FIFTEEN YEARS ago, when the Chinese government sent in the army to crack down violently on peaceful student demonstrators in Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989, I was a graduate student in physics at Peking University. Because I was also in charge of coordinating the students from the various campuses in Beijing in joint political actions, I was sentenced to four years in prison.
Although I had learned about democracy by reading Western books, such as the Federalist Papers and essays by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, and I had participated in a brief student demonstration at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou in 1986, until then I had been primarily interested in my studies. But the party's crackdown on June 4 made me realize that political change in China could not come from demonstrations; only by building democratic institutions in China from the bottom up could China become democratic.
Thus, when I was released from prison in 1991 and returned to my hometown of Hangzhou, I became interested in the local elections that had begun in the Chinese countryside in the late 1980s and had spread to many areas of the country.
I contacted some of the peasants who were involved in village elections to find out more. In most cases my peasant informants had had some high school education or were engaged in rural small private businesses. I discovered that even though there were more candidates than positions in the elections for village head and the village council, the village Communist Party committees still controlled the nomination process.
As a result, the village elections were not really democratic. Therefore, I concluded that the only way to introduce true democratic practices into China would be to establish a multi-party system.
In June 1998, I attempted to set up an opposition party, the China Democracy Party, in my hometown. I tried to register a local branch of the China Democracy Party as a nongovernmental organization with the Hangzhou Bureau of Civil Affairs. I encouraged friends and colleagues in other cities in China to follow suit.
Initially, our efforts to register local branches of the China Democracy Party met with little opposition. Officials may not have understood exactly what we were trying to do. Moreover, we timed our actions to the visits of a series of foreign dignitaries, starting with President Bill Clinton in June 1998 and ending with French President Giscard d'Estaing in late fall 1998.
We knew that the Chinese government would be less likely to crack down on our political activities during these visits so as to avoid censure from the international community. That proved to be the case. But once the foreign visitors had departed in late 1998, virtually all the founders of the local chapters of the China Democracy Party, including myself, were immediately arrested, bringing our six-month effort to establish a multiparty system in China to an abrupt end.
I was sentenced to 11 years in prison. But due to pressure from the international community, especially the United States, I was released after six years and exiled to the United States in March 2004.
Although I have left my country, I bear a heavy burden for my colleagues who are left languishing in Chinese prisons. My short-term goal in the United States is to do whatever I can to work toward their release; my long-term goal is to continue efforts to establish a multiparty democratic system in China.
In this endeavor, the Western nations have a role to play. China's leaders are responsive to international pressure on issues of human rights and democracy. Establishment of democracy in China is important to peace in the world. Just as American pressure helped to bring democracy to Eastern Europe, South Korea, and Taiwan, it can also help to bring democracy to China.
Yet, while outside pressure can help, democracy can come only when carried out by citizens within the country. The military crackdown on June 4, 1989, did not end efforts to establish democracy in China. Rather, it taught Chinese democrats an important lesson that we must build democratic institutions gradually, step by step, from the bottom up.
Wang Youcai is a visiting scholar at the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research at Harvard University.