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became a forum for discourse, and every night leaders met to discuss tactical
and logistic issues. But those discussions were hampered by the attempt to
make decisions by consensus. This became a major issue when proposals to
withdraw from Tiananmen Square began to be put forward by the most
prominent leaders of the movement. Accounts differ on whether majority
opinion actually favored staying when Wu'erkaixi, Wang Dan, and Chai Ling
were voted down on May 21st, or whether a substantial minority simply
indicated that it would not leave. In any case, it was clear that a complete
and orderly withdrawal could not be achieved. To leave a few behind was
thought of as weakening to the movement, and so the students stayed
(ostensibly all of them, though in fact a good many simply drifted away until
the statue of the Goddess of Democracy rekindled enthusiasm a few days
later). On many occasions different student groups spent hours in debate
about the right course ofaction, without establishing procedures to make clear
decisions to move ahead. I had to remind myself that they had not been in–
grained with the two hundred years of experience of majority votes which
has made such procedures almost second nature to us.
Closely related to this lack was the fact that the students generally did
not have a strong conception, still less a habit of pluralistic public discourse.
They favored pluralism in the sense that they wanted their voices to be
heard and not squashed by the government. But internally they felt a strong
need to speak unanimously. They sought to be the "voice of the people" and
understood themselves as speaking ideally for the country as a whole. They
did not consider that there might be competing but equally right views of a
situation or solutions to a problem. Though they tried to respect minorities,
they did not see the nurturing of an internal discourse across lines of sig–
nificant difference as itself one of the goals of their movement. As a result,
student activists occasionally complained that movement leaders behaved
towards them just as the government behaved towards the people. Certainly
leaders made no systematic effort to ascertain the views of ordinary
movement participants. They reached their own conclusions, announced
them, and then hoped that they would be followed. When they were not,
they felt abandoned and tended to withdraw.
Finally, the movement was weakened by its lack of communications
media. This was both an internal problem and especially a limit to the
movement's ability to reach the country as a whole. Most information flowed
by word of mouth. Students used telephones and printed handbills, but they
did not have their own newspaper or journals. For an exhilarating week in
mid-to-Iate May Chinese newspapers and television began to report events
as they happened. The BBC and Voice ofAmerica broadcasts were a crucial
source of news on China, but the students lacked the capacity to disseminate
