise, of the demonstrations is depicted in the pages of this text to illustrate, to show the punishing and ruthless system of political intolerance and repression in P.R.C.  The principals in the democratic movement in China at the time knowingly risked everything in this difficult and fitful time for their society, and in a time that was retrograde to a more systemically primitive and backward generation.