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Modernization and Democracy
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16731 |
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Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1989 |
4,593 Words |
| Author
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Gilbert Rozman
Gilbert Rozman is professor in the Department of Sociology at
Princeton University. |
June 4, the day the People's army first turned their firepower against students and by standers in the streets of Beijing, will live on as a day of infamy. The popular appeal of two adjacent anniversaries--May 4 and July 4--only serves to intensify the symbolism.
May 4, the date that has lent its name to the May Fourth Movement and to the highest ideals for modernizing China, annually nourishes hopes for a new approach to politics and learning. In 1989, the timing of the seventieth anniversary of the May Fourth Movement proved propitious for enlarging the demonstrations that had followed Hu Yaobang's death on April 15 and for forging the impression that this year's fortieth anniversary of the People's Republic on October 1 will be overshadowed. To Chinese intellectuals the message is clear: October 1 is not the successor to May 4, but its repudiation.
July 4, once exclusively the symbol of American independence, has now come to represent broader, though not universal, aspirations for genuine democratic rights. Provoking the authorities, Chinese protestors erected a "Goddess of Democracy" modeled after the Statue of Liberty to associate themselves with these aspirations. Now authorities seek turn that association against the protestors by reviving the stereotype of the enemy used to justify dictatorship in China--a tactic employed almost continuously since 1949.
Caught between the unrealized ideals of the past and the newly articulated hopes for the future, peaceful but determined demonstrators could not withstand the brute force of military power unleashed upon them. They could only take solace in the conviction that for the sake of economic modernization, if not because of opposition within the Chinese army and society, communist leader would eventually be obliged to reverse their harsh stand against democratization.
As graphically exposed in June, the linkage between political reform and economic development depends, in the short run, on power politics among a small set of leaders. But over the long run it is subject to more predictable forces. Chinese history and the major developments in the history of socialism can help us to better understand the decisive nature of these forces for the future and to see how they continue to build even when their expression is temporarily thwarted. To fully appreciate what is happening in China, we need to reexamine modernization theory--a subject of much controversy both in the West since the 1960s and in China over the past decade of ideological uncertainty. Chinese students are
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