Today, June 4, marks the 36th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre—a moment of both tragedy and hope. It was the bloody end to a nationwide democracy movement that brought together workers and students, the most promising push for political reform in the history of the People’s Republic of China. But despite the courage of many individual Chinese who fought for democracy and the solidarity of their international supporters, there has not been a comparable movement since—and it’s hard to imagine one arising anytime soon.
While the 2022 white paper protests—named after the blank sheets of white paper that demonstrators held up—against COVID-19 lockdowns demonstrated the Chinese public’s capacity for dissent and momentarily challenged the authoritarian state’s policies to a certain degree of success, they lacked the ideological depth, organizational structure, and systemic ambition of the 1989 pro-democracy movement. They were a reaction rather than a revolution, more about ending specific suffering than about redefining China’s political future. There has yet to be any revival of the spirit of 1989.
There is no single answer to why China lacks a grassroots democracy movement of the same scale today. Several interlocking factors—domestic, international, technological, and sociological—have suppressed the conditions necessary for such a movement to reemerge.
One of the most effective strategies of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been its informal “bread-for-freedom” policy. Following the brutal crackdown of 1989, the CCP understood that outright repression alone could not maintain legitimacy. Economic growth was essential.
By delivering unprecedented levels of material prosperity—lifting millions of people out of poverty, building modern infrastructure, and creating urban middle classes—the CCP made a Faustian bargain with the Chinese people: economic opportunity in exchange for political obedience. Economic reform had begun prior to the 1989 Tiananmen movement and, in many ways, helped create the political, economic, and social conditions that gave rise to it. But at the time, a prevailing belief—shared by much of the public and even by key policymakers like Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang—was that political liberalization would closely follow, if not accompany, economic reform. Within this idealistic atmosphere, few recognized, let alone accepted, the notion of a bread-for-freedom bargain.
For the majority, however, the growth of the 1990s and the implicit new bargain worked. The cooptation of the Chinese elite—intellectuals, entrepreneurs, and technocrats—was key. With China’s rapid growth, they became stakeholders in the system rather than challengers to it. The intellectual elite, including most of the post-1989 entrepreneurs who emerged from these ranks, were originally idealists. This included college students, who saw it as their duty to push for societal progress—a conviction deeply rooted in traditional Chinese culture. Exposed to the realities of Western democracies and inspired by the ideals of democracy and human rights, young Chinese firmly believed that democracy should be China’s future.
As they turned their gaze toward the developed world, they also became acutely aware that, despite enjoying public respect, they were not fairly compensated under China’s distribution system. This sense of injustice left a lasting grievance deep in their hearts. But as they benefited from the new economic order, many of them shifted positions. The democracy movement, once led by students and intellectuals, found itself robbed of its natural base. Those who might have risked their lives in protest before were now more invested in protecting their gains.
Internationally, the CCP adopted a “market-for-everything” strategy: using China’s massive market as a bargaining chip to silence criticism and deter collective international action on human rights.
Foreign governments and corporations, enticed by China’s growth and population size, have often prioritized access over advocacy. The West allowed China’s accession to the World Trade Organization without any human rights conditions, for instance. Yahoo handed over the personal details of journalist and poet Shi Tao to the Chinese authorities in 2004, resulting in his arrest and sentencing. LinkedIn censored politically sensitive profiles and posts in China until the country exited the market in 2021, explicitly complying with local censorship laws. Apple removed apps (such as VPNs and Hong Kong protest tools) from its App Store in China upon government request.
While individual voices—activists, dissidents, and nongovernmental organizations—have been vocal, they operate in an environment that is increasingly isolated from power and policy. As a result, external pressure on the CCP has rarely been consistent or forceful enough to help reignite internal democratic momentum.
The CCP’s ability to generate sustained economic growth—even, until 2020, amid global downturns—has translated into a powerful narrative of legitimacy. In the minds of many Chinese, the CCP is not only the guardian of China’s stability but also the architect of its rise.
This legitimacy is reinforced by nationalist rhetoric and historical memory. China’s humiliation by foreign powers in the 19th and early 20th centuries is routinely invoked, and the CCP presents itself as the bulwark against chaos and Western subjugation. In this narrative, democracy is not a universal value but a foreign imposition that threatens national unity.
Perhaps the most profound transformation since 1989 has been the revolution in information technology. In China, this has enabled the construction of a comprehensive surveillance state—what many, such as myself and correspondent Kai Strittmatter, have called a digital dictatorship.
With full support from tech capital, the CCP has deployed artificial intelligence, facial recognition, data analytics, and big data integration to track, censor, and preempt dissent. China now monitors not only public spaces but also private lives, digital habits, and online speech. Authorities monitor mobile usage, including calls, messages, app data, and geolocation. Apps like WeChat and Alipay are integrated into daily life and are heavily surveilled. Users can be tracked, censored, or penalized for sharing politically sensitive content—even in private chats.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, although the costs eventually proved to be unsustainable, individuals in urban areas were closely tracked for compliance with shifting regulations. Digital anonymity is nearly impossible; every phone’s unique identifier is logged and monitored, and, in times of high tension, police check individual phones on the street for illicit content.
This infrastructure does more than punish—it shapes. The omnipresence of surveillance and censorship alters behavior and even thought.
The mere expectation of censorship alters public discourse and shapes internal beliefs about what is safe to think or say.
China Digital Times and China Media Project’s interviews show that many urban youth and intellectuals engage in coded language, sarcasm, or silence on social media—consciously tailoring speech to avoid being flagged. This produces a gradual shaping of internal red lines, where people begin to internalize the state’s logic of what is appropriate or dangerous.
Platforms like WeChat, Weibo, Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok), Bilibili, and Zhihu deploy AI-powered algorithms designed to prioritize content that is state-friendly, nationalistic, consumer-orientated, and entertaining, not only to suppress dangerous ideas but also to promote nationalism, consumption, and apathy. Dissent becomes both dangerous and increasingly unthinkable.
There is, however, a more subtle yet equally powerful explanation for the absence of grassroots democratic mobilization—a transformation of the nature of community itself. Recent analyses, such as Derek Thompson’s “The Anti-Social Century” and Marc Dunkelman’s concept of the “missing middle ring” of human relations, provide us with some clues. Their arguments, though centered on American society, shed light on dynamics increasingly present in China and other countries.
The traditional grassroots democracy movement depended on a dense network of middle-ring relationships, such as neighbors, co-workers, and classmates—people familiar but not intimate. These were the bonds that created social cohesion and civil engagement. They made physical gatherings, shared grievances, and trust-based organizing possible.
The backbone of the Tiananmen movement was university students in Beijing, joined by workers, with protests then spreading to other cities. They were not a single tight-knit group but were linked through middle-ring relationships: classmates, student union colleagues, dormitory acquaintances, and peers across campuses. In those days, physical middle-ring gatherings were far more common and impactful, such as collective movie screenings, shared news viewing, and university-wide sports competitions. Mass discussions could only take place in person.
Compared to physical gatherings, online communication falls far shorter in generating the same levels of emotional contagion, shared enthusiasm, trust-based coordination, collective confidence (from safety in numbers), and horizontal solidarity. These are precisely the conditions that transform shared grievances into collective action. Middle-ring relationships create the threshold level of confidence needed for collective action: “If I see classmates or colleagues going, I’ll go,” or “If my neighbor’s son is marching, then it’s not too dangerous.”
Today, that middle ring is withering. Digital life favors the inner circle (close friends and family via private chats) and the outer circle (virtual groups united by ideology or hobby). But the middle ring—the town square, the public forum, the classroom, the community center—is increasingly absent. And in China, where digital life is not only fragmented but policed, this structural erosion becomes even more damaging.
The remote, phone-based, and screen-dominated culture has atomized individuals. People live within carefully curated digital bubbles, shaped not by proximity or shared civic life, but by algorithmic logic and ideological echo chambers. In such an environment, it becomes almost impossible to cultivate the tolerance, solidarity, and mutual accountability needed to fuel a movement for democratic change.
The failure of a new Tiananmen-style movement to emerge is not a failure of courage. Rather, it reflects a confluence of forces—authoritarian strategy, economic cooptation, global complicity, and deep technological restructuring of social life—that suppress the possibility of mass democratic mobilization.
But that does not mean hope is lost.
If democracy movements are to be reborn in China—or elsewhere—they must reckon with the new terrain. They must rediscover ways to rebuild the middle ring of civic life, forge solidarity in fragmented digital landscapes, and develop new strategies that don’t merely replicate past models but reimagine resistance in an age of AI, largely defined by surveillance and screens.
As we remember the sacrifices of those who stood in Tiananmen Square 36 years ago, we must also reflect on how to carry their vision forward.