The Forgotten Socialists of Tiananmen Square

What the world remembers about the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests were the students. But above all, it was a mass workers’ uprising for socialist democracy.

Public discourse on the 1989 Tiananmen Democracy Movement has been dominated by two narratives. The most prevalent interprets the movement in the framework of “democracy vs. authoritarianism.” The “democracy” in this narrative almost always refers to liberal democracy. In this telling, intellectuals and college students deeply influenced by Western liberalism hoped to push the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to accelerate political liberalization, which had been rolled out only intermittently during the 1980s. The goal of the movement was to keep democratization advancing apace with…

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• Tianyu Fang

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