(FORTUNE Magazine) – Insufficiently remarked upon in the avalanche of commentary on the Beijing students is their source of inspiration. It was, and is, democracy Western- style. You could fairly say American-style. In rising against China's oppressive dictatorship, they never seemed terribly interested in Eastern models (Gandhi, Sun Yat-sen) or alternative Marxist visions (the ''young Marx'' who fascinated the New Left in America in the Sixties) or any of the nonwhite Third World icons (Frantz Fanon) who keep getting represented as critically important to impressionable young American students by their impressionable slightly older assistant professors. The Beijing students seem to have paid no attention at all to American intellectuals and scholars who have been telling Stanford and the rest of the world that it is prejudicially ethnocentric to equate civilization with the Anglo-American democratic heritage. We kept looking for exceptions in the slogans and banners of the Chinese students, but mainly we were getting the same old names: Lincoln, Jefferson, Thoreau, and the Statue of Liberty -- renamed the Goddess of Liberty in versions that proliferated in several Chinese cities. In their most desperate hour, the students were quoting Nathan Hale, Patrick Henry, and the Declaration of Independence. Long before they were shedding blood, they seemed a lot more serious than their counterparts at Stanford who marched with Jesse Jackson inanely chanting ''Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western culture's got to go.'' A part of the news from Tiananmen Square is that it has staying power.