Is there any good reason to think that the Tiananmen uprising participants, had they gotten power, would actually have brought about democracy? Given what had happened during the Cultural Revolution, I can understand why some Chinese would be uneasy about militant students. To actually shift a society to democracy may require much more than just a revolution led by a small vanguard. If society as a whole is not ready, such revolutions might tend to just lead to a new, worse dictatorship taking power. And this may be the case regardless of whatever genuinely good intentions the more humane revolutionary leaders might have - in practice, they may be just purged and replaced by brutal opportunists if the revolution succeeds.
I also wish for a more liberal China, I am just trying to explore some of the complexities of such events. To be fair, if by "if the Tiananmen uprising had succeeded", you mean "if the Tiananmen uprising had made China democratic", then some of my points do not make sense. It is just that, based on my reading about history, I know that successful revolutions often lead to outcomes that are very different from what idealists who root for those revolutions have in mind.
I think there's reason to wonder about the outcome of any revolution. Proclaimed goals sometimes are just rhetoric and something else happens.
But I think it is fair to take the student's and those they were inspired by at their word and theorize that China might have been 'more democratic' had the movement been embraced.
I'm not sure the "militant students" framing is very fair here, but it's otherwise a good point - we saw in the Arab Spring that the end result wasn't really democracy, and it's a good question which way China might've gone.
>I'm not sure the "militant students" framing is very fair here
You may want to re-read the article. There's at least one passage of a group of the protestors approaching a surrendering soldier with pipes, rocks, and other weapons. The reporter continues, "surely the man would be killed. There was nothing I could do to help him in the chaos."
Perhaps the argument here is that the guy got what he deserved, but I think if you want to argue that it's okay to kill someone who's surrendering, you might be fairly classified as militant.
I think there is a difference between militant “Hongweibings” and a street lynching. One is ongoing and organized with tacit approval from the highest ranks, the other an ad-hoc mob phenomenon.
Indeed. And history shows that often the problem isn’t quite the first revolution, inspired by democratic values, but a subsequent revolution that takes advantage of the temporary power vacuum and institutes a dictatorship. One example is the October (Bolshevik) Revolution in Russia, which overthrew the nascent democracy that had been instituted earlier that year in the February Revolution. Another example is the Islamic Revolution in Iran after Khomeini returned from exile, which quickly wiped out the varied mix of Communists and other secular political forces that had overthrown the Shah.
Even the first, democratic-inspired revolution can look pretty dangerous in retrospect. I am sympathetic to many ideals of May ’68, yet at the same time I feel like Western Europe dodged a bullet, because the subsequent regime could have turned out very badly.
The college students (cultural revolution) were useful idiots egged on by ccp leadership. And they were absolutely authoritarian btw, not at all democratic, so its a difficult comparison.
More specifically Mao than the entire CCP leadership. The cultural revolution was an attempted coup by Mao to regain power after he was sidelined by his disastrous economic policies. It also really colored the viewpoints of the post Mao CCP leadership on populist movements. Specifically, Deng who was in charge during 1989 probably saw echos of the same students that exiled him into the countryside and crippled his son now marching again in Tiananmen square.
Not sure why the downvotes. Revolutionaries actually have a terrible track record at creating democratic governments. Russia got Communism at the beginning of the 20th century and an oligarchy at the end of it. More recently Egypt got religious fundamentalists. Revolutionaries having legitimate reasons to protest isn't a guarantee of a good outcome.
I also wish for a more liberal China, I am just trying to explore some of the complexities of such events. To be fair, if by "if the Tiananmen uprising had succeeded", you mean "if the Tiananmen uprising had made China democratic", then some of my points do not make sense. It is just that, based on my reading about history, I know that successful revolutions often lead to outcomes that are very different from what idealists who root for those revolutions have in mind.