Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom

Acting Out Democracy: Political Theater in Modern China

For two and a half months in the spring of 1989, Chinas student actors dominated the world stage of modern telecommunications. Their massive demonstrations, the hunger strike during Gorbachevs visit, and the dramatic appearance of the Goddess of Democracy captured the attention of an audience that spanned the globe. As we write in mid-1990, the movement and its bloody suppression have already produced an enormous body of literature—from eyewitness accounts by journalists (Morrison 1989; Zhaoqiang, Gejing and Siyuan 1989) and special issues of scholarly journals ( Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs Nos. 23, 24; The Fletcher Forum of World Affairs 14.4), to pictorial histories (Turnley and Turnley 1989) and documentary collections (Han 1990; Wu 1989), and, most recently, textbook chapters (Spence 1990) and analytical works (Feigon 1990; Nathan 1990)—tracing the development of Chinas crisis. Despite a flood of material too massive to review in the present context, we still lack a convincing interpretive framework that places the events within the context of Chinas modern political evolution, and also provides a way to compare Chinas experience to that of Eastern Europe. Such an interpretation should help us to understand why massive public demonstrations spurred an evolution toward democratic governance in Eastern Europe, but in China led only to the massacre of June 3–4 and the present era of political repression.

Student Protests in Twentieth-Century China: The View from Shanghai

Introduction Part I. The Warlord Era, 1911-1927: 1. Shanghai and its students, 1911-1927 2. The May 4th movement 3. Student tactics 4. The May 30th movement 5. Organization and mobilization Part II. The Nationalist Period, 1927-1949: 6. Shanghai and its students, 1927-1949 7. The student movement of 1931 8. The language of student protest 9. Student struggles of the mid-1940s 10. The power of student protest Epilogue: the May 4th tradition in the 1980s Notes Bibliorgaphic essay Bibliography Chinese character list Index.

Popular protest and political culture in modern China

* Introduction: Chinese Political Culture Revisited Elizabeth J. Perry. General Frameworks * Imagining the Ancien Rgime in the Deng Era Ernest P. Young. * Acting Out Democracy: Political Theater in Modern China Joseph W. Esherick and Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom. Class, Gender, And Identity: 1989 As A Social Movement * Casting a Chinese Democracy Movement: The Roles of Students, Workers, and Entrepreneurs E. J. Perry. * Science, Democracy, and the Politics of Identity Craig C. Calhoun. * Gender and the Chinese Student Movement Lee Feigon. Popular Culture And The Politics Of Art * The Birth of the Goddess of Democracy Tsao Tsing-yuan. * Politics and Popular Music in Post-Tiananmen China Andrew F. Jones. Cultural Dilemmas And Political Roles Of The Intelligentsia * Memory and Commemoration: The Chinese Search for a Livable Past Vera Schwarcz. * From Priests to Professionals: Intellectuals and the State Under the CCP Timothy Cheek. * The Role of the Chinese and U.S. Media Stephen R. MacKinnon. State Power And Legitimacy * What Happened in Eastern Europe in 1989? Daniel Chirot. * Discos and Dictatorship: Party-State and Society Relations in the Peoples Republic of China Tony Saich. Historical Narratives And Key Words Deconstructed * History, Myth, and the Tales of Tiananmen J. N. Wasserstrom. * That Holy Word, Revolution Liu Xiaobo. * Postscript: April 1994 J. N. Wasserstrom.

Human Rights and Revolutions

Introduction: Human Rights and Revolutions Part I: Two Opening Perspectives Chapter 1: The Paradoxical Origins of Human Rights Chapter 2: The Chinese Revolution and Contemporary Paradoxes Part II: The English, American, and Russian Revolutions Chapter 3: Tradition, Human Rights, and the English Revolution Chapter 4: Natural Rights in the American Revolution: The American Amalgam Chapter 5: A European Experience: Human Rights and Citizenship in Revolutionary Russia Part III: Asian and African Case Studies Chapter 6: An Enlightenment of Outcasts: Some Vietnamese Stories Chapter 7: India, Human Rights, and Asian Values Chapter 8: What Absence Is Made Of: Human Rights in Africa Part IV: A Human Rights Revolution? Chapter 9: (Homo)sexuality, Human Rights, and Revolution in Latin America Chapter 10: Ethics and the Rearmament of Imperialism: The French Case Chapter 11: The Strange Career of Radical Islam Part V: A Concluding Perspective Chapter 12: Human Rights and Empires Embrace: A Latin American Counterpoint

Popular protest and political culture in modern China : learning from 1989

A reconsideration of contemporary Chinese society and politics since the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989. The book emphasizes the need to understand the vital role that a culture plays in shaping political action.

Diary of a Madman

Ha Jin, who left China in 1985 and has never returned, became a literary star several years ago with the appearance of his National Book Award-winning novel Waiting. This work won its author praise for his spare prose style, keen descriptive eye, and ability to render effectively the frequent sorrows and occasional joys of flawed but empathetic characters struggling to make difficult choices in difficult circumstances. Waiting was also noteworthy for several other things. It maintained the reader’s interest despite a slow-moving and deceptively simple plotline: an educated man stationed in a city tries, without success, to gain a divorce from his uneducated rural wife so that he can marry a female coworker. It succeeded in making readers care about a protagonist whose main defining trait was indecisiveness. And it poignantly portrayed moral dilemmas that came across as distinctive to the warped political context of China in the latter part of the Maoist era (1949-1976) yet had universal resonance. The Crazed, Jin’s first novel since Waiting, is similar in many ways to its justly acclaimed predecessor. Once again, for example, the author uses crisp sentences to tell a story whose main elements can be summed up succinctly: after a literary scholar (Professor Yang) has a stroke and becomes delusional, a favored student (Jian Wan) devotes himself to caring for his mentor and rethinking his own future. Once again a central figure’s difficulty in making and sticking to decisions — Jian can’t decide whether to take an all-important examination and whether to break off his engagement to Yang’s daughter — works effectively as a focus of attention. And once again Jin limns problems that are specific to China yet speak to the human condition. This said, there are several important differences between the two novels. One is that, while Waiting was written in the third person, The Crazed is a firstperson narrative, so we see events only through Jian’s eyes. Part of the power and gentle humor of Waiting came from the author’s detached presentation of the conflicts facing his characters and the flaws of the society in which they lived. Here, however, criticism of things such as the corruption that riddles a system in which offending those who hold even minor positions of authority within the Party can dramatically affect one’s life are made much more explicitly — and with less irony and humor. Rather than being left to draw our own conclusions Critical Asian Studies 36:1 (2004), 162-167

The Chairman of Everything

Overall, conditions for civil society are worse in China today than they have been for more than two decades. The swing back toward repression, which began around the time of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, was fueled by the curious and combustible mix of elite self-confidence and elite skittishness. It has picked up steam under Xi Jinping’s rule. In spite of ratcheted up forms of control, protests continue. A sense of the system’s fragility remains, even though there is no organized opposition, and no movement since 1989 has emerged to link people with the most commonly shared grievances, which now include old ones such as disgust with corruption, as well as newer ones such as anxiety about their children growing up breathing toxic fumes.

Editor's Preface: Commentaries on the Partition

The February 2014 issue of the Journal of Asian Studies opened with a section made up of two brief “Reflections” on partition—the traumatic South Asian developments of the late 1940s that accompanied the end of British rule over the subcontinent and led to the founding of India and Pakistan as separate nation-states. The first of this pair of short pieces was an introductory look at partition by Gerald James Larson, which I asked this prominent scholar of religion to write. I suggested that it take the form of an at-most lightly footnoted overview of the topic, which would provide basic information of a sort that would help nonspecialists understand the historical background of the partition and would serve to frame the main commentary to follow. That second piece, a meditation on memory and loss by historian Manan Ahmed Asif, was experimental in form for an academic article (a hallmark of the Journal s one-year-old “Reflections” genre) and accompanied by photographs. The trio of essays that follow here, titled “Further Reflections on Partition,” are part of a two-stage effort to respond to and carry forward discussion of issues raised in the earlier pieces. This sort of sequel to previously published work is unusual for the JAS , and is not something I expect to run with any regularity as editor, so some further remarks are in order.