Daniel A. Bell Replies

In 1989, I strongly supported the student-led pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. Without knowing much about China, I guess I supported the students partly out of a form of self-love; it seemed they wanted to follow my social and political way of life. It didn’t occur to me that democracy in China might take particular forms rooted in its own traditions. Five years later, however, I read these words:

"I recognized in the arguments of the students [in Tiananmen Square in 1989] a sense of their mission or their special political role that was clearly incompatible with the American [democratic] ideal (in which a certain hostility to the claims of the educated classes has always been present) and probably incompatible too with the prevailing abstract and universal theories..."