Volume 36, Number 14 · September 28, 1989
Why China's Rulers Fear Democracy
By John K. Fairbank
To try to understand is not to condone or forgive. Quite the contrary. In this bicentennial year when a euphoria for democratic rights seemed to be sweeping the world, why was it stopped in Tiananmen Square? Why do China's rulers attack their students like enemies when in our view they are the hope of the future? The answer lies farther back than Deng Xiaoping's aversion to the Red Guards who manhandled him in the Cultural Revolution twenty years ago. The sad fact is that China's twentieth-century modernization of learning and the student class got started in two different directions at cross purposes. A brief look back may show us why Chinese politics is so out of step today.
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