A review of From Comrade to Citizen: The Struggle for Political Rights in China by Merle Goldman.
About the Author
Liu Junning is senior fellow at the Institute of Chinese Cultural Studies of the Chinese Academy of Arts in Beijing and a former fellow at the Institute of Political Science of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. He was editor of the journal Res Publica, as well as a series of books on democratization.
The Communist Party’s adaptation to China’s new social elites will lead to a democratic transition only, if at all, at the expense of regime continuity.
China’s 1989 democracy movement was brutally suppressed, but a former student leader argues that it also planted the seeds for the growth of Chinese civil society and for future democratization.
Xi reads Tiananmen as a cautionary tale, and he has sought to centralize power and reverse years of ideological atrophy. By controlling the past, he is trying to determine how…
