born and raised in Beijing, studying and living in the States while thinking about China Supervisors: Jeff Wasserstrom Phone: 5104096496 Address: 2316 Orleans Dr. Pinole, CA 64564
Panel Abstract: While the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution has generated discussion an... more Panel Abstract: While the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution has generated discussion and reflection this year, another landmark is quietly approaching its 60th anniversary: the Rectification and the Anti-Rightist Campaigns of 1957. In comparison to the intensively studied Cultural Revolution, its precursor has remained under-researched. This roundtable panel will rekindle conversations regarding the history and scholarship on this crucial turning point in the Mao era. Our roundtable addresses a couple questions. One deals with the debate regarding Mao's motivation of launching the Anti-Rightist Campaign: Did he react from genuine surprise, or had he set a trap and plotted from the beginning to lure snakes? We hope to reach a consensus with the most recent scholarship. The other concerns various treatments of different social groups in the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and explores reasons for the differences. This question puts elite politics aside and pursues local variations of the campaign.
I'm participating in an individual paper panel, and presenting my chapter on student responses to... more I'm participating in an individual paper panel, and presenting my chapter on student responses to Khrushchev's secret speech and the Hungarian Revolution.
Our panel focuses on the intersection of Chinese education and politics across the twentieth cent... more Our panel focuses on the intersection of Chinese education and politics across the twentieth century. Despite changing political leadership, all regimes attempted to instill their own ideologies in students through textbooks, propaganda and political campaigns. The process of ideological inscription, however, was in no way smooth, as students were not content to be passive tools in the hands of missionaries, nationalists, revolutionaries, or bureaucrats. We therefore examine both the attempts of authorities to shape education according to their own political agendas and how students received, contested, and resisted these orders from above.
Our papers address politicized education in sequential periods of twentieth century China. Jennifer Bond’s paper explores how mission school girls in 1920-40’s Zhejiang skillfully combined nationalism, Christianity and feminism to defend their school from attack and transcend the conservative gender boundaries prescribed by both the government and Christian educators. Steven Pieragastini’s paper argues that the thought reform campaign of the early 1950s, meant to render universities ideological reliable, backfired in Shanghai and left a legacy of mutual suspicion between the Party and students. Yidi Wu’s paper studies college students during the Hundred Flowers and the Anti-Rightist Campaigns of 1957, and authorities’ mechanisms for and manipulations of the classification of students’ political reliability. Kyle David’s paper argues that the post-Mao Zedong leadership of the late 1970s reoriented childhood away from politics and towards the business of childhood, that is, play, study, and development into an economically productive citizens.
Our theme is official classification in Communist China. Revolutionary regimes, by definition, re... more Our theme is official classification in Communist China. Revolutionary regimes, by definition, reclassify people, things, and events to promote their own vision and division of society and, more broadly, the world order. This, in turn, requires the regimes to construct arguments, develop procedures, train classifiers, overcome resistance and resolve other contradictions, among other things. We investigate the rationales and techniques that the Chinese Communists used to classify and reclassify people and objects at critical junctures in the Mao era. In doing so, we lay out concrete challenges and contradictions that the regime confronted and impact of the classification. Our focus on classification serves as a pathway to bridge the cultural and the social history of Chinese Communism.
We address the classification of intellectuals, students, foreigners, national holidays, and publication. Eddy U’s paper offers a theoretical statement of how the intellectual went from an obscure classification of people before 1949 to highly visible persons and populations locatable virtually everywhere afterward. Yidi Wu’s paper focuses on college students in the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and investigates the classification of student political orientation. Zachary Scarlett’s paper explores the reclassification of foreign students studying in China and the recategorization of Communist holidays in the wake of the Sino-Soviet split. Lara Yang’s paper addresses the problematic communist practice of reclassifying traditional books and participating publishers and printers into socialist genres. In short, we illustrate concretely how the Chinese Communists classified society and the world in four different instances.
Beijing University students made posters asserting that “it is the right time” to act. They openl... more Beijing University students made posters asserting that “it is the right time” to act. They openly criticized the privilege of Party cadres, and started a journal called “The Square.” Most observers would think that these activities surely occurred in 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Protests. In fact, these events occurred in 1957 during the Rectification Campaign, which came between Chairman Mao’s famous speech to “let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend” and the subsequent Anti-Rightist Movement which stifled dissent. For the first time since the 1949 founding of the People’s Republic, 1957 saw student activists claim that they were carrying forward the May Fourth spirit of 1919, hold a movement of their own, and pay a huge price for doing so.
The Rectification Campaign was affected by and came partly in response to international changes. In February 1956, Soviet leader Khrushchev gave his “secret speech” on Stalin’s personality cult, which triggered a series of upheavals in the Eastern Bloc, such as the “Polish October” and the Hungarian Revolution later that year. How did Chinese leaders and university students perceive these events, and how did their reactions made an impact on domestic politics and individual lives? My paper will situate 1957’s China in the history of the Communist world, and seek to understand Chinese top leaders’ and, more importantly, students’ responses to the political crises in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
If one puts the terms “1980s” and “Chinese students” together in a sentence, most people will thi... more If one puts the terms “1980s” and “Chinese students” together in a sentence, most people will think of just one image: the massive Tiananmen Square protests that took place at the end of that decade. What is often overlooked is the series of earlier student-related events that built up to the climax in 1989. In 1980, for example, campus life was enlivened by activities associated with nationwide competitive elections for representatives to local people’s congress, made possible by a change of electoral laws. It was the first time to have nationwide direct elections at the county level that were based on universal suffrage since the Republican China established in 1912.
As a way to open up discussion of the decade’s various forms of student activism, my paper will focus on elections held on two campuses in 1980: at Beijing University, where unusually thought-provoking debates on the recent past and the prospects for the future occurred, and at Hunan Teachers College, where students came into conflict with university and provincial officials, staged a hunger strike, and even launched a petition drive to Beijing. In comparing and contrasting the two 1980 events, I am specifically interested in the issues that students cared about, the authorities’ reactions, the reasons for participation or lack thereof, and the roles of female students.
I will use two main sets of primary sources: for Hunan events, the Liang Heng Collection at the Hoover Institution, including on-site recordings and photos of marching students; for Beijing events, a collection of candidates’ speeches and election surveys published in Hong Kong. I will also conduct oral history interviews with both the protagonists of student elections and those who witnessed yet not actively participated in the elections, and whose thoughts were eclipsed by louder voices.
An co-authored chapter with Jeff Wasserstrom in an edited book Scripting Revolution, published by... more An co-authored chapter with Jeff Wasserstrom in an edited book Scripting Revolution, published by Stanford University Press in 2015
Introduction
The People’s Movement began in mid-April 1989, with gatherings of students in Beiji... more Introduction
The People’s Movement began in mid-April 1989, with gatherings of students in Beijing. They ostensibly turned out to mourn Hu Yaobang, a recently deceased Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official associated with reformist ideas, who had been General Secretary and Deng Xiaoping’s heir apparent as paramount leader until being demoted for taking a soft line on campus unrest in 1986–1987. The students used the mourning ceremonies to speak out on issues that concerned them, especially official corruption and nepotism. In later weeks, the struggle spread rapidly in geographical and social terms and increasingly became a fight for political liberalization and the right to protest. In Beijing, local students, who made Tiananmen Square their main protest site, were joined on the streets by intellectual, workers, and even sympathetic journalists and cadres, as well as by educated youths who streamed into the capital from other cities. By late April and May, very large crowds were filling Tiananmen Square, site of some of China’s most important political monuments, while smaller but still significantly sized crowds gathered at the central squares of other cities. The most dramatic events of the movement included a high-profile hunger strike by student leaders, which increased popular support for the protesters, and the creation of a “Goddess of Democracy” statue, which combined design elements from America’s Statue of Liberty with traditional Chinese features. The struggle ended in June with the government using force to put down demonstrations, after condemning the movement as an effort to create “turmoil” (a code word for Cultural Revolution-style chaos) backed by foreigners wishing to destabilize China. The most significant repression took place in Beijing, where soldiers killed many protesters and bystanders—estimates of casualties range widely, but at least several hundred deaths occurred—on the streets near Tiananmen Square late on the night of 3 June and early in the morning of 4 June 1989. Common names for the upheaval include “Tiananmen Movement,” “June 4th Movement” (the most common term in Chinese language publications is Liusi, literally “Six Four”), “Democracy Movement,” “Beijing Spring,” and “1989 Student Movement,” but “People’s Movement” has two advantages. First, it underscores the multiclass, multilocale nature of the struggles and the repression (demonstrations in scores of cities, a massacre in Chengdu as well as Beijing); and it avoids giving the impression that the sole issue was “democracy” (anger at corruption and a desire for increased personal freedoms were also important).
Panel Abstract: While the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution has generated discussion an... more Panel Abstract: While the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution has generated discussion and reflection this year, another landmark is quietly approaching its 60th anniversary: the Rectification and the Anti-Rightist Campaigns of 1957. In comparison to the intensively studied Cultural Revolution, its precursor has remained under-researched. This roundtable panel will rekindle conversations regarding the history and scholarship on this crucial turning point in the Mao era. Our roundtable addresses a couple questions. One deals with the debate regarding Mao's motivation of launching the Anti-Rightist Campaign: Did he react from genuine surprise, or had he set a trap and plotted from the beginning to lure snakes? We hope to reach a consensus with the most recent scholarship. The other concerns various treatments of different social groups in the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and explores reasons for the differences. This question puts elite politics aside and pursues local variations of the campaign.
I'm participating in an individual paper panel, and presenting my chapter on student responses to... more I'm participating in an individual paper panel, and presenting my chapter on student responses to Khrushchev's secret speech and the Hungarian Revolution.
Our panel focuses on the intersection of Chinese education and politics across the twentieth cent... more Our panel focuses on the intersection of Chinese education and politics across the twentieth century. Despite changing political leadership, all regimes attempted to instill their own ideologies in students through textbooks, propaganda and political campaigns. The process of ideological inscription, however, was in no way smooth, as students were not content to be passive tools in the hands of missionaries, nationalists, revolutionaries, or bureaucrats. We therefore examine both the attempts of authorities to shape education according to their own political agendas and how students received, contested, and resisted these orders from above.
Our papers address politicized education in sequential periods of twentieth century China. Jennifer Bond’s paper explores how mission school girls in 1920-40’s Zhejiang skillfully combined nationalism, Christianity and feminism to defend their school from attack and transcend the conservative gender boundaries prescribed by both the government and Christian educators. Steven Pieragastini’s paper argues that the thought reform campaign of the early 1950s, meant to render universities ideological reliable, backfired in Shanghai and left a legacy of mutual suspicion between the Party and students. Yidi Wu’s paper studies college students during the Hundred Flowers and the Anti-Rightist Campaigns of 1957, and authorities’ mechanisms for and manipulations of the classification of students’ political reliability. Kyle David’s paper argues that the post-Mao Zedong leadership of the late 1970s reoriented childhood away from politics and towards the business of childhood, that is, play, study, and development into an economically productive citizens.
Our theme is official classification in Communist China. Revolutionary regimes, by definition, re... more Our theme is official classification in Communist China. Revolutionary regimes, by definition, reclassify people, things, and events to promote their own vision and division of society and, more broadly, the world order. This, in turn, requires the regimes to construct arguments, develop procedures, train classifiers, overcome resistance and resolve other contradictions, among other things. We investigate the rationales and techniques that the Chinese Communists used to classify and reclassify people and objects at critical junctures in the Mao era. In doing so, we lay out concrete challenges and contradictions that the regime confronted and impact of the classification. Our focus on classification serves as a pathway to bridge the cultural and the social history of Chinese Communism.
We address the classification of intellectuals, students, foreigners, national holidays, and publication. Eddy U’s paper offers a theoretical statement of how the intellectual went from an obscure classification of people before 1949 to highly visible persons and populations locatable virtually everywhere afterward. Yidi Wu’s paper focuses on college students in the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and investigates the classification of student political orientation. Zachary Scarlett’s paper explores the reclassification of foreign students studying in China and the recategorization of Communist holidays in the wake of the Sino-Soviet split. Lara Yang’s paper addresses the problematic communist practice of reclassifying traditional books and participating publishers and printers into socialist genres. In short, we illustrate concretely how the Chinese Communists classified society and the world in four different instances.
Beijing University students made posters asserting that “it is the right time” to act. They openl... more Beijing University students made posters asserting that “it is the right time” to act. They openly criticized the privilege of Party cadres, and started a journal called “The Square.” Most observers would think that these activities surely occurred in 1989, the year of the Tiananmen Protests. In fact, these events occurred in 1957 during the Rectification Campaign, which came between Chairman Mao’s famous speech to “let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend” and the subsequent Anti-Rightist Movement which stifled dissent. For the first time since the 1949 founding of the People’s Republic, 1957 saw student activists claim that they were carrying forward the May Fourth spirit of 1919, hold a movement of their own, and pay a huge price for doing so.
The Rectification Campaign was affected by and came partly in response to international changes. In February 1956, Soviet leader Khrushchev gave his “secret speech” on Stalin’s personality cult, which triggered a series of upheavals in the Eastern Bloc, such as the “Polish October” and the Hungarian Revolution later that year. How did Chinese leaders and university students perceive these events, and how did their reactions made an impact on domestic politics and individual lives? My paper will situate 1957’s China in the history of the Communist world, and seek to understand Chinese top leaders’ and, more importantly, students’ responses to the political crises in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
If one puts the terms “1980s” and “Chinese students” together in a sentence, most people will thi... more If one puts the terms “1980s” and “Chinese students” together in a sentence, most people will think of just one image: the massive Tiananmen Square protests that took place at the end of that decade. What is often overlooked is the series of earlier student-related events that built up to the climax in 1989. In 1980, for example, campus life was enlivened by activities associated with nationwide competitive elections for representatives to local people’s congress, made possible by a change of electoral laws. It was the first time to have nationwide direct elections at the county level that were based on universal suffrage since the Republican China established in 1912.
As a way to open up discussion of the decade’s various forms of student activism, my paper will focus on elections held on two campuses in 1980: at Beijing University, where unusually thought-provoking debates on the recent past and the prospects for the future occurred, and at Hunan Teachers College, where students came into conflict with university and provincial officials, staged a hunger strike, and even launched a petition drive to Beijing. In comparing and contrasting the two 1980 events, I am specifically interested in the issues that students cared about, the authorities’ reactions, the reasons for participation or lack thereof, and the roles of female students.
I will use two main sets of primary sources: for Hunan events, the Liang Heng Collection at the Hoover Institution, including on-site recordings and photos of marching students; for Beijing events, a collection of candidates’ speeches and election surveys published in Hong Kong. I will also conduct oral history interviews with both the protagonists of student elections and those who witnessed yet not actively participated in the elections, and whose thoughts were eclipsed by louder voices.
An co-authored chapter with Jeff Wasserstrom in an edited book Scripting Revolution, published by... more An co-authored chapter with Jeff Wasserstrom in an edited book Scripting Revolution, published by Stanford University Press in 2015
Introduction
The People’s Movement began in mid-April 1989, with gatherings of students in Beiji... more Introduction
The People’s Movement began in mid-April 1989, with gatherings of students in Beijing. They ostensibly turned out to mourn Hu Yaobang, a recently deceased Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official associated with reformist ideas, who had been General Secretary and Deng Xiaoping’s heir apparent as paramount leader until being demoted for taking a soft line on campus unrest in 1986–1987. The students used the mourning ceremonies to speak out on issues that concerned them, especially official corruption and nepotism. In later weeks, the struggle spread rapidly in geographical and social terms and increasingly became a fight for political liberalization and the right to protest. In Beijing, local students, who made Tiananmen Square their main protest site, were joined on the streets by intellectual, workers, and even sympathetic journalists and cadres, as well as by educated youths who streamed into the capital from other cities. By late April and May, very large crowds were filling Tiananmen Square, site of some of China’s most important political monuments, while smaller but still significantly sized crowds gathered at the central squares of other cities. The most dramatic events of the movement included a high-profile hunger strike by student leaders, which increased popular support for the protesters, and the creation of a “Goddess of Democracy” statue, which combined design elements from America’s Statue of Liberty with traditional Chinese features. The struggle ended in June with the government using force to put down demonstrations, after condemning the movement as an effort to create “turmoil” (a code word for Cultural Revolution-style chaos) backed by foreigners wishing to destabilize China. The most significant repression took place in Beijing, where soldiers killed many protesters and bystanders—estimates of casualties range widely, but at least several hundred deaths occurred—on the streets near Tiananmen Square late on the night of 3 June and early in the morning of 4 June 1989. Common names for the upheaval include “Tiananmen Movement,” “June 4th Movement” (the most common term in Chinese language publications is Liusi, literally “Six Four”), “Democracy Movement,” “Beijing Spring,” and “1989 Student Movement,” but “People’s Movement” has two advantages. First, it underscores the multiclass, multilocale nature of the struggles and the repression (demonstrations in scores of cities, a massacre in Chengdu as well as Beijing); and it avoids giving the impression that the sole issue was “democracy” (anger at corruption and a desire for increased personal freedoms were also important).
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Our papers address politicized education in sequential periods of twentieth century China. Jennifer Bond’s paper explores how mission school girls in 1920-40’s Zhejiang skillfully combined nationalism, Christianity and feminism to defend their school from attack and transcend the conservative gender boundaries prescribed by both the government and Christian educators. Steven Pieragastini’s paper argues that the thought reform campaign of the early 1950s, meant to render universities ideological reliable, backfired in Shanghai and left a legacy of mutual suspicion between the Party and students. Yidi Wu’s paper studies college students during the Hundred Flowers and the Anti-Rightist Campaigns of 1957, and authorities’ mechanisms for and manipulations of the classification of students’ political reliability. Kyle David’s paper argues that the post-Mao Zedong leadership of the late 1970s reoriented childhood away from politics and towards the business of childhood, that is, play, study, and development into an economically productive citizens.
We address the classification of intellectuals, students, foreigners, national holidays, and publication. Eddy U’s paper offers a theoretical statement of how the intellectual went from an obscure classification of people before 1949 to highly visible persons and populations locatable virtually everywhere afterward. Yidi Wu’s paper focuses on college students in the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and investigates the classification of student political orientation. Zachary Scarlett’s paper explores the reclassification of foreign students studying in China and the recategorization of Communist holidays in the wake of the Sino-Soviet split. Lara Yang’s paper addresses the problematic communist practice of reclassifying traditional books and participating publishers and printers into socialist genres. In short, we illustrate concretely how the Chinese Communists classified society and the world in four different instances.
The Rectification Campaign was affected by and came partly in response to international changes. In February 1956, Soviet leader Khrushchev gave his “secret speech” on Stalin’s personality cult, which triggered a series of upheavals in the Eastern Bloc, such as the “Polish October” and the Hungarian Revolution later that year. How did Chinese leaders and university students perceive these events, and how did their reactions made an impact on domestic politics and individual lives? My paper will situate 1957’s China in the history of the Communist world, and seek to understand Chinese top leaders’ and, more importantly, students’ responses to the political crises in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
As a way to open up discussion of the decade’s various forms of student activism, my paper will focus on elections held on two campuses in 1980: at Beijing University, where unusually thought-provoking debates on the recent past and the prospects for the future occurred, and at Hunan Teachers College, where students came into conflict with university and provincial officials, staged a hunger strike, and even launched a petition drive to Beijing. In comparing and contrasting the two 1980 events, I am specifically interested in the issues that students cared about, the authorities’ reactions, the reasons for participation or lack thereof, and the roles of female students.
I will use two main sets of primary sources: for Hunan events, the Liang Heng Collection at the Hoover Institution, including on-site recordings and photos of marching students; for Beijing events, a collection of candidates’ speeches and election surveys published in Hong Kong. I will also conduct oral history interviews with both the protagonists of student elections and those who witnessed yet not actively participated in the elections, and whose thoughts were eclipsed by louder voices.
The People’s Movement began in mid-April 1989, with gatherings of students in Beijing. They ostensibly turned out to mourn Hu Yaobang, a recently deceased Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official associated with reformist ideas, who had been General Secretary and Deng Xiaoping’s heir apparent as paramount leader until being demoted for taking a soft line on campus unrest in 1986–1987. The students used the mourning ceremonies to speak out on issues that concerned them, especially official corruption and nepotism. In later weeks, the struggle spread rapidly in geographical and social terms and increasingly became a fight for political liberalization and the right to protest. In Beijing, local students, who made Tiananmen Square their main protest site, were joined on the streets by intellectual, workers, and even sympathetic journalists and cadres, as well as by educated youths who streamed into the capital from other cities. By late April and May, very large crowds were filling Tiananmen Square, site of some of China’s most important political monuments, while smaller but still significantly sized crowds gathered at the central squares of other cities. The most dramatic events of the movement included a high-profile hunger strike by student leaders, which increased popular support for the protesters, and the creation of a “Goddess of Democracy” statue, which combined design elements from America’s Statue of Liberty with traditional Chinese features. The struggle ended in June with the government using force to put down demonstrations, after condemning the movement as an effort to create “turmoil” (a code word for Cultural Revolution-style chaos) backed by foreigners wishing to destabilize China. The most significant repression took place in Beijing, where soldiers killed many protesters and bystanders—estimates of casualties range widely, but at least several hundred deaths occurred—on the streets near Tiananmen Square late on the night of 3 June and early in the morning of 4 June 1989. Common names for the upheaval include “Tiananmen Movement,” “June 4th Movement” (the most common term in Chinese language publications is Liusi, literally “Six Four”), “Democracy Movement,” “Beijing Spring,” and “1989 Student Movement,” but “People’s Movement” has two advantages. First, it underscores the multiclass, multilocale nature of the struggles and the repression (demonstrations in scores of cities, a massacre in Chengdu as well as Beijing); and it avoids giving the impression that the sole issue was “democracy” (anger at corruption and a desire for increased personal freedoms were also important).
See more at http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199920082/obo-9780199920082-0097.xml
Our papers address politicized education in sequential periods of twentieth century China. Jennifer Bond’s paper explores how mission school girls in 1920-40’s Zhejiang skillfully combined nationalism, Christianity and feminism to defend their school from attack and transcend the conservative gender boundaries prescribed by both the government and Christian educators. Steven Pieragastini’s paper argues that the thought reform campaign of the early 1950s, meant to render universities ideological reliable, backfired in Shanghai and left a legacy of mutual suspicion between the Party and students. Yidi Wu’s paper studies college students during the Hundred Flowers and the Anti-Rightist Campaigns of 1957, and authorities’ mechanisms for and manipulations of the classification of students’ political reliability. Kyle David’s paper argues that the post-Mao Zedong leadership of the late 1970s reoriented childhood away from politics and towards the business of childhood, that is, play, study, and development into an economically productive citizens.
We address the classification of intellectuals, students, foreigners, national holidays, and publication. Eddy U’s paper offers a theoretical statement of how the intellectual went from an obscure classification of people before 1949 to highly visible persons and populations locatable virtually everywhere afterward. Yidi Wu’s paper focuses on college students in the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and investigates the classification of student political orientation. Zachary Scarlett’s paper explores the reclassification of foreign students studying in China and the recategorization of Communist holidays in the wake of the Sino-Soviet split. Lara Yang’s paper addresses the problematic communist practice of reclassifying traditional books and participating publishers and printers into socialist genres. In short, we illustrate concretely how the Chinese Communists classified society and the world in four different instances.
The Rectification Campaign was affected by and came partly in response to international changes. In February 1956, Soviet leader Khrushchev gave his “secret speech” on Stalin’s personality cult, which triggered a series of upheavals in the Eastern Bloc, such as the “Polish October” and the Hungarian Revolution later that year. How did Chinese leaders and university students perceive these events, and how did their reactions made an impact on domestic politics and individual lives? My paper will situate 1957’s China in the history of the Communist world, and seek to understand Chinese top leaders’ and, more importantly, students’ responses to the political crises in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
As a way to open up discussion of the decade’s various forms of student activism, my paper will focus on elections held on two campuses in 1980: at Beijing University, where unusually thought-provoking debates on the recent past and the prospects for the future occurred, and at Hunan Teachers College, where students came into conflict with university and provincial officials, staged a hunger strike, and even launched a petition drive to Beijing. In comparing and contrasting the two 1980 events, I am specifically interested in the issues that students cared about, the authorities’ reactions, the reasons for participation or lack thereof, and the roles of female students.
I will use two main sets of primary sources: for Hunan events, the Liang Heng Collection at the Hoover Institution, including on-site recordings and photos of marching students; for Beijing events, a collection of candidates’ speeches and election surveys published in Hong Kong. I will also conduct oral history interviews with both the protagonists of student elections and those who witnessed yet not actively participated in the elections, and whose thoughts were eclipsed by louder voices.
The People’s Movement began in mid-April 1989, with gatherings of students in Beijing. They ostensibly turned out to mourn Hu Yaobang, a recently deceased Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official associated with reformist ideas, who had been General Secretary and Deng Xiaoping’s heir apparent as paramount leader until being demoted for taking a soft line on campus unrest in 1986–1987. The students used the mourning ceremonies to speak out on issues that concerned them, especially official corruption and nepotism. In later weeks, the struggle spread rapidly in geographical and social terms and increasingly became a fight for political liberalization and the right to protest. In Beijing, local students, who made Tiananmen Square their main protest site, were joined on the streets by intellectual, workers, and even sympathetic journalists and cadres, as well as by educated youths who streamed into the capital from other cities. By late April and May, very large crowds were filling Tiananmen Square, site of some of China’s most important political monuments, while smaller but still significantly sized crowds gathered at the central squares of other cities. The most dramatic events of the movement included a high-profile hunger strike by student leaders, which increased popular support for the protesters, and the creation of a “Goddess of Democracy” statue, which combined design elements from America’s Statue of Liberty with traditional Chinese features. The struggle ended in June with the government using force to put down demonstrations, after condemning the movement as an effort to create “turmoil” (a code word for Cultural Revolution-style chaos) backed by foreigners wishing to destabilize China. The most significant repression took place in Beijing, where soldiers killed many protesters and bystanders—estimates of casualties range widely, but at least several hundred deaths occurred—on the streets near Tiananmen Square late on the night of 3 June and early in the morning of 4 June 1989. Common names for the upheaval include “Tiananmen Movement,” “June 4th Movement” (the most common term in Chinese language publications is Liusi, literally “Six Four”), “Democracy Movement,” “Beijing Spring,” and “1989 Student Movement,” but “People’s Movement” has two advantages. First, it underscores the multiclass, multilocale nature of the struggles and the repression (demonstrations in scores of cities, a massacre in Chengdu as well as Beijing); and it avoids giving the impression that the sole issue was “democracy” (anger at corruption and a desire for increased personal freedoms were also important).
See more at http://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/view/document/obo-9780199920082/obo-9780199920082-0097.xml