When Sun Yat-sen started a republic in 1911-12, his aim was to have a democracy, because he believed that it was through democratic processes that the Western powers had been enabled to mobilize their people and to get the support they needed for the foreign enterprises that had led to the division of China. That first modernization, that democratization, disappeared in the turmoil of warlordism and then the fighting between the Nationalists, who adopted a semi-Leninism, and the Maoists, who adopted the full brand of Leninist communism.

As a result of that democratic failure at the very beginning of China's decision to move away from an imperial Confucian culture, the old Confucian imperial state institutions were re-created, albeit in new and more powerful form. The key institutions of the Confucian state were an emperor from whom all blessings, certainly all commands, were supposed to flow, a mandarinate that ruled on behalf of the emperor, and the imperial Confucian doctrine. There was a pyramid with the emperor at the top, the mandarins in the middle, and at the bottom the forces of the military and police to keep order. That is exactly the kind of state system that was re-created in 1949 when Mao proclaimed the liberation of China. Far from being liberation, it was the straitjacketing of China within the old political system. The new mandarins-the party cadres-under Mao Zedong, buttressed by Marxist Leninist doctrine, thought that they knew the past and understood where history was going, and therefore they had the right to take the Chinese people in the direction that the chairman said they ought to go.

Today, as a result of the wounds inflicted by Mao during the Cultural Revolution and, in a very different manner, by Deng Xiaoping during the reform period, the Communist Party of China no longer has the authority it once had. Its legitimacy has been questioned, and it no longer has doctrine to support its claims. No one in China pays much attention to Marxism and Leninism, let alone to Mao Zedong's thought. The one thing the Party does pay attention to is, of course, the goal that the Party should continue to rule.

So there is now this oddity of a revolutionary situation-revolutionary in the sense that all modernization is revolutionary because it is about change-mired in the nineteenth-century ideas of Lenin. The leaders of China today don't know how to solve this problem. They know they want to stay in power, and they know only one way to do that, which is by repression.

Wang Gungwu spoke of the great advances during the reform period, but the last twenty years have shown us that reform is not enough, that Chinese, like everyone else, cannot live by bread alone. In 1989 the student movement made it clear that the political ideas of democracy embraced by Sun Yat-sen so many decades earlier were once more on the political agenda. China today has a bankrupt political system that can stay in power only by the use of military force, as we sawinTiananmen Square on June4, 1989. There was no appeal to doctrine at that time; it would have been laughed out of court. The Politburo standing committee, the top body, split three ways in trying to decide on martial law-five people, a three-way split! Only by the intervention of a supposedly retired Deng Xiaoping, using all his influence and calling in all his chips, were they able to bring the military together to suppress that movement.

Deng Xiaoping certainly thinks that reform is the only way to stay in power, but ten years after the Tiananmen events we saw again a clear indication that reform is not enough. This time it was the Falun Gong movement, which suddenly appeared from nowhere and, in a state that used to be able to control everything, was able to mobilize about 10,000 people to surround Communist Party headquarters. The more important thing is not the ability to organize such an event-the use of cell phones and such-but why they were doing it. What Falun Gong represents is a search for meaning. What does it mean to live in a modernizing China at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Marxism-Leninism is gone. Confucianism was thrown on the junk heap, supposedly back in the early years of the twentieth century. What is left? What does it mean to be modern and Chinese? It is a question that the regime, with all its attempts at propagandizing "socialist spiritual civilization" and the like, has been unable to answer.

The peaceful passage of power in Taiwan in 2000 with the installation of a president chosen by votes of ordinary citizens marked the first time this had taken place within a country or an entity of Chinese origin. There is an identity in Taiwan that is more than just looking Chinese, speaking Chinese, bringing children up in the Chinese manner. A democratic political dimension has been added to their identity, and it is that identity that is lacking today in mainland China. The Communist Party cannot provide spiritually and will not provide politically the kinds of things that Chinese people in '89 and '99 showed that they wanted. That inability will lead to further revolutionary changes that will be even more corrosive of the Chinese state, which even today is only a pale shadow of what was set up in 1949.

Roderick MacFarquhar chairs the Department of Government at Harvard University, where he formerly directed the Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. He was the founding editor of The China Quarterly.

It is not right to suggest that Chinese tradition has been antithetical to certain Western values and ideas like democracy and human rights. Confucian culture is not inhospitable to the Western idea of democracy. In my reading of Chinese history, the sixteenth century brought a kind of fundamental change in political social thinking, one I would call the individualistic turn. Individual self-interest is given more and more emphasis in Confucian writings in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The point is made that the people themselves can take care of their self-interest much better than a loving emperor can. No matter how much he cares about his people, he cannot love their children more than the parents themselves love their own. Also, there is this view that the total sum of public good is the adding up of all self-interests. If all the self-interests are fulfilled, the public good is fulfilled. This individualistic turn was a subtle but important change in Confucian thinking.

Professor William Theodore De Bary of Columbia has done us an important service by translating and annotating Huang Tsung-hsi's book Waiting for the Dawn. Although Huang lived in the seventeenth century, his influence on the generation of Confucians at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century was tremendous. He was compared to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. That may have been an exaggeration, but he was generally appreciated for ideas very close to certain Western liberal ones, such as the idea that the consent of the governed is a precondition for any successful rule.

So I would say that from the sixteenth century on, there was a slow Chinese search for modernity. This began long before China was fully exposed to military and commercial and religious pressures from the West, which started around the middle of the nineteenth century.

This very slow crawl toward modernity was not marked by the kind of milestones you can easily identify in the West, such as the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution. But there was indeed a movement toward such modern values as the autonomy of the individual and the importance of the people's consent in any successful governance.

Yü Ying-shih is the Gordon Wu Professor of Chinese Studies and professor of history and East Asian studies at Princeton University. Born in China, he has also taught at Harvard, Yale, Michigan, and the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

My perspective is that of a longtime observer and student of China. I began this study a generation ago and am now the father of two young men who have considered the same subject in rather different circumstances.

A generation ago, we wanted to understand how the People's Republic of China came to be. We looked in the history of China for precursors of collectivism and totalitarianism and even the madness of the Cultural Revolution. We had our own ideas about Oriental despotism and Buddhist millenarianism, and we studied the intricacies of the inner doctrines of the Chinese Communist Party.

Today what interests us is the kind of society now taking shape in China, the society that described. We look for precursors of that and find them, Professor Yu reminds us, in small state traditions in China and in Confucian thinking. We want to reexamine the early twentieth century, looking for proto-democratic practices. We see a great revival of the study of Confucianism itself as a possible precursor of a liberal political order.

Until very recently, Chinese living in China were at a serious disadvantage in studying their own history, because of disorder and because of the repressive regimes that governed the mainland and, to a lesser extent, until around 1984, Taiwan also. People of my age understood Sinology as something to be practiced outside China. But now this study increasingly goes back into the Chinese world itself, in part because the various areas of the world where Chinese live have increasingly been joined together. While Chinese who live outside China are very different in their experience from those who live inside, the gap is closing. This kind of Chinese cosmopolitanism is having an effect on the world that would have been unimaginable a generation ago.

Our first teachers about China in this country were mainly products of the missionary experience. Children born in China to American missionaries-and to a lesser extent American businessmen-came back to the United States as teachers. But after the Second World War, the next generation of China scholars was different, because they couldn't go to China and had no direct experience of it. People my age would peer into China from Hong Kong; some were perhaps able to go to Quemoy Island and look into nearby China through a pair of binoculars. It was all quite mysterious. All this study was carried on outside of China, and not by Chinese at all. Now the teaching and interpretive function of American universities is devolving increasingly on Chinese people who have come to the United States from Taiwan or from the mainland. There are more and more Chinese who are studying modern Chinese history and communicating their insights to us.

Understanding how Chinese people interpret the meaning of their own modern experience is going to become increasingly important. Just as in a previous era we relied on people who were actually born in the USSR or Eastern Europe to guide our relations with that part of the world-people like Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski-so now, I think, we will more and more come to rely on people either born in China itself or of Chinese heritage to guide us in our thinking about China with comparable depths of learning and sensibility.

Charles Horner is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. He held several posts in the Reagan and Bush administrations, including associate director of the United States Information Agency.

We need a new way to understand the Chinese past. We were all brought up learning about the Chinese Communist Party, and all of a sudden it turns out that the Party isn't really very important. But most people don't know much about anything besides that. So there is now a search for an informative past, and I think that my old teacher and colleague Professor Yü Ying-shih suggested what we need is an understanding that the Chinese tradition, the great tradition of Confucian learning, is not inimical to the needs of modernity at all.

It seems quite conceivable to me that a democratic and pluralistic China could have been built on the cultural foundations already present in 1900. Today France is democratic, but for many years France had the doctrine of the divine right of kings. This Western form of the divine right of kings was much stronger than the Chinese form. In the Chinese form, a person who was not virtuous could not be a king. This would be a contradiction in terms, because to be a king meant to be virtuous. But in the West, virtue was not required; all that was necessary was the right genes.

There are really two kinds of modernity, personal or individual modernity, and state or public modernity. Unquestionably, by the early part of the twentieth century, many Chinese had achieved personal modernity; they were already comparable to the best the West had to offer in terms of education, command of languages, command of money, general knowledge. If you had visited the Chinese students' club at Columbia University in the 1920s, you would have found students every bit as impressive as the ones you meet there today. One of the reasons I went into Chinese studies is that when I was in high school, I had a room next to a Chinese-American fellow who is now a very successful banker in New York. His impressive study habits, general level of knowledge, and other admirable characteristics gave me a sense of what this civilization had to offer.

But there is a real tension between the Chinese level of individual achievement and the ability of the country to put itself in order. It's a little like France again: if you count how many different governments France has had since, say, the French Revolution, it is a staggering total. But France is nonetheless a great civilization.

The roots of China's great ability to achieve individually go straight back to Confucianism. If you open up a Confucian classic, what does it teach you? Does it tell you to go out and organize a neighborhood committee or go out and run for political office? No. It says two things. First, look into yourself. Cultivate yourself. Turn your gaze on your innermost heart and examine your moral condition. And second, seek knowledge. Those two admonitions are powerful components of Confucianism. Along with them goes a great distrust of the use of force, the idea that with enough introspection and enough sincere effort, disagreements can be resolved. The whole idea of governance under Confucianism is that coercion is not required. To use coercion is to admit moral insufficiency.

In the first part of the twentieth century, much or even most of the change that was going on in China was at the individual level. For instance, many Chinese men cut off their queues, their pigtails. This was a big step that they took on their own; there was no command from above to do it. A similar thing happened with foot binding. If you ask a Chinese woman of a certain age why her feet were not bound, she might say, "Well, my mother was a simple peasant with very little education, but she did know that she wasn't going to bind the feet of her daughter, so she wouldn't let it be done." These were little sparks of enlightenment.

Also in the early twentieth century, the written Chinese language was transformed from classical Chinese to a vernacular. This was done not by the government but by individuals who were writing, starting newspapers, trying to change the traditional way of doing things. Cultural life flourished in the first half of the twentieth century. With the exception of cinema, all the great twentieth-century works of Chinese culture-particularly in art and literature-were produced before 1949. All sorts of schools were founded; people went abroad to learn the most advanced things and returned home to spread their knowledge. Charitable organizations and relief organizations were started. Again, all this was being done at the individual and local level, not as the result of commands from above.

But none of this ferment was institutionalized. There has never been a governmental structure that was able to interact comfortably with the tremendous popular potential. Of course, given the great size and complexity of China, this is not surprising.

At about the same time that this process of modernization got under way in China, very much as a matter of personal initiative, Japan experienced the Meiji Restoration, in which officialdom took command of the modernization and reconstruction of the country. One of its chief achievements was the Meiji constitution, which was the result of a kind of a careful distillation of everything the Japanese could learn about foreign laws and legal systems. It's a magnificent achievement, and despite the problems that Japan ran into in the twentieth century, I would argue that before the end of the nineteenth century, Japan had created robust institutions that would endure. In a sense, they paid a price in the degree of personal autonomy. In many ways China is a much more pluralistic, active population. Japan, because modernization came from above, is somewhat different. Nevertheless, this Japanese achievement means that the country can now go forward without worrying about the most fundamental issues of state.

The tragedy for China is that what the Communists did, far from capturing and building on the tremendous momentum that existed within the population, was to try to push the society back to where it had been at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Arthur Waldron is the Lauder Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania and director of Asian studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He previously was a professor of strategy and policy at the U.S. Naval War College.