Excerpt from treatment for the documentary film Ti-Anna
Produced by Prospector Films
A Short History of the Chinese Pro-Democracy Movement
The pro-democracy movement in China is said to have its origins during a brief period in
the late 1970s after the death of Mao Zedong; it is often referred to as The Beijing Spring.
During this time, the Chinese government was coming under the new leadership of Deng
Xioaping, and during the transition, democracy activists were permitted to post ideas,
usually in the form of posters, on what became known as The Democracy Wall in
Beijing. On December 5th, 1978 an electrician named Wei Jingsheng placed a poster with
the title Five Modernizations on the Wall. The poster called on the Communist Party of
China (CPC) to add Democracy to its own list of Four Modernizations essential to
China’s development: Agriculture, Industry, National Defence, and Science and
Technology. Wei’s was the first poster to openly advocate for personal liberties. A year
after he posted the demand for the fifth modernization, the CPC shut down the Wall and
sentenced Wei to fifteen years in prison for authoring the document. In 1995 Wei was
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize.
Throughout the 1980s the pro-democracy movement gained momentum, especially
among college educated citizens, culminating in the Tiananmen Square protests in the
spring of 1989. Though the protests were student led, they received a great deal of
support from Beijing residents, demonstrating the widespread popularity of the prodemocracy movement. The government crackdown in response to the protests was brutal.
The Chinese government condemned the protests as ‘counter-revolutionary riots,’ and
under orders from Deng Xioaping, sent armoured tanks and troops with assault rifles to
meet the students at Tiananmen Square. The events of that day would become known as
the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Due to the lack of hard facts from the CPC, estimates of
the death toll remain inconclusive, ranging from several hundred to thousands. In the
aftermath of Tiananmen Square, the CPC conducted widespread arrests of protesters and
their supporters, cracked down on other protests in China, expelled foreign journalists,
and strictly controlled coverage of the events in the domestic press. To this day, the
Chinese government prohibits all forms of discussion or remembrance of the event. The
pro-democracy movement has never again attained the momentum behind the Tiananmen
Square protests.