Jefferson in Beijing

 In 1776, a group of American colonists declared that all men are created equal with inalienable rights and that governments are just only when they are by the consent of the governed. This declaration would be heard again in an unlikely place more than two hundred years later: communist China. In a similar fashion, Chinese students used the Declaration of Independence to complain about the CCP’s authority during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. While living under an entirely different form of government, the protestors’ demands for rights and liberty reflected the Declaration’s ideas that all men are entitled to liberty and participation in the government.

The belief that rights are inalienable, grounded in natural law rather than any government, is also reflected in the Declaration of Independence. Upon asserting that “all men are created equal” and thus endowed with “unalienable Rights” such as life and liberty, the Declaration states that governments are instituted to secure the rights, and that when they become destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish them. The principle of popular sovereignty superseded forms of monarchy or government that were based solely on coercion and instead stressed a system which derives its legitimacy from the people.¹ 

Chinese communism is a Marxist-Leninist ideology that views the Communist Party as the embodiment of the will of the people and the basis of the popular will that cannot be rightfully disputed, whereas the rights of the individual yield to the rights of the collectivity and the state. Dissent is not a value. It is a threat. It means that Chinese citizens have no freedom of speech, no free elections and no possibility of organizing a meaningful fight against corruption or abuse of power.² 

By the late 1980s, many Chinese students exposed to Western publications and broadcasts began to question the system and demand more political rights. After the liberal-minded Communist Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang died in April 1989, thousands of students came to Tiananmen Square to pay tribute to him and demand democratic reform, igniting a nationwide protest against the one-party system.³ 

In terms of its goals, the Tiananmen protestors’ demands were similar to those of the Americans at the time of drafting the Declaration of Independence: freedom of speech, freedom of the press, individual rights. One of the movement’s key documents, the Tiananmen Manifesto, declared, “democracy, freedom, and human rights” as the movement’s demand, alongside the denunciation of corruption and suppression of politics.⁴ Like other manifestos, the document reflects the belief that any legitimate government must be accountable to the people and respect their rights.

The protesters’ symbolism also drew from American political culture. For instance, the most famous icon of the protests was the “Goddess of Democracy”, a statue built by art students at Tiananmen Square, which was modeled after the Statue of Liberty in New York. To the protesting students, the statue represented freedom, the resistance against oppression, and aspirations for humanity.⁵ The protestors’ use of the statue as a symbol equated their movement with Western ideas of freedom, such as those derived from the United States. 

Furthermore, some student leaders explicitly quoted the lines by American politicians. For example, protest leader Wang Dan said that many students had read Jefferson, Lincoln, and other leaders, and explained that the protest was inspired by these leaders’ beliefs that political power comes from the people, not the ruling party.⁶ This is paraphrased from the Declaration of Independence, which says that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the 

governed.” However, the students were not merely objecting to specific policies, but the entire communist system. 

Rather than a single political struggle, the Tiananmen protests were part of a historic global civil disobedience and nonviolent revolution tradition based on liberal political philosophy, in which American colonists challenged British rule in the name of liberty and the Chinese students challenged communist rule in the name of democracy. Both believed that unjust governments lost their right to rule.

The Tiananmen Square protests are an example of this. The Chinese government sent tanks and troops into Beijing on June 4, 1989, in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to quell the protests. Thousands of people were killed, and this was erased from history by the government, which still censors discussion of these events.⁷ The violent response suggests that the CCP understood how dangerous these ideas were. Belief in natural rights runs counter to the principles of one-party rule. 

While the protests in Tiananmen Square would ultimately fail, the legacy of the Declaration of Independence was that the ideals presented there did not apply to one place, but are rather universal expressions of freedom. Even in a society committed to the principles of communism, individuals have turned to the same principles of freedom and human dignity that were embraced in 1776. 

As historian Dr. Lee Edwards has pointed out, the struggle against communism was always “a moral struggle, not just a geopolitical one.”⁸ The students on Tiananmen Square were not just protesting an economic crisis or details of government policy. They were staking a moral claim about the nature of just government itself. They were reiterating a truth of the Declaration: that government exists to serve the people. Theirs was a universal message. The search for liberty 

knows no national borders or ideology. It is an instinct that transcends and outlasts oppressive regimes everywhere in the world. 

1. Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence (1776). 

2. Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), 647–650. 

3. Andrew J. Nathan, China’s Crisis: Dilemmas of Reform and Prospects for Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 3–15. 

4. “Tiananmen Manifesto,” in The Tiananmen Papers, ed. Andrew J. Nathan and Perry Link (New York: PublicAffairs, 2001), 183–185. 

5. Rowena Xiaoqing He, Tiananmen Exiles: Voices of the Struggle for Democracy in China (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 78–80. 

6. Wang Dan, quoted in Rowena Xiaoqing He, Tiananmen Exiles, 112. 

7. Perry Link, “The Anaconda in the Chandelier: Censorship in China Today,” The New York Review of Books 49, no. 6 (2002). 

8. Lee Edwards, The Cold War and the Reagan Presidency (Washington, DC: Heritage Foundation, 2001), 3. 

Jonas Lane authored this article as part of VOC’s Student Essay Contest.