A Century Of Student Movements In China

This is a history of student protests in Shanghai from the turn of the century to 1949, showing how these students experienced and help shape the course of the Chinese Revolution.

In this book the authors offer their unique perspectives on the important roles Chinese students and intellectuals played in the shaping of the twentieth-century China. Their answers to these pivotal questions explore new nationalistic spirit, modern world-views, and willingness of self-sacrifice, which had attributed to the spontaneous actions of the students as a “New Culture” emerged during the May Fourth Movement. These articles show how China nurtured these spontaneous student movements, even though the Nationalist Party in the Republic of China and the Communist Party in the People’s Republic had exerted tight control over schools. Both governments established organizations as well as operations among students that effectively turned some of the student movements into a political instrument by the parties for their own agenda.

The book looks through five generations of Chinese students since the May Fourth Movement in 1919, explains how their ideas, actions, and impact ran like a thread through many governments and institutions that have shaped modern China, and indicates where China came from and what the country became.

Since World War II, students in East and Southeast Asia have led protest movements that toppled authoritarian regimes in countries such as Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand. Elsewhere in the region, student protests have shaken regimes until they were brutally suppressed--most famously in China's Tiananmen Square and in Burma. But despite their significance, these movements have received only a fraction of the notice that has been given to American and European student protests of the 1960s and 1970s. The first book in decades to redress this neglect, Student Activism in Asia tells the story of student protest movements across Asia. Taking an interdisciplinary, comparative approach, the contributors examine ten countries, focusing on those where student protests have been particularly fierce and consequential: China, Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, Burma, Malaysia, Thailand, and the Philippines. They explore similarities and differences among student movements in these countries, paying special attention to the influence of four factors: higher education systems, students' collective identities, students' relationships with ruling regimes, and transnational flows of activist ideas and inspirations. The authors include leading specialists on student activism in each of the countries investigated. Together, these experts provide a rich picture of an important tradition of political protest that has ebbed and flowed but has left indelible marks on Asia's sociopolitical landscape. Contributors: Patricio N. Abinales, U of Hawaii, Manoa; Prajak Kongkirati, Thammasat U, Thailand; Win Min, Vahu Development Institute; Stephan Ortmann, City U of Hong Kong; Mi Park, Dalhousie U, Canada; Patricia G. Steinhoff, U of Hawaii, Manoa; Mark R. Thompson, City U of Hong Kong; Teresa Wright, California State U, Long Beach.

"In the critical decade between the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, perhaps as many as 10,000 Chinese students converged on Tokyo in what was the first large study-abroad movement anywhere in the world." "Following China's defeat by Japan in 1895, sending young Chinese to Japan for schooling seemed wise policy to leaders in both countries. To reform-minded pragmatists at the helm of Ch'ing government, study in Japan meant access to modern ideas and technology that would strengthen the state and their own power. To Japan's leaders, training thousands of young Chinese fit their objective of creating a strong China under Japanese tutelage; together, the two countries could form an Asian bulwark against the encroachments of the West. But this blueprint for study abroad failed to consider what the students' own goals might be for a modernizing China." "For the Chinese students, exposure to an economically stronger, intellectually more open Japan inspired visions of a new China, free of Ch'ing mismanagement, more broadly representative politically, and capable of holding back imperialism in any form, Western or Japanese. Increasingly alienated from the Ch'ing state, Japan-educated activists boldly proclaimed their anti-authoritarian views and were a key force in the rising tide of dissidence propelling China to revolution in 1911." "Among the topics the author considers are the emergence of official and popular support for study in Japan, the socio-economic background of the students, their psychological interaction with the Japanese, case studies of student protest movements, and the nature of students' intellectual and political concerns. In developing a new political outlook, the students grappled with many of the issues confronting China nearly a century later: how far to open the door to Western influence, how to relate to an economically strong Japan, how much political reform should accompany technological and economic change, and, above all, how to become modern and remain distinctively Chinese."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The mass protests that erupted in China during the spring of 1989 were not confined to Beijing and Shanghai. Cities and towns across the great breadth of China were engulfed by demonstrations, which differed regionally in content and tone: the complaints and protest actions in prosperous Fuijan Province on the south China coast were somewhat different from those in Manchuria or inland Xi'an or the country towns of Hunan. The variety of the reactions is a barometer of the political and economic climate in contemporary China. In this book, Western China specialists who were on the spot that spring describe and analyze the upsurges of protest that erupted around them.

Within a framework of analysis and background by the four editors, this book presents a view from the grassroots of the 1989 student and mass movement in China and its tragic consequences. Here are the core eyewitness and participant accounts expressed through wall posters, students speeches, movement declarations, handbills, and other documents. In their introductions to the material, the editors address the political economy of the democracy movement, the evolving concept of democracy during the movement, the movement's contribution to China becoming a civil society, and the changing view of the Chinese Communist Party by students, intellectuals, workers and others, as the crisis unfolded.

A comprehensive collection on twentieth-century educational practices in China