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At the heart of the Tiananmen spectacle were some troubling questions: What exactly did the hunger strikers and their supporters want? Did they even know?
Several of their objectives are clear. One is a clean sweep of China's rampant corruption. The demand seems straightforward enough, but implied in it is an attack on what the protesters see as the abuse of power by top party officials. Virtually all of them have been accused of nepotism. Li Peng is viewed as a beneficiary of nepotism since he was an orphan raised by Zhou Enlai.
Another demand is for a free press, which is largely related to the drive against corruption. Investigative journalism is regarded in China as the foremost tool for rooting out corruption. Thus far, the government has confined journalists to relatively small cases, protecting upper-level party members. The value placed on a free press was underscored by one of the most astonishing aspects of the demonstrations. The ordinarily staid party organ, People's Daily, broke with long-standing practice and reported fully on the protests before Li announced a crackdown. Central China Television did so as well, with one of its news anchors -- incredibly -- broadcasting news of the student leaders' demand that Deng step down.
Beyond these immediate wishes of the crowds, the picture becomes fuzzy. Democracy, the rallying cry of the demonstrators, is an ambiguous word. For some of the protesters, who have no experience and little knowledge of democratic practices in other countries, democracy meant the opposite of everything associated with Communist Party rule. "They can't enumerate concretely what they want," says a diplomat in Beijing, describing the antigovernment movement as fundamentally a "scream of the damned." As Grace, 19, a pig-tailed student who spent Friday night in Tiananmen Square, put it, "We think everything must change."
The demands may be amorphous, but there can be no doubt about the passion, as evidenced by the willingness of ordinary people to obstruct tanks and of hunger strikers to court death. If anything, the absence of an ideology with specific long-range aims indicates just how powerful is the public revulsion at the party and the entire status quo. The immediate reasons for the discontent -- the government's condescending treatment of the student demonstrators and its general repressiveness -- are clear. But the anger also stems from the less political aspects of everyday life. Economically and socially, China is experiencing many of the dislocations that typify an era of revolutionary change. The overall effect is one of widespread frustration and ^ rising expectations. "It is not always when things are going from bad to worse that revolutions break out," Alexis de Tocqueville noted in his study of the French Revolution. More often, he added, people take up arms when an oppressive regime that has been tolerated without protest for a long period "suddenly relaxes its pressure."