Chinese Protest Research Articles

Religious Liberalism, International Politics, and Diasporic Realities: The Chinese Students Christian Association of North America, 1909-1951

Between 1911 and 1949, when Chinese Nationalists on the mainland and in the Diaspora sought to modernize their nation, many Chinese Protestants undertook a quest to make their religion socially and po litically relevant for an emerging New China. Attributing European and American economic and military dominance and apparent cul tural superiority to the leavening influence of Christianity, they yearned to see Protestantism play just as significant a role in China's reawakening and reconstruction.2 Chinese Protestants in the United States were especially active in their efforts to build a new China, but most could do little more than contribute financial support for the state and provide some of the missionaries' material needs.3 The ma

Keeping Democracy Safe from the Masses: Intellectuals and Elitism in the Chinese Protest Movement

The decade of popular Chinese protest that close with the Beijing massacre in 1989 never culminated in a movement devoted to creating democratic institutions. The A. uses the Chinese case to examine how elite-mass conflict within the opposition can keep a democracy movement from developing. It compares the Chinese case with instance of democratization in eastern Europe and Latin America in order to identify the conditions that make the transition from broad-based protest to a democracy movement possible.

Book Reviews : Frank PIEKE, The Ordinary and the Extraordinary: An Anthropological Study of Chinese Refomi and Political Protest, Leiden, 1992. Ph.D. Thesis, University of California, Berkeley, Department of Anthropology, 1992. 506 pp

Book Reviews : Frank PIEKE, The Ordinary and the Extraordinary: An Anthropological Study of Chinese Refomi and Political Protest, Leiden, 1992. Ph.D. Thesis, University of California, Berkeley, Department of Anthropology, 1992. 506 pp

The Chinese Protests of 1989: The Issue of Corruption

The correlation between rapid socioeconomic change and increased corruption in a modernizing society has been examined by Samuel Huntington and James Scott, 1 and the disruptive and delegitimizing potential of corruption has also been noted by scholars. But corruption has yet to be studied as a key factor destructive of the Chinese political order in general and catalytic to the protests of 1989 in particular. To ignore this issue is to fail to grasp a crucial motivating and mobilizing force of the 1989 movement as a popular rebellion. The frequent neglect of the corruption issue, I suggest, is due partly to an uncritical acceptance of some Chinese reformers' view that corruption bashing is reform bashing, and partly to a related insensitivity to the complaints prevalent among various Chinese circles during the past few years. Thus, for all the attention given to the events of 1989, we have yet to account for the unprecedented size and spontaneity of the involvement in Beijing and the support outside. Changing political outlooks of intellectuals and students cannot account for the support from those who were politically conservative. Particularistic concerns of workers are insufficient to explain the rare alliance between workers and students. Cumulative effects of the weakening of political control provide few clues to explain why many members of the remaining control systems were supportive of the protests. Lastly, the fractionating of party unity during the crisis explains the sustained length of the demonstrations, but not their scope. The

The Chinese Protests of 1989: The Issue of Corruption

The Chinese Protests of 1989: The Issue of Corruption

Aspects of Beijing's Crisis Management: The Tiananmen Square Demonstration

The Chinese student protest in April-June 1989 at Tiananmen Square in Beijing and elsewhere in China constituted a domestic crisis situation.1 The immediate effects and the Chinese leaders' perception of the protest clearly meet four essential elements of a crisis: a change in the domestic political environment, a threat to important national goals as defined by political leaders, the probability of violence being significantly increased, and leaders' perceived short time for response.2 The demonstration in April-June 1989 thus affords a good opportunity to study Chinese leaders' crisis management. Though minutes of highlevel meetings in Beijing during the crisis are not available, major phases of leaders' reactions to the demonstration are known. For example, we have reliable reports on the initial uncertainty of leaders as to the nature of the demonstration, the crucial role of the Beijing Communist Party Committee and government in starting the crisis decision-making process at the party center, first definition by leaders on the demonstration, the controversy over this definition, and the different stands of various leaders, especially that of Zhao Ziyang, toward the demonstration. These are sufficient for us to present a preliminary analysis of Beijing's crisis management.

National Communism in Eastern Europe since the 22nd Congress

It is more than two years since the historic 22nd Congress of the Communist party of the Soviet Union. In contrast to the dramatic repercussions in Eastern Europe of the 20th Congress five years earlier, the impact of the 1961 meeting was at first much less striking. The renewed assault on Stalin, this time open and unrestrained, did not generate a comparable intellectual ferment or unleash political forces capable of producing a crisis of the dimensions of 1956. No doubt Khrushchev and the other Eastern European leaders were anxious to avoid the disastrous consequences of that year, when the stability, and indeed the very existence, of communism hung in the balance, at least in Hungary and Poland. This time, certainly, their efforts carefully to control the direction and tempo of change were more successful, and the modest thaw did not produce a flood. None the less, there were serious consequences, often slow in manifesting themselves and differing substantially in each country, but having a long-run potential for modifying profoundly the shape and content of communism in Eastern Europe.An entirely unforeseen result of 1956 had been the emergence of China as an influential force in world communism, challenging the hitherto predominant position of the Soviet Union. Her extraordinary intervention in the affairs of Eastern Europe during and after the Hungarian revolt had greatly contributed to the stabilizing of the situation, but had marked the emergence of a balance of power within the communist system and the beginning of a serious conflict of policy and doctrine between the two great communist states. Although the full effect of this Chinese challenge was at first somewhat obscured from view, it became increasingly clear that it would have an even more profound impact than earlier defiance by smaller states such as Yugoslavia, Poland, and Hungary. At the 22nd Congress, only the tip of the iceberg of Sino-Soviet differences protruded in the form of the Chinese protest at Khrushchev's public denunciation of Albania. The full measure of the divergence was revealed in the subsequent two years, reaching a climax in the confrontation of mid-1963.

Chinese Protests Against American Loan to South Manchuria Railway

Chinese Protests Against American Loan to South Manchuria Railway