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The beginning of China's democracy movements is usually regarded as the Democracy Wall movement of November 1978 to spring 1981.[1] The Democracy Wall movement framed the key issue as the elimination of bureaucratism and the bureaucratic class.[1] Former Red Guards from both rebel and conservative factions were the core of the movement.[1] Democracy Wall participants agreed that "democracy" was the means to resolve the conflict between the bureaucratic class and the people, the nature of the proposed democratic institutions was a major source of disagreement.[1] A majority of participants in the movement favored viewed the movement as part of a struggle between correct and incorrect notions of Marxism.[1] Many participants advocated classical Marxist views that drew on the Paris Commune for inspiration.[1] The Democracy Wall movement also included non-Marxists and anti-Marxists, although these participants were a minority.[1] Demands for "democracy" were frequent but without an agreed-upon meaning.[2] Participants in the movement variously associated the concept of democracy with socialism, communism, liberal democracy, capitalism, and Christianity.[2] They drew on a diverse range of intellectual resources "ranging from classical Marxist and socialist traditions to Enlightenment philosophers, [socialist] experiments in Yugoslavia, and Western liberal democracy."[2]
Significant documents of the Democracy Wall Movement include The Fifth Modernization manifesto by Wei Jingsheng, who was sentenced to fifteen years in prison for authoring the document. In it, Wei argued that political liberalization and the empowerment of the laboring masses was essential for modernization, that the CCP was controlled by reactionaries and that the people must struggle to overthrow the reactionaries via a long and possibly bloody fight.[citation needed]
Development
Throughout the 1980s, these ideas increased in popularity among college-educated Chinese, through the "New Enlightenment movement" led by intellectuals.[3][4] Overseas pro-democracy organizations including the Chinese Alliance for Democracy were founded by Chinese activists. Student protests inspired by intellectuals broke out in 1986.[5]
In the wake of growing corruption and economic dislocation, the Tiananmen Square protests erupted in 1989, which culminated in a military crackdown in June.
Academic Lin Chun criticizes the phrase "democracy movement" as typically used in the scholarly and media discourse on China, noting that the term is often used exclusively to refer to the "demands and activism of an urban, educated group of people seeking liberal more than democratic values."[8] She notes, for example, that the political turbulence in universities over the period 1986 to 1989 had specific flash points ranging from anger at the government's "too soft" position on China–Japan relations to poor management of student welfare.[8]
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