journey something

The pampered American youth of bourgeois classes came to believe that their mere attendance at rallies and the symbolic choices they made between factions in the election booths constituted a movement–even a sort of revolution. Sincere though their intentions were, they lacked the historical knowledge of the sustained sacrifices that revolutionary struggle entails. They could not see that their efforts had brought “change” without any real political movement behind it, and therefor no true change at all.

Harper’s Magazine, June 2009, 34. Excerpted from The Dragon Rising, Vol. 1 of Li Xian’s The Chinese Century, HarperChina. Translated from the Chinese by Peter Moore.