ABSTRACT
To China’s ruling Communist Party the Tiananmen “Incident” was a domestic uprising, not too dissimilar in its basic elements from the White Lotus or the Eight Trigram uprisings some two centuries before. Granted, the prodemocracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square were peaceful and unarmedin sharp contrast to the knife-wielding Eight Trigram followers-but their goal of forcing the collapse of the ruling government and creating a new government to replace it must have seemed frighteningly similar. Therefore, the military reaction to both disturbances was also similar: just as Manchu princes used muskets to shoot down the Eight Trigram invaders inside the Forbidden City, China’s Communist rulers used tanks and infantry to run down helpless students outside the Forbidden City. More recently, in the late 1990s and in 2000, the PLA has helped round up and imprison members of the religious sect Falun Gong. Faced with these clear signs of domestic unrest, the primary dynastic question is: Will China’s Communist “Dynasty” slip into decline and eventually fall, just as the Qing Dynasty declined and collapsed as a result of similar events almost two centuries ago?
