Abstract
In 2011, while writing on the category of ‘youth’ in twentieth-century China, I found a measure of inspiration in media representations of the Arab Spring.1 Western media presented the ousting of Mubarak and similar dictators as the work of technologically inclined young kids (they tweet! they are on Facebook!) rather than as the result of a complicated mixture of Islamist organizations, economic inequality, and political dispossession. Understood in such terms these events appeared much less threatening to Western ears. After all, if these were democratic, secular and West-friendly young people -analysts and editorialists seemed to imply — then they could and should be supported without ambiguity. ‘Americans need feel no ambiguity’ was precisely what the New York Times editorial board had told its readers on 6 May 1989 apropos of the student demonstrations that had shaken Beijing since mid-April. These young students, ‘China’s future’ — the editorial argued — were protesting for things that were as vaguely defined as they were immediately understandable to US readers: economic prosperity and democratic reforms.2 Unlike their elders, these young people were ‘like us’.
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Notes
F. Lanza (2012) ‘Springtime and Morning Suns: “Youth” as a Political Category in Twentieth-Century China’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, 5 (1), 31–51.
For a history of modern student movements in China see J. Wasserstrom (1991) Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai (Stanford: Stanford University Press).
R.I. Jobs (2007) Riding the New Wave: Youth and the Rejuvenation of Trance after the Second World War (Stanford: Stanford University Press), p. 46.
For an analysis ol political and intellectual change in the first decade ol the Deng era, see M. Goldman (1994) Sowing the Seeds of Democracy in China: Political Reform in the Deng Xiaoping Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
C. Calhoun (1994) Neither Gods Nor Emperors: Students and the Struggle for Democracy in China (Berkeley: University ol California Press), p. 9.
Lee Feigon (1990) China Rising: The Meaning of Tiananmen (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee), p. 110.
Xu Luo (2002) Searching for Life’s Meaning: Changes and Tensions in the Worldviews of Chinese Youth in the 1980s (Ann Arbor: The University ol Michigan Press), p. 127.
The Gate of Heavenly Peace (1995), Dir. Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon.
K. Hartford (1992) ‘Summer 1988-Spring 1989 The Ferment Before the “Turmoil”’ in S. Odgen et al. (eds) China’s Search for Democracy: The Student and the Mass Movement of 1989 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe), p. 21.
On the 1986 protests see J. Kwong (1998) ‘The 1986 Student Demonstrations in China: A Democratic Movement?’ Asian Survey, 28 (9), pp. 970–85.
R. Bernstein, ‘To Be Young and in China: A Colloquy’, New York Times, 7 October 1989. A similar equally depoliticizing explanation has been provided for May 1968. See R. Wolin (2010) The Wind from the East. Trench Intellectuals, the Cultural Revolution, and the Legacy of the 1960s (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
For a much more complex analysis of the relationship between sexual liberation and politics, see D. Herzog (2007) Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
P. J. Cunningham (2009) Tiananmen Moon: Inside the Chinese Student Uprising of 1989 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlelield), p. 88.
Li Qiao (1990) ‘The Soul of China’ in M. Oksenberg, L. R. Sullivan, and M. Lambert (eds) Beijing Spring, 1989: Confrontation and Conflict: The Basic Documents (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe), p. 48. The journal Xin Wusi (New May Fourth) had started publications on 5 April, before the beginning ol the protests. See Zhongguo minyun yuanziliao jingxuan II.
Advertisement by Hong Kong Women, 24 May in The Chinese Democracy Information Center (ed.) (1990) Newspaper Advertisements on the Democratic Movements of China ‘89 (Hong Kong: Federation of Hong Kong Citizens Supporting the Democratic Movement), p. 114.
J. W. Esherick and J. N. Wasserstrom (1994) ‘Acting Out Democracy: Political Theater in Modern China’ in J. Wasserstrom and E. J. Perry (eds) Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China, 2nd edn (Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford: Westview Press), p. 36.
Advertisement by Lu Weicheng (22 May 1989) in Newspaper Advertisements on the Democratic Movements of China ‘89, p. 33. Also p. 68.
Ad by Lu Weicheng (22 May 1989), Newspaper Advertisements on the Democratic Movements of China ‘89, p. 33; ‘History Will Remember This Day’, collective report of People’s Daily reporters (17 May 1989) in Han Minzhu (ed.) Cries for Democracy, p. 229.
‘Thank You Letter’ by the entire student body ol Beijing Normal University (28 May 1989) in Zhongguo minyun yuanziliao jingxuan II, p. 66. ‘Save the Children’ is a reference to the most famous short story in twentieth-century Chinese literature, Lu Xun’s ‘A Madman’s Diary’ (1918).
Lu Ping (ed.) (1990) A Moment of Truth: Workers’ Participation in China’s 1989 Democracy Movement and the Emergence of Independent Unions (Hong Kong: Hong Kong Trade Union Education Centre), p. 5.
Alison Landsberg provides a very interesting insight into the issue ol our relationship with the past by introducing the idea ol ‘prosthetic memory’. This new form ol public cultural memory, she argues, ‘emerges at the interlace between a person and a historical narrative about the past, at an experiential site such as a movie theatre or a museum’. The Hong Kong commemoration ol 4 June could be constituted as such a site. Through these experiences, Landsberg writes, ‘the person does not simply apprehend a historical narrative but takes on a more personal, deeply felt memory ol a past event through which he or she did not live. The resulting prosthetic memory has the ability to shape that person’s subjectivity and politics’. A. Landsberg (2004) Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 2.
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© 2015 Fabio Lanza
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Lanza, F. (2015). Deng’s Children: Chinese ‘Youth’ and the 1989 Movement. In: Jobs, R.I., Pomfret, D.M. (eds) Transnational Histories of Youth in the Twentieth Century. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137469908_12
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