Student Protest in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Winter, 1993 by Joseph W. Esherick

From the May 4th Movement of 1919 to the "Democracy Movement" of 1989, student protests have punctuated the history of modem China. At every stage of the national struggle, students have been among the first to take to the streets: against Great Power victimization of China at the Versailles conference, against imperialist suppression of the workers' movement in the 1920s, against Japanese aggression (and Guomindang weakness before it) in the 1930s, and against civil war and American support for the collapsing Nationalist regime in the 1940s. In this book, Jeffrey Wasserstrom discusses a half-century of student protest in China's largest city, Shanghai, and analyzes their tactics and organization, language and ritual in compelling detail. In an insightful Epilogue, he links this protest tradition to the student demonstrations of the 1980s.

In the 1930s, 60% of Chinese undergraduates were concentrated in the two cities of Beijing and Shanghai. Although some of the most famous student movements--May 4 (1919), December 9 (1935), and the 1989 protests--began in Beijing, Shanghai was an equally important center. In 1919 and 1989, Shanghai students quickly followed their Beijing comrades lead; and in such important cases as the May 30th Movement (1925) or the anti-civil war protests of the 1940s Shanghai often took a leading role. These facts, plus the superior documentation of the Shanghai protests in the Chinese and foreign press, diplomatic and police files, and published memoirs makes that city an ideal focus for this sort of detailed study of the evolving repertoire of student collective action.

Much of this book is devoted to a chronologically organized descriptive analysis of Shanghai student protests. The May 4th Movement established the basic repertoire: student protest leagues; oath-taking rituals; disciplined demonstrations with slogans, flags and school banners; student strikes with calls for simultaneous industrial and commercial strikes; songs and music; street theater and speech-making; boycotts and a gradual encroachment on governmental functions as protest monitors sought to enforce their demands. In the May 30th Movement, we see a much more deliberate attempt (with Communist Party inspiration) to involve the working classes. The 1930s witnessed the tactical innovation of commandeering trains to send petition groups to the national capital. But the 1930s and especially the 1940s also saw the polarization of the student movement, as Communists and other dissidents competed with loyalist supporters of the Nationalist Party (Guomindang) for student and popular support.

The empirical detail of this study is enough to give it lasting value as a rich read and ready reference on Shanghai students. But Wasserstrom also makes a number of important analytical points. He is clearly less interested in why students protested than in how they protested. His concern is "the process by which students were able to translate collective anger into effective collective action" (9). Recognizing that many cultures have witnessed significant student unrest, Wasserstrom seeks to explain the extraordinary power of student protest in China's modern politics. He sees that behind the power of Chinese student protest was "their efficacy as symbolic performances that questioned, subverted, and ultimately undermined official rituals and spectacles" (5). The question thus becomes, what made the "symbolic performances" of Chinese students so remarkably efficacious.

Here Wasserstrom, making impressive use of the comparative literature, suggests a number of important factors. Students in twentieth-century China, as in most developing countries, were a small and socially cohesive group, which enjoyed "special status ... as a presumptive elite" (280). This status, shared with students in Latin America, Thailand and Korea, was enhanced in China by a tradition which linked higher education to political responsibility and power. In China, furthermore, students were able to capitalize upon pre-existing networks and associations to organize their protest movements, while in the West such "socializing" associations as fraternities or sports teams have tended to oppose (or remain detached from) radical student activity (127-131).

Wasserstrom further notes that "the symbolism of popular demonstrations is particularly threatening in one-party states" (292). For the leaders of Republican China as for the leaders of China and Eastern Europe in 1989, the lack of electoral legitimacy made them extraordinarily dependent on public rituals to validate their claim to popularity and institutionally transmitted revolutionary charisma. As a consequence, such states are unusually vulnerable to the type of symbolic assault that student demonstrations represent.

Wasserstrom writes with a depth and assurance rare in books that derive from Ph.D. dissertations. The importance of his study may be measured in part by the theoretical questions left unsettled by this work. To me, one of the most important issues concerns the origins of the modern Chinese protest ritual, and its relation to political rituals of imperial China. On this topic, Wasserstrom's analysis is occasionally disappointing. Thus he links a musical interlude in the repertoire of the May 4th era to "the Chinese protest tradition," but closer scrutiny reveals that this "tradition" is only documented back to 1903 (79). We need to go a good deal further back than this. As symbolic performances, Chinese student protests clearly gained some of their power from a resonance with preexisting aspects of Chinese political culture. Our task now is to understand how the politically efficacious protest rituals that Wasserstrom so ably describes evolve from, or replace, or ridicule and seek to delegitimize the symbolic performances of political ritual in late imperial China.