For two and a half months in the spring of 1989, China's student actors dominated the world stage of modern telecommunications. Their massive demonstrations, the hunger strike during Gorbachev's visit, and the dramatic appearance of the Goddess of Democracy captured the attention of an audience that spanned the globe. As we write in mid-1990, the movement and its bloody suppression have already produced an enormous body of literature—from eyewitness accounts by journalists (Morrison 1989; Zhaoqiang, Gejing and Siyuan 1989) and special issues of scholarly journals (Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs Nos. 23, 24; The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 14.4), to pictorial histories (Turnley and Turnley 1989) and documentary collections (Han 1990; Wu 1989), and, most recently, textbook chapters (Spence 1990) and analytical works (Feigon 1990; Nathan 1990)—tracing the development of China's crisis. Despite a flood of material too massive to review in the present context, we still lack a convincing interpretive framework that places the events within the context of China's modern political evolution, and also provides a way to compare China's experience to that of Eastern Europe. Such an interpretation should help us to understand why massive public demonstrations spurred an evolution toward democratic governance in Eastern Europe, but in China led only to the massacre of June 3–4 and the present era of political repression.

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Landlords and rich peasants, who constitute less than 10 per cent of the rural population, possess approximately from 70 to 80 per cent of the land and brutally exploit the peasants by means of their land. Poor peasants, farm laborers, middle peasants and others, however, who make up 90 per cent of the rural population, possess in all only 20 to 30 per cent of the land.—Liu Shaoqi (1950: 63) According to John Buck, then of the University of Nanking, in the north China plain at this time [the 1930s] over four-fifths of the cultivated area was farmed by those who owned it. In the Yangtze valley, the corresponding proportion was about three-fifths, and in Kwangtung and Szechwan slightly over half. The median size of farm was 3.1 acres. The amount of land held by landowners who did not themselves farm was clearly too small to serve in and of itself as an adequate basis for a distinct and socially dominant class.—Mark Elvin (1973: 254-255) AUTHOR'S NOTE: I would like to express my thanks to Philip Huang, Edwin Moise, and an anonymous referee for their extensive, helpful, and ancisme comments and criticisms of an earlier draft of this article. The many inadequacies which remain are, of course, my own responsibility.

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