The rise and fall of the Democracy Movement, 1978-1979, is the
primary concern of the present article. An attempt to sketch the contemporary
political context is followed by a discussion of the different
democratic organizations and their journals and, finally, an attempt to
assess the importance of the movement. To put the basic themes of the
Democracy Movement of 1978-1979 into a historical perspective, we
must survey a number of similar, although not quite identical, phenomena-the
outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, the Li Yi Zhe manifesto
of November 1974, and the Tian'anmen incident in April 1976.