Evaluation of the Democracy Wall movement and its impact on the legitimacy of the Chinese government and intellectuals

This paper is an examination of the literature and events of the ten-year Democracy Wall movement and its impact on the perceived legitimacy of Deng Xiaoping's reform government and the intellectuals who criticized that government. This movement was a reaction to the chaos of the Mao campaigns such as the Hundred Flowers Movement, the Great Leap Forward, and the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Deng and the reformists were supported by the Democracy Wall activists and the rehabilitated intellectuals who welcomed the more open atmosphere of Deng's regime, only to become critical of it as political reform lagged behind economic reform throughout the 1980s. This resulted in a break between the intellectuals and the government, with an attendant loss of legitimacy by both government and intellectuals alike when the government was forced to use coercive means to control the students at Tiananmen Square in 1989 and by the failure of the intellectuals to effectually intercede on the behalf of the people.