Beijing, China, June 2004

Strolling around the campus where he has taught English for more than a decade, the now-retired Chinese professor was unguarded and outspoken. He is absolutely convinced that democracy will one day be achieved in China.

Reflecting on the changes he had lived through over the past 35 years since the waning of the Red Guard’s fanatical Cultural Revolution, the professor thinks that democracy is now inevitable.

In a manner that would not have been possible even two decades ago, he now speaks openly about the need for political change in China, and for his country’s need to “become more like the United States.”

A week earlier, our strolls had taken us through the huge new Sam’s Club about a mile  beyond campus.

What’s still missing, he says, is a change in the Chinese mind-set that allows certainty that the shift to democracy will be permanent and not a temporary, reversible adjustment.

China must find a way to break the deep-seated mass perception that change is followed by counter-change, revolution by counter-revolution, the rise and fall of dynasties, followed by the rise and fall of the next dynasty, ad infinitum.

The Chinese, he said, expect history to run in cycles: a good and virtuous leader arises, consolidates power, grows corrupt and falls, to be replaced by the next good and (temporarily) virtuous leader.

Breaking that mind-set, that pre-conditioned expectation, must occur for China to move ahead with democracy, he said.

Speaking darkly for a moment, the aging professor criticizes his people for being too patient, too tolerant of persecution and injustice. That is because they find it difficult to believe it could be otherwise.

“China needs a hero like Nelson Mandela,” he concluded.

Earlier that month, freedom-loving Chinese celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of the Tiananmen Square rebellion largely in secret. The massive, globally televised student demonstration in Beijing’s main square was brutally crushed on June 4, 1989 at the direction of Jiang Zemin, who was rewarded by being named president of the republic soon afterward.

When Jiang was replaced as president in 2003, he retained control over the military. But finally that vestige of power was relinquished this fall.

Some say the internet is feeding an undeniable demand for democracy in China. But the government is reported to employ well over 30,000 censors to block access to disfavored websites.

—Jeff Radford