Pro-Democracy Protests in China

THE PRO-DEMOCRACY PROTESTS IN CHINA: REPORTS FROM THE PROVINCES
Jonathan Unger, editor

An East Gate Book, © 1991 by M.E. Sharpe, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Acknowledgements

Ten of the thirteen chapters in this book first appeared in the January and July 1990 issues of The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, a twice-yearly academic magazine published at the Australian National University's Contemporary China Centre. As editor of the Journal, I was endeavouring to solicit papers by China specialists who had been on-the-spot observers of the extraordinary events that exploded across the breadth of China in the spring of 1989. I am grateful that every China specialist who was approached, from North America and Europe and Australia alike, responded by contributing their first-hand knowledge and analyses to this project. The results were of a quality and interest beyond my expectations.

Three additional papers were subsequently written for this book, and appear here for the first time. These are the chapters by Geremie Barméon the demonstrations in Beijing; by Anita Chan on the protest movement in a Hunan county town; and by Andrea Worden on the student movement in Changsha, Hunan's capital city. These chapters help to round off the book by providing additional types of locations and analyses and insights, and a debt is owed to their authors.

Dianne Stacey, the Production Manager of the Journal, contributed her expertise and effort to the production of the book, from beginning to end. Elizabeth Kingdon, the Assistant Editor of the Journal, copy-edited and improved the book manuscript throughout. Keith Forster, the Journal's Associate Editor (and author of the chapter on Hangzhou), contributed greatly in helping to critique most of the chapters. Without them this book would never have appeared.

Finally, on behalf of all of the contributors to this book, acknowledgement and thanks are due to all of the friends, interviewees and colleagues in China who shared with us their knowledge of their own country and their hopes of spring 1989.
J.U.

Contributors

Geremie Barmé is a Post-doctoral Fellow in the Australian National University's Department of East Asian History. He is co-editor (with John Minford) of Seeds of Fire: Chinese Voices of Conscience , and has recently edited with Linda Jaivin a sequel, New Ghosts, Old Dreams: Voices from Tiananmen Square .

Anita Chan , a sociologist, is currently writing a book at the ANU's Contemporary China Centre on the social crisis of the Hundred Flowers period. Dr. Chan has published four books on China, including Children of Mao: Personality Development and Political Activism in the Red Guard Generation and Chen Village: The Recent History of a Peasant Community in Mao's China (co-authored with Richard Madsen and Jonathan Unger).

Mary S. Erbaugh is Research Associate at the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She has written extensively on how children learn Mandarin, and is completing a book on the social and political forces which have shaped the modern Chinese language.

Joseph W. Esherick is Professor of History at the University of Oregon. His books include Reform & Revolution in China: The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei and The Origins of the Boxer Uprising . The latter book was awarded both the American Historical Association's John K. Fairbank Prize and the Association for Asian Studies' Joseph Levenson Prize. Esherick's current research focuses on the revolutionary movement in the Shaan-Gan-Ning border region.

Keith Forster is a Research Fellow in the Contemporary China Centre at the Australian National University. His book on the Cultural Revolution, Rebellion and Factionalism in a Chinese Province: Zhejiang, 1966-1976 , was published by M.E. Sharpe in 1990.

Roy Forward is Lecturer in Australian Studies at East China Normal University in Shanghai, and has been Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Queensland, Senior Private Secretary to the Minister for Social Security, and Lecturer at the Australian National Gallery.

Anne Gunn is a PhD student at the Australian National University. She was formerly assistant editor of the Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, and was a student in Beijing and Nanjing in the early 1980s.

Roger W. Howard teaches in the Department of Communication at Simon Fraser University, Canada. He studied and taught in China in the mid-1970s, and is about to begin a joint research project with the Central Institute of Nationalities in Beijing and the Centre for International Communication at Simon Fraser on economic development in minority nationality areas.

Richard C. Kraus teaches Chinese politics at the University of Oregon. He has written Class Conflict in Chinese Socialism, Pianos and Politics in China, and Brushes with Power: Modern Politics and the Chinese Art of Calligraphy (forthcoming). (See the index of readings for excerpts from Brushes with Power , and Pianos and Politics .)

Tony Saich is Professor of Chinese Politics at the Sinologisch Instituut, Leiden University, and a Senior Research Fellow at the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. His most recent book is China's Science Policy in the 80s (1989). He has recently finished a study on the origins of the first united front in China and is currently working on a documentary history of the pre-1949 CCP in collaboration with members of the Fairbank Center, Harvard University.

Jonathan Unger , a sociologist, is head of the ANU's Contemporary China Centre and concurrently editor of The China Journal . His seven books include Education Under Mao: Class and Competition in Canton Schools, 1960-1980 and, as editor, 'Using the Past to Serve the Present': Historiography and Politics in Contemporary China (M.E. Sharpe and Allen & Unwin, 1991).

Shelley Warner is a China specialist with the Australian government's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. In 1973 she was a member of the small team that established the Australian embassy in Beijing, where she remained until 1975. She more recently served a three-year posting, until March 1989, as Political Counsellor at the Beijing embassy.

Andrea Worden is a PhD student in modern Chinese history at Stanford University. She taught in Changsha from 1987-1989 under the auspices of the Yale-China Association.

Kate Wright lived in Shanghai during the democracy movement of 1989.

THE PRO-DEMOCRACY PROTESTS IN CHINA: REPORTS FROM THE PROVINCES
Jonathan Unger, editor
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