Student protests in Fin-de-Siècle China

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 237, 1999, Pages 52-72

  Wasserstrom, Jeffrey N ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0033442934     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. Throughout the 1990s, small-scale demonstrations broke out, but before this past May workers and farmers, not students, played the central roles in all of them. Students were likewise a minor presence in the largest single protest of the 1990s to take place before the anti-NATO marches - the April 1999 Beijing sit-in by an estimated 10,000 members the Falun Gong sect.
2. One of the authors of that document was a history student at Beijing University named Wang Dan, who had already established himself as a leading student activist at the school that had played the central role in the May 4th Movement. For a translation of this text, see Cries for Democracy: Writings and Speeches from the 1989 Chinese Democracy Movement, edited by Han Minzhu, Princeton 1990, pp. 135-37.
3. This was done directly at times - as it had been in 1986, when notices appeared on campus bulletin boards after a series of demonstrations had taken place, warning of the reemergence of Red Guardism. At other times, it was done indirectly via code words, such as dongluan (turmoil), which were linked to the Cultural Revolution.
4. Some dissidents were arrested this past May, of course, but not because they had organized anti-NATO protests. In addition, as I am writing this (in late August), a campaign of repression against Falun Gong is underway.
5. Wang Chaohua, Wang Dan and Li Minqi, 'A Dialogue on the Future of China', NLR 235, May-June 1999.
6. Documentation for many of the specific points made here about historical events can be found in Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai, Stanford 1991, which contains a bibliographic essay that describes some of the most interesting and useful texts on Chinese youth movements by other authors. Where 1989 itself is concerned, see also the documentary film, The Gate of Heavenly Peace, which is discussed in a later note, and various contributions in Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China, edited by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Elizabeth J. Perry, Boulder 1994, second edition. Comments on the 1999 protests are based mainly on personal observations and conversations with participants and observers, as well as on continual, though obviously selective, reading of English and Chinese press reports, sometimes via newspapers, sometimes via the internet, while I was in Beijing May 9-10, Shanghai 10-17 May, and Hong Kong 17-20 May. For helping me make sense of the protests as they were unfolding, I am particularly grateful to Barbara Mittler, Steve Smith, David Kenley, Adam Brookes, and Susan Lawrence. I am also very grateful to several Chinese colleagues in Shanghai who shall remain anonymous and to Kate Edgerton. And I would like to thank John Gittings, Seth Faison, Stephanie Ho, Ted Plafker, Scott Savitt, and Maggie Farley, journalists with whom I exchanged information and ideas at one or another point.
7. Documentation for many of the specific points made here about historical events can be found in Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai, Stanford 1991, which contains a bibliographic essay that describes some of the most interesting and useful texts on Chinese youth movements by other authors. Where 1989 itself is concerned, see also the documentary film, The Gate of Heavenly Peace, which is discussed in a later note, and various contributions in Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China, edited by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Elizabeth J. Perry, Boulder 1994, second edition. Comments on the 1999 protests are based mainly on personal observations and conversations with participants and observers, as well as on continual, though obviously selective, reading of English and Chinese press reports, sometimes via newspapers, sometimes via the internet, while I was in Beijing May 9-10, Shanghai 10-17 May, and Hong Kong 17-20 May. For helping me make sense of the protests as they were unfolding, I am particularly grateful to Barbara Mittler, Steve Smith, David Kenley, Adam Brookes, and Susan Lawrence. I am also very grateful to several Chinese colleagues in Shanghai who shall remain anonymous and to Kate Edgerton. And I would like to thank John Gittings, Seth Faison, Stephanie Ho, Ted Plafker, Scott Savitt, and Maggie Farley, journalists with whom I exchanged information and ideas at one or another point.
8. Documentation for many of the specific points made here about historical events can be found in Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai, Stanford 1991, which contains a bibliographic essay that describes some of the most interesting and useful texts on Chinese youth movements by other authors. Where 1989 itself is concerned, see also the documentary film, The Gate of Heavenly Peace, which is discussed in a later note, and various contributions in Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China, edited by Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Elizabeth J. Perry, Boulder 1994, second edition. Comments on the 1999 protests are based mainly on personal observations and conversations with participants and observers, as well as on continual, though obviously selective, reading of English and Chinese press reports, sometimes via newspapers, sometimes via the internet, while I was in Beijing May 9-10, Shanghai 10-17 May, and Hong Kong 17-20 May. For helping me make sense of the protests as they were unfolding, I am particularly grateful to Barbara Mittler, Steve Smith, David Kenley, Adam Brookes, and Susan Lawrence. I am also very grateful to several Chinese colleagues in Shanghai who shall remain anonymous and to Kate Edgerton. And I would like to thank John Gittings, Seth Faison, Stephanie Ho, Ted Plafker, Scott Savitt, and Maggie Farley, journalists with whom I exchanged information and ideas at one or another point.
9. For a sense of Liu's views, see the June 2nd 'Hunger Strike Manifesto' that he co-authored, which is translated in Han, ed., Cries for Democracy, pp. 349-54. Interviews with Liu, as well as with many other former participants who express divergent views, can be found in the Long Bow Groups 1995 documentary, The Gate of Heavenly Peace a prize-winning film that has provoked controversy. For more about that film, for which I was a consultant, and links to both positive and harshly critical reviews, see the very creative website designed by the insightful China specialist Geremie Barmé and the Long Bow Group: http://www.nmis.org/Gate/. This site contains an extensive bibliography and the full text of several works, including an essay by Liu taken from Wasserstrom and Perry, eds., Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China.
10. For a sense of Liu's views, see the June 2nd 'Hunger Strike Manifesto' that he co-authored, which is translated in Han, ed., Cries for Democracy, pp. 349-54. Interviews with Liu, as well as with many other former participants who express divergent views, can be found in the Long Bow Groups 1995 documentary, The Gate of Heavenly Peace a prize-winning film that has provoked controversy. For more about that film, for which I was a consultant, and links to both positive and harshly critical reviews, see the very creative website designed by the insightful China specialist Geremie Barmé and the Long Bow Group: http://www.nmis.org/Gate/. This site contains an extensive bibliography and the full text of several works, including an essay by Liu taken from Wasserstrom and Perry, eds., Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China.
11. For a sense of Liu's views, see the June 2nd 'Hunger Strike Manifesto' that he co-authored, which is translated in Han, ed., Cries for Democracy, pp. 349-54. Interviews with Liu, as well as with many other former participants who express divergent views, can be found in the Long Bow Groups 1995 documentary, The Gate of Heavenly Peace a prize-winning film that has provoked controversy. For more about that film, for which I was a consultant, and links to both positive and harshly critical reviews, see the very creative website designed by the insightful China specialist Geremie Barmé and the Long Bow Group: http://www.nmis.org/Gate/. This site contains an extensive bibliography and the full text of several works, including an essay by Liu taken from Wasserstrom and Perry, eds., Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China.
12. For a sense of Liu's views, see the June 2nd 'Hunger Strike Manifesto' that he co-authored, which is translated in Han, ed., Cries for Democracy, pp. 349-54. Interviews with Liu, as well as with many other former participants who express divergent views, can be found in the Long Bow Groups 1995 documentary, The Gate of Heavenly Peace a prize-winning film that has provoked controversy. For more about that film, for which I was a consultant, and links to both positive and harshly critical reviews, see the very creative website designed by the insightful China specialist Geremie Barmé and the Long Bow Group: http://www.nmis.org/Gate/. This site contains an extensive bibliography and the full text of several works, including an essay by Liu taken from Wasserstrom and Perry, eds., Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China.
13. For a sense of Liu's views, see the June 2nd 'Hunger Strike Manifesto' that he co-authored, which is translated in Han, ed., Cries for Democracy, pp. 349-54. Interviews with Liu, as well as with many other former participants who express divergent views, can be found in the Long Bow Groups 1995 documentary, The Gate of Heavenly Peace a prize-winning film that has provoked controversy. For more about that film, for which I was a consultant, and links to both positive and harshly critical reviews, see the very creative website designed by the insightful China specialist Geremie Barmé and the Long Bow Group: http://www.nmis.org/Gate/. This site contains an extensive bibliography and the full text of several works, including an essay by Liu taken from Wasserstrom and Perry, eds., Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China.
14. For example, the May 4th era was a time when many educated youths criticized patriarchal ideas and practices. Neither the students of the June 4th generation nor of the current one have echoed this interest. For May 4th era feminism, see Wang Zheng's excellent new study, Women in the Chinese Enlightenment: Oral and Textual Histories, Berkeley 1999.
15. In terms of more detailed problems, I found perplexing Li Minqi's claim that 1999 witnessed a healthy revival of interest in 'socialist' terms. I saw no evidence that students involved in the protests viewed these terms, when used by the régime, as more than hollow slogans. I saw no signs, in other words, that a concern with socio-economic equality was re-emerging as a major force on Chinese campuses.
16. The fascination with Clinton's sex life that manifested itself on many posters would make an interesting topic for analysis in and of itself. There is a very tempting line of feminist interpretation that could be explored. This would pick up on recent work by literary critics such as Chen Xiaomei and Lydia Liu, anthropologists such as Susan Brownell and Dru Gladney, and historians such as Tani Barlow, Geremie Barmé, Gail Hershatter, and Prasenjit Duara. Some of these scholars have focused on the linking of the Chinese nation, symbolically, with the female body, in various discourses, others on the theme of a sense among some male Chinese of their county having been emasculated by foreigners. In moments of national crisis, such as the Belgrade bombing, this line of interpretation suggests, there is a tendency to focus on the damage done to female Chinese bodies by foreign men and the passivity or impotence of China's male population. This trope goes back, in its modern form, at least as far as the beginning of this century. Then, revolutionary critics of the Qing Dynasty made much of the idea that, in the 1640s, the Manchu conquerors had violated Han Chinese daughters, sisters and wives while Han Chinese fathers, brothers and sons proved unable to protect the nation's women. The Revolution was presented as a way to avenge the rape of Han Chinese women and enslavement of Han Chinese men. Similar imagery was reworked during the Japanese invasions of the 1930s and 1940s. The motif of Clinton as a 'bi-raper' fits in here perfectly - as does the appearance in the Embassy district of Beijing of a giant, very phallic, model of a cruise missile, during a demonstration I witnessed - but there is more to a gendered reading of 1999 propaganda than these things. This is because, even though some attention was given initially to the grief of the mothers as well as fathers of the three martyred journalists, the dominant television image accompanying stories about the May 8th Tragedy became that of the distraught father of one of the female victims. He was shown, over and over again, weeping over the body of the daughter he had been unable to protect from foreign missiles. Needless to say, the line of analysis is particularly attractive to those who see links, as I do, between the 1999 protests and an earlier Reform era event in which nationalist sentiments were linked to anxieties associated with sex and gender the 1988 anti-African riots.
17. I am grateful to Barbara Mittler for alerting me to this connection.
18. The phrases are from Yue Daiyun's stirring memoir (co-written with Carolyn Wakeman), To the Storm: The Odyssey of a Revolutionary Chinese Woman, Berkeley 1985. p. 21. Her account of the appeal of the CCP, transmitted mainly via reports from people who had visited the base areas, is a moving one. She shows how, as a thoughtful, patriotic youth, she was drawn to the CCP because it seemed less corrupt than the Nationalist Party and more capable of protecting China from mistreatment by foreigners. Important recent studies that pay attention to both Yan'an's mythic allure and dystopian qualities include David Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao's Republic, London 1994 , and Pauline Keating, Two Revolutions, Stanford 1997.
19. The phrases are from Yue Daiyun's stirring memoir (co-written with Carolyn Wakeman), To the Storm: The Odyssey of a Revolutionary Chinese Woman, Berkeley 1985. p. 21. Her account of the appeal of the CCP, transmitted mainly via reports from people who had visited the base areas, is a moving one. She shows how, as a thoughtful, patriotic youth, she was drawn to the CCP because it seemed less corrupt than the Nationalist Party and more capable of protecting China from mistreatment by foreigners. Important recent studies that pay attention to both Yan'an's mythic allure and dystopian qualities include David Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao's Republic, London 1994 , and Pauline Keating, Two Revolutions, Stanford 1997.
20. The phrases are from Yue Daiyun's stirring memoir (co-written with Carolyn Wakeman), To the Storm: The Odyssey of a Revolutionary Chinese Woman, Berkeley 1985. p. 21. Her account of the appeal of the CCP, transmitted mainly via reports from people who had visited the base areas, is a moving one. She shows how, as a thoughtful, patriotic youth, she was drawn to the CCP because it seemed less corrupt than the Nationalist Party and more capable of protecting China from mistreatment by foreigners. Important recent studies that pay attention to both Yan'an's mythic allure and dystopian qualities include David Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao's Republic, London 1994 , and Pauline Keating, Two Revolutions, Stanford 1997.
21. For information on the donning of Red Guard costumes, I am grateful to Julia Andrews and Robert Stern. I have become aware of continuities relating to slogans - for example, the prevalence in 1966 and 1999 alike of phrases such as 'The Chinese People Will Not Be Bullied' - while working on a multimedia exhibition, 'Picturing Power: Posters of China's Cultural Revolution', developed at Indiana University in collaboration with the University of Westminster's Centre or the Study of Democracy. For details, see http://www.fa.indiana.edu/∼sofa/feat/index.html and http://www.indiana.edu/∼easc/exhibit/project.html. See also the book edited by Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald, Picturing Power in the Peoples Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution, Oxford 1999.
22. For information on the donning of Red Guard costumes, I am grateful to Julia Andrews and Robert Stern. I have become aware of continuities relating to slogans - for example, the prevalence in 1966 and 1999 alike of phrases such as 'The Chinese People Will Not Be Bullied' - while working on a multimedia exhibition, 'Picturing Power: Posters of China's Cultural Revolution', developed at Indiana University in collaboration with the University of Westminster's Centre or the Study of Democracy. For details, see http://www.fa.indiana.edu/∼sofa/feat/index.html and http://www.indiana.edu/∼easc/exhibit/project.html. See also the book edited by Harriet Evans and Stephanie Donald, Picturing Power in the Peoples Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution, Oxford 1999.