Chasing Liberty: China's Democratic Legacy and the Schism of the Chinese Communist Party

Abstract

Despite the seizure of power by the Chinese Communist Party in 1949, Communist China has a long democratic heritage throughout the Communist Era. This paper explores three democratic movements prior to their culmination in 1989, and does not focus on the innumerable smaller protests that individuals and small groups undertook. As time progressed these movements grew larger, more boisterous, and more frequent. The government had been putting these movements down with a relative lack of violence, but as the public yearnings for democracy kept being revived with each movement, something had to be done. Thus, it was only a matter of time before the state violently suppressed democracy in China or democracy made inroads in China. After the violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protesters in 1989 no subsequent large scale democratic movements have taken hold of China as they used to. With the Tiananmen Square Massacre, China quashed democracy at its source.