Overview

This text presents a percipient account of the efforts at political reform in Deng Xiaoping's era. Merle Goldman describes a group of highly placed individuals who, with the patronage of Deng Xiaoping's designated successors Hu Yaobang and then Zhao Ziyang, attempted to reshape both China's Marxist-Leninist ideology and its political system. When they found their efforts had produced negligible results, they tried to introduce new institutions such as a free press, a legislature with real power, the rule of law and truly competitive elections. Through an exhaustive search of the current literature and in-depth interviews, Goldman shows that the writings and activities of the democratic elite and its supporters through the 1980s provided the intellectual context for the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. The Party's crackdown on June 4 1989 was directed as much against this elite as against the student and worker demonstrators. Yet despite the efforts of the ruling elders, the intellectuals have introduced ideas and advocated actions that have gradually limited the all-encompassing power of China's party-state and helped to make possible the beginnings of democracy. Steady media attention has been devoted to China's economic reforms, yet little notice has been paid to efforts toward political change. ""Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China"" introduces the reader to the agents of such a change and chronicles the growing pains of China's loyal opposition.

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9780674830073

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Reviews

Goldman selects about three dozen figures for careful study...Some of the subjects...appear in one of [her] two earlier books ( Literary Dissent in Communist China and China's Intellectuals ). The three books are similar in style, chronologically consecutive, and together make a comprehensive and shrewdly analytical history of the battles that have taken place over dissident thought in Communist China. -- Perry Link New York Review of Books

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