ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the difference between the student movement and the older intellectuals' petition movement, and the rift that arose between the dialogue-oriented student leaders, who were inspired by the philosopher Popper, and the radical hunger strikers, who were willing to become martyrs for the democratic cause. In January 1989, the well-known critical intellectual Fang Lizhi wrote an open letter to Deng Xiaoping, which started off a full-fledged petition movement. Many of the petitioners were inspired by the ideas and the example of Wei Jingsheng, the most prominent dissident of the Democracy Movement of 1978–1979. The difference between the petition movement and the student movement was obscured by the fact that they followed closely upon each other chronologically, and that many older intellectuals rallied to the support of the students in May. Popper’s popularity in China was due to his attack on Marxism as a "pseudo-science," on the basis of methodological and logical arguments.
