This thesis is about culture, learning, and politics. It attempts to explain how and why we may learn differently about politics depending on our particular social and cultural settings. The case study is focused on China and the processes that led up to the Tiananmen demonstrations in 1989.

The point of departure is that cultural diffusion--the spreading of values, ideas, concepts and symbols, is likely to affect the process of political learning in any society. Political learning is an on-going process that depends on both the availability of ideas to import and on the intensity and willingness to import these ideas. The intensity and willingness to adopt novel or exogenous ideas depend on two inter-related processes. These are:(1) how knowledge is constructed on both a social and an individual level, and (2) the extent to which social and political identity are formed on the basis of any particular knowledge construction, and institutionalized in expected patterns of behaviour. From these two contextual processes arises a cultural filter. The available ideas must necessarily pass through this filter. They may come through in their original form (learning occurs), in a modified form (adaptation), or they may be entirely rejected.