ABSTRACT
In the late 1980s, after nearly a decade of economic reform in China, many observers believed that political evolution would be part of an inevitable process. The liberalization of the economy had led to a new and dramatic sense of freedom in Chinese society. New laws brought a new sense of structure to social and political worlds, which only two decades before had been dominated by totalitarian caprice. Although the political elites in China maintained that they were not sure where the reforms were headed, it seemed increasingly clear what the endpoint would be. The direction of the reforms was toward a liberal economy and a democratic political system. And, although the world did not know it (though perhaps many sensed it), 1989 would be a watershed year in the transformation of political systems around the world. After a decade of economic reform in China, the country, like those in Eastern Europe, was poised for a radical transformation, one that would redress the ills that had been visited upon the population by the capricious authoritarian rule of the 1960s and 1970s.
