1.  Individuals or groups of individuals who feel either entitled to and/or endowed with certain fundamental rights may be expected to put up resistance when such rights are violated or perceived to be violated.  Rights in China are derived from citizenship/membership instead of humanity, treated as programmatic goals instead of claims on government, restricted by state power, and unprotected by independent judicial review.

2.  Dissident resistance : the early years In the early years of reform, the embryonic dissident movement adopted a more direct and confrontational approach, relying heavily on underground publications and mass demonstrations to challenge the Communist Party’s monopoly of power.  Dissident in the 1990s the revival of the dissident movement in the mid- 1990s may be attributed to many factors. Most importantly, the conservative attempt to reverse China’s economic reform failed miserably and decisively in 1992 after Deng Xiaoping toured southern China and re-ignited economic reform.

3.  The international contexts Chinese dissidents frequently timed their protest activities to coincide with important visits by major Western leaders, to put the government in an embarrassing situation. Beijing signed two critical human rights covenants under Western pressure-the international covenant on social, economic, and cultural rights (in 1997) and international covenant on civil and political rights (in 1998).

4.  The change legal contexts A notable trend in the pro-democracy movement in the 1990s was the dissidents’ increasing use of China evolving legal system in asserting rights and putting the government and the ruling party on the defensive.  Right consciousness and resistance Democracy resistance in China may be better understood as part of a broad trend of increasing rights consciousness among ordinary people. Such resistance is likely to occur more frequently and intensely and gain greater, although not necessarily overt or direct, popular support when the general level of rights consciousness is on the rise.

5.  Falling repression produces greater resistance mainly as a result of rising rights consciousness among the oppressed.  Dissident resistance performs some of the most essential functions of political opposition in political systems where legal opposition does not exist. In the long run, dissident resistance may have important and more direct political consequences.