CRAIG CALHOUN
575
heard by the government.
Democracy was spoken of, I thought, more as something that people
might have than as something they might do. That is, democracy meant
having a government which took the interests of its people seriously, acted to
their benefit rather than that of its cadres, listened to expressions of popular
opinion and was fair. The idea of democracy as a form of political participa–
tion was much less well developed. The crucial participations which the stu–
dents sought to guarantee were extensions of the traditional idea of officials
(and to a lesser extent, ordinary people) remonstrating with the emperor,
holding him to his responsibilities and telling him what he needed to know in
order to be a good ruler. Thus a greater role for intellectuals was central to
their vision of democracy. We in America sometimes emphasize the role of
elections to the point of forgetting the importance of social movements and
other less mechanical forms of democratic participation, particularly in deter–
mining which issues will be on the agenda of policy-makers and behind the
decisions made in elections. Chinese thinkers have often pointed to both the
weaknesses of electoral democracy in the West and the problems of reliance
on elections in a backward, under-educated country. Students implicitly post–
poned questions of universal suffrage to a later stage, after popular con–
sciousness had been raised. They tended to conceive of education as some–
thing which they as intellectuals would do to the people, rather than as a di–
rect outgrowth of a participatory political process.
As
to the ordinary people, when asked, they certainly declared them–
selves to be in favor of democracy. But if pressed about their grievances,
they stressed economic issues and corruption. They wanted an end to the
inflation which ate away at the purchasing power of their relatively fixed
salaries. Though not high by third world standards, this inflation was un–
precedented in the People's Republic of China. The government had imple–
mented reforms which enabled some people to get rich, and had praised the
idea of getting rich, but had not offered a clear rationale for understanding
why some would enjoy this opportunity and others would not. Why should
teenagers lucky enough to get jobs in ajoint-venture hotel make more than
the most senior university professors? In short, the economy seemed to lack
order; its results did not make sense to ordinary people. This may well have
unsettled them even
if
growth were continuous and inflation nonexistent. But
growth had stagnated during the last two years, while inflation had grown.
At one level, of course, people simply wanted more wealth, but they also
wanted the distribution ofwealth to make sense. The Party had abandoned
the extreme but clear egalitarianism of its earlier policies, and had not come
up with a new legitimating message. In one sense this was ironic, for it is not
clear that inequality really had increased: the rise of rural incomes compared
