The 1989 Tian'anmen Square Protest and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution are two of the most influential non-violent protests at the junction of the 20 th century and 21 st century. Although they share many similarities, the two movements reached completely different results: the Tian'anmen Protest was harshly repressed by the Chinese government, whereas the Egyptian Revolution successfully overthrew the authoritarian Mubarak government. Although most existing research has attributed the different

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... stinies of the two revolutionary movements to government control over the military, this paper focuses instead on the implications of the protestors' social classes. The research method employed is a qualitative comparative analysis on these two events based on existing literature and primary sources. Two objectives were formulated for this study: to examine how the social class composition of the protest movements influenced the development process of the two revolutions and to provide insights for future non-violent revolutionaries on how to avoid failure due to a lack of diversity in social classes among protesters.