Two Decades After the Fall: Patterns of Chinese Protest–1919,1989, 2009

Two Decades After the Fall: J. Wasserstrom

CHINA HAS a long, rich tradition—or, rather, multiple overlapping traditions—of dissent. For centuries prior to the 1949 Revolution, which culminated in the founding of the People’s Republic of China, aggrieved villagers and urbanites employed an array of tactics, ranging from rioting over tax rates to going to the capital with petitions detailing the failings of local officials. This varied repertoire continually evolved, and whenever new complaints arose or novel technologies of communication became available, innovations were made and familiar forms were updated. Since the revolution, this has continued to be true: movements of dissent have linked themselves to both the past and utilized new expressions of protest.

Two famous pre-1949 and post-1949 examples are the great student-led struggles that swept through the country during the May 4 Movement of 1919 and the Tiananmen Uprising of 1989. They were both agitations that began with marches by educated youths but reached their peaks with much bigger demonstrations in which non-student participants far outnumbered those with ties to campuses.

In the May 4 Movement, the student activists were angry about oppression and corruption at home as well as about impingements on Chinese sovereignty from abroad. They stepped into a long-established role of dissent by citing historical precedents that stretched back as far as the Song Dynasty (960-1279), but they also circulated their manifestos via a new medium: the telegraph.

Similarly, the students of 1989, again angered by corruption, framed their protests as an effort to save the nation and nodded to the past, including calling their struggle the “New May 4 Movement.” But they also employed various tactics that had not been used in 1919. Perhaps the most important one was the group hunger strike, a dramatic action that put young bodies on the line and that had no parallels with the original May 4 movement.

This strategy proved very effective in winning widespread support for the students, partly because corruption and lavish government banquets had become tightly linked in the minds of many Chinese. In the wake of the early May 1989 hunger strikes, the size of crowds swelled both in Beijing (the city where the struggle began) and in scores of other urban centers (including Shanghai, where the biggest demonstrations of an earlier wave of protests had taken place in 1986). By mid-May, there were, at times, a million people marching through the streets of Beijing, only a small percentage of them educated youths. (This was one reason why many more workers than students were slain in the June 4 Massacre, something too often forgotten in the West when the tragedy is commemorated.)

SO WHAT sets the current era of dissent apart from those of 1919 and 1989? Certainly, we still see plenty of the interplay between old and new. The promulgation by intellectuals last December of a daring document of dissent, “Charter 08,” echoed themes from earlier Chinese struggles (and also from the famous Czech document of dissent Charter 77), but was circulated via the novel technology of the Internet. The current era of dissent, like those of 1919 and 1989, also does not lack discontented people. There are plenty of them, and protests take place every week in one or another part of China.

But what does set 2009 apart from both 1919 and 1989 are two things. The first is the relative quiescence of university students. They are not nearly as apathetic as they are sometimes portrayed in the West, but they are not agitating loudly for change and trying to get members of other classes to follow them onto the streets as their counterparts did during the May 4 and Tiananmen protests.

The second difference is probably an even more important one to keep in mind. In 2009, there is no unifying thread that connects the actions of different disgruntled groups. People from various walks of life don’t feel—as many did in 1919 and in 1989—that they’re all in the same boat. Censorship and crackdowns, especially on the most organized forms of protest, help keep the landscape of dissent fragmented. But this is also a product of the economic boom, which has made and continues to make Chinese society ever more socially, culturally, and geographically differentiated.

Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom is a professor of history at the University of California-Irvine, the editor of the Journal of Asian Studies, and the author, most recently, of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. A shorter version of this commentary appeared in the New York Times on June 2, 2009, as part of an online forum devoted to “China’s New Rebels,” which was part of the “Room for Debate” series.