Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China: Political Reform in the Deng Xiaoping Era [Paperback]

The Wests leading authority on the role of intellectuals in contemporary China presents a percipient account of the efforts at political reform in the Deng Xiaoping era. Merle Goldman describes a group of highly placed intellectuals who, with the patronage of Deng Xiaopings designated successors Hu Yaobang and then Zhao Ziyang, attempted to reshape both Chinas MarxistLeninist ideology and its political system.[A] definitive study of Chinas dissidents& [Goldman] is the foremost Western expert on Chinas intellectual dissidentsespecially writerssince the founding of the Peoples Republic in 1949& Whenever one seeks an explanation, Goldman furnishes it.Goldman selects about three dozen figures for careful study& Some of the subjects&appear in one of [her] two earlier books (Literary Dissent in Communist China and Chinas Intellectuals). The three books are similar in style, chronologically consecutive, and together make a comprehensive and shrewdly analytical history of the battles that have taken place over dissident thought in Communist China.Until now, no work has adequately probed the intellectual climate of Chinas decade of reform ending in the Tiananmen drama of MayJune 1989. With sensitivity to both the Confucian and Maoist past, Goldman, in a gripping narrative, reviews the lives and activities of a host of intellectual gadflies.The title of Goldmans new volume is misleading: the book is not simply a recounting of political reform (or its lack) in post-Mao China, but a fascinating account of how Chinas intellectuals sought to produce such reform in a sometimes favorable, but often hostile, environment. We learn an enormous amount from this book about who the important intellectual actors are in post-Mao China as well as about their views, activities, and relationship to elites and how each of these changed during the course of the era. Goldmans interesting conclusion is that Chinas intellectuals largely failed in their efforts to bring about politilÓ"