The story behind the struggle for democracy in China and the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, still the subject of widespread government censorship efforts. The first complete book on the Tiananmen Square tragedy reveals how diplomats from the United States, Britain, and Europe knew exact details of the impending massacre of the students in Tiananmen. In a vivid narrative window into secret meetings in the Oval Office, CIA headquarters, and the private compound of China’s leaders, more than one hundred interviewees contribute to an untold story. Chaos Under Heaven reveals America and the West’s betrayal of the children of China, who, for a brief moment in history, brought democracy to their homeland. In this stunning book, Gordon Thomas takes readers inside the tragic drama of those fifty-five days when the young people of China, crying out for freedom, rebelled against the old men of the Long March. At stake were America’s and the world’s roles in the future of China. Once castigated by Karl Marx as a “carefully preserved mummy in a hermetically sealed coffin,” China has become the superpower of the Pacific. As the students’ demand for democracy escalated, the Western nations realized that their carefully cultivated ambitions for China were at risk. Their goal was to preserve the status quo.

This book investigates whether the theory of “deliberative democracy”--developed in the West to focus democratic theory on the legitimization that deliberation can afford--has any application to Chinese processes of democratization. It discovers pockets of theory especially useful to guide Chinese practices and pockets of Chinese practice that can, in turn, educate the West on possibilities for innovative uses of deliberative democratic theory.

Presents a view from the grassroots of the 1989 student and mass movement in China and its tragic consequences. Here are eyewitness and participant accounts expressed through wall posters, students speeches, movement declarations, handbills, and other documents.

Within a framework of analysis and background by the four editors, this book presents a view from the grassroots of the 1989 student and mass movement in China and its tragic consequences. Here are the core eyewitness and participant accounts expressed through wall posters, students speeches, movement declarations, handbills, and other documents. In their introductions to the material, the editors address the political economy of the democracy movement, the evolving concept of democracy during the movement, the movement's contribution to China becoming a civil society, and the changing view of the Chinese Communist Party by students, intellectuals, workers and others, as the crisis unfolded.

Four decades of reform fostered a democratic mentality in China. Now citizens are waiting for the government to catch up. Jiwei Ci argues that the tensions between a largely democratic society and an undemocratic political system will trigger a crisis of legitimacy, compelling the Communist Party to become agents of democratic change--or collapse.

This thoroughly researched study provides an invaluable account of Hong Kong's political evolution from its founding as a British colony to the present. Exploring the interplay between colonial, capitalist, communist, and democratic forces in shaping Hong Kong's political institutions and culture, Suzanne Pepper offers a fresh perspective on the territory's development and a gripping account of the transition from British to Chinese rule. The author carries her narrative forward through the lives of significant figures, capturing the personalities and issues central to understanding Hong Kong's political history. Bringing a balanced view to her often contentious subject, she places Hong Kong's current partisan debates between democrats and their opponents within the context of China's ongoing search for a viable political form. The book considers Beijing's increasing intervention in local affairs and focuses on the challenge for Hong Kong's democratic reformers in an environment where ultimate political power resides with the communist-led mainland government and its appointees.