On June 30, 1949, just before the nationwide victory of the Chinese Revolution, Mao Zedong wrote his On the People's Democratic Dictatorship, one section of which deals with the Chinese people's quest for revolutionary truth. He wrote that, from the time of China's Opium War in 1840, Chinese progressives such as Hong Xiuquan, Kang Youwei, Yan Fu, and Sun Yatsen went through untold hardships in their search for truth from the Western countries, but nothing worked.

As China enters the twenty-first century and we look back at the slogans China raised during the May Fourth New Culture Movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, we find that whether "science" and "democracy," or liberalism, or the emancipation of the personality, or human rights and humanitarianism—all remain as foci of attention today. The May Fourth movement as a movement for enlightenment may be seen as an ideological preparation for China's advance toward modernization, and the first step required (...) in practice was political change. Whether revolution or reform, the objective was always to bring about constitutional democracy. Despite close to forty years of detours, we have finally admitted that the market economy is a stage of development that cannot be skipped. But we still do not admit that constitutional democracy is similarly a stage that cannot be skipped. And so, as China steps into the new millennium, it is still limping along and must make up for this missed lesson. (shrink)