The people who wrote the posters were not strangers to political mobilization. Many had been Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, answering Mao's call in 1966 to root out capitalist elements from within the Communist Party. By 1969, Mao had exiled these same students to rural areas through the Down to the Countryside Movement, and the sense of betrayal ran deep. When Lin Biao's attempted coup and death in 1971 shattered belief in Mao's infallibility, a slow reckoning began. In 1974, a 67-page paper by Li Yizhe appeared on a wall in Guangdong Province, detailing the damage caused by bureaucratic corruption during the Cultural Revolution and arguing for democracy and a legal system. The Democracy Wall movement that erupted four years later drew its energy from these disillusioned former revolutionaries.

The movement accelerated through individual acts of courage. On November 23, 1978, a man named Lu Pu posted a critique of Mao Zedong on the Xidan Wall, arguing that the real causes of the April 5th Movement of 1976 were a backward economy, rigid thought control, and the poor living conditions of ordinary people. His poster was called the Fire Lighter of Democracy Wall. Then, on December 5, writer and activist Wei Jingsheng posted the movement's most famous document: The Fifth Modernization: Democracy and Others. While China's official program called for four modernizations -- agriculture, industry, defense, and science -- Wei argued that without political democracy, the other four were meaningless. His long article criticized both Mao and Deng Xiaoping, a distinction that made it far more dangerous than the pro-Deng posters that predominated.

The wall hosted multiple forms of protest simultaneously. Alongside the political manifestos, petitioners from across China posted accounts of suffering during the Cultural Revolution, detailing persecution by corrupt local officials and pleading for the central government's attention. These petitioners' posters, often written by less educated citizens, were usually torn down quickly and largely forgotten. More durable were the unofficial journals that sprang up around the wall. Academic Liu Sheng-chi categorized them into three groups: the radical left, moderates, and the radical right. Printing was difficult -- most journals managed only 200 to 500 copies per issue -- but readers hand-copied articles and passed them along, spreading the content far beyond the wall itself. On January 15, 1979, six leading journals announced their intention to fight for constitutional rights of free speech and free press. Those freedoms were never realized.

Deng Xiaoping's relationship with the Democracy Wall was tactical from the start. He initially tolerated and even encouraged the movement because the posters criticizing the Gang of Four and Mao's legacy served his own political struggle against Hua Guofeng. When Deng told Japanese delegates in November 1978 that the wall's activities were constitutionally legal, the crowds swelled. But when voices like Wei Jingsheng's turned their criticism toward Deng himself, tolerance evaporated. The short period of political openness became known as the Beijing Spring, a name that carries its own bitter irony. By December 1979, the wall was shut down. Wei Jingsheng was arrested and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. The movement that had begun as a crack in the monolith ended, but its influence persisted as the beginning of what would become the broader Chinese Democracy Movement.