st democracy A decade later the most vocal intellectual partisans of the regime were advocates of a capitalist autocracy. By 1989 neither socialist nor democratic goals had survived Deng Xiaoping's reform program, at least not in official circles (Meisner, 1996; p. 395). The intellectuals of China did not participate in earlier democratic demonstrations. The reasons for this lack of activity are various. For a long while, they were still seduced by Deng's program of reforms, and they were told that, as a class, they would play a prominent role in the Four Modernisations. There was also a certain air of snobbishness in that the intellectuals felt that early movements were really led by self-educated workers and not students. By early 1989, this was beginning to wear on the collective conscious and the government began to receive well-publicised letters from famous intellectuals calling for the release of political prisoners. The intellectual element also began to challenge the government on other fronts. It began to challenge the government's position as the sole interpreter of Marxist doctrine. Beginning around 1987, dissident political literature could be bought right on the street from book carts along with pornography imported from Hong Kong. According to Meisner, Deng made a serious error when he allowed the standard of living to go down for intellectuals after 1985. Thus, it can be seen that pressures toward some sort of political unrest had been building for quite sometime. The students knew that the death of a Party leader was one of the rare occasions when the regime would tolerate a symbolic political action and spontaneous gatherings. After the government violence which brought the student democracy movement to a bloody and tragic end, one U.S. magazine, The National Review, criticised the students for not foreseeing that the government would eventually resort to violence. However, it is easy to see how this could happen. On A...
