Craig Calhoun
PROTEST IN BEIJING: THE CONDITIONS
AND IMPORTANCE OF THE CHINESE
STUDENT MOVEMENT OF 1989
Echoes of the past figured prominently in the Chinese student
movement of 1989. Students began to take to the streets in growing num–
bers after the death ofHu Yaobang, the reform-oriented Communist Party
General Secretary who had lost his post during the repression of the 1986-
87 student protest. Dazibao (large-character posters) mounted on the walls of
Beijing University's "triangle area" listed key dates from the May 4th
movement of 1919, China's first major student protest movement. The
seventieth anniversary of May 4th itself was the occasion of the second re–
ally large march of 1989. This year was also the tenth anniversary of the
"democracy wall" movement which had brought the first massive voice for
democratization in post-Mao China. And the anniversaries went on and on.
On May 3d, I sat with a handful of graduate students on the Beijing
University campus musing on the fact that their movement, which already
was beginning to make them feel part of a historical struggle, came in the
year of the fortieth anniversary of the culmination of China's Communist
Revolution in the creation of the People's Republic, the two hundredth an–
niversary of the adoption of the Constitution of the United States, and per–
haps most potently ofall, the bicentennial of the French Revolution.
The very scene of this conversation said something about the back–
ground to the protest. Of all Chinese universities, Beijing University is per–
haps the one which feels most familiar to an American. Its campus was
originally that of Harvard's Beijing outreach effort, and it is laid out with
quadrangles, spacious lawns, rolling hills, and even a pretty lake. No Ameri–
can arriving there would need more than a moment to realize that he was on
a university campus. And in 1989 it looked more familiar than ever. Snazzy
ten-speed bicycles were cropping up among the more traditional utilitarian
Chinese designs. Students wore polo shirts with brand name logos splashed
across their chests. Men and women walked hand in hand. One could buy
Coke as well as the local orange sodas. A good number of students had ear–
phones on their heads and "Walkman" stereos on their belts. Oddly, the first
thing that struck me as unfamiliar was the very high percentage of students
