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Before analyzing how state-society relations contributed to the development of the 1989 Beijing Student Movement in China, it is important to know more precisely how the movement unfolded. This chapter offers a narrative of the movement, chronologically arranged into four major sections which correspond to the movement's major periods. This narrative does more, however, than just give a general description of the movement. It highlights a few major events and issues that were important to the development of the movement but that nevertheless have not received enough attention in previous writing. In addition, it focuses on the contingencies that also shaped the 1989 Movement, such as Hu Yaobang's sudden death, the three students kneeling in Tiananmen Square, the conflict and lack of communication among student activists before the hunger strike, the hunger strike, and the arrival of large numbers of students from other cities in Beijing.

The May 4th Movement of 1919, the December 9th Movement of 1935–1936, and the 1989 Beijing Student Movement are the three largest student movements in the history of twentieth-century China. Why did the 1989 Movement have a particular pattern of activities and what was the impact of those activities on the dynamics of the movement? So far, scholars have approached this type of question from a cultural perspective. For example, to prevent other Beijing populations from joining the demonstration, students often set up picket lines and made anyone who wanted to join a march show his or her student identity card. This chapter asks why movement participants adopt certain forms of rhetoric and action and not others, focusing on the role of state-society relations. After a short introduction to the two earlier student movements, it examines the patterns of movement rhetoric and activities during the 1989 Movement. It then describes the different state-society relationships underlying the May 4th, December 9th, and 1989 movements.

During the 1989 Beijing Student Movement, the Chinese government went back and forth several times between policies of concession and repression, neither of which was successful. Eventually, the government suppressed the movement with military force, ending it tragically. Both the frequent changes in state policy and the eventual repression have been commonly explained as the outcome of power struggles between reform and conservative factions within the government. This chapter argues that the key factor underlying these policy changes and the consequent development of the movement was the ineffectiveness of previous state control measures, an ineffectiveness which in turn had resulted from the presence of conflicting views of state legitimacy in the minds of top state elites, the movement activists, and the rest of Beijing's population. After providing a critical review of theories of factionalism in Chinese politics, the chapter presents a model that reveals the Chinese state's fundamental social control problems by bringing into focus the nature of the regime and its sources of legitimation. Finally, it offers an empirical account of government behavior during the 1989 Movement.

A central question in social movement research has been that of the mechanisms of participant mobilization. Since the 1970s, social movement scholars have put great emphasis on the role of formal organizations and movement networks in movement mobilization. Currently, the idea that organizations and pre-existing networks are the basis of movement mobilization has become conventional wisdom. In Beijing, the ecology of university campuses facilitated student mobilization beyond its encouragement of movement organizations and student networks. This chapter examines the role of campus ecology in student mobilization during the 1989 Beijing Student Movement. It first discusses state-society relations and mobilization structures and then looks at universities in Beijing, focusing on their physical layout and typical student life on campus. It also considers interuniversity competition for student activism in Beijing, along with the April 27 demonstration.

Media coverage of a social movement, and the way it is covered, have been crucial to the public awareness, support, and development of social movements. Although there are significant differences among the positions taken by media scholars, most see both the media and public opinion in the West as relatively conformist institutions. When a news story is about the government, reports generally reflect official views. Since many social movements are anti-establishment, the media tend to neglect them. Even when the media report on a social movement, they tend to marginalize, trivialize, and distort the scale and the goals of the movement. Such distortions are also characteristic of public opinion. This chapter analyzes the pattern of interactions between the media and public opinion and its impact on the 1989 Beijing Student Movement, focusing on state-society relations. It starts with an analysis of the range of news coverage in China before the rise of the 1989 Movement and then considers which communication channels were most important to the dynamics of the movement.

On the morning of April 22, 1989, seven days after the emergence of the 1989 Beijing Student Movement, a state funeral was held for Hu Yaobang inside the Great Hall of the People. The previous night, about 50,000 students had gone to Tiananmen Square, just outside the Great Hall of the People, in order to be part of that funeral. The 1989 Beijing Student Movement has three major characteristics: frequent government policy changes back and forth from concession to repression, quick and successful participant mobilizations, and the dominance of traditional forms of language and action during the movement. This book argues that the rise and development of the 1989 Beijing Student Movement can be explained in terms of state-society relations in China, understood in three impure dimensions: in terms of the nature of the state, of the nature of society, and of the economic, political, and ideational linkages between the state and society. It examines the role of intellectual elites in the 1989 Movement, economic reform in China, state legitimacy, and public opinion about the Movement.

By the late 1980s, China's economic reform had gone into a deep crisis. Inflation and corruption hounded Chinese society. People's confidence in the reform was at its lowest point, and grievances mounted. The emerging economic crisis not only further radicalized the liberal intellectual elites but also alienated the rest of the students and urban residents. To better understand the mass support for the 1989 Beijing Student Movement, this chapter discusses the socioeconomic environment immediately before the movement's outbreak. It argues that, among other activities, going abroad had been a major route for Chinese students to escape from the unhappy domestic reality, and that the diminishing possibilities for going abroad at the end of the 1980s drew students to domestic politics. As 1989 approached, some intellectual elites persistently pushed for desired social changes — actions that constituted the final episode before the rise of the 1989 Movement.

The 1989 Beijing Student Movement was framed around issues concerning the economic crisis and pro-democratic political reform in China. While the rank-and-file students provided manpower, it was the intellectual elites who supplied ideologies for the movement. This chapter explores how state-society relations during and before the reform era in China gave rise to radical intellectual elites, and how those elites in turn contributed to the rise of the 1989 Beijing Student Movement. It first gives a brief overview of the characteristics of modern Chinese intellectuals before the communists took power. It then analyzes the impact of communism and especially of Mao Zedong's rule on Chinese intellectuals. It shows how, after they had been frightened by state power under Mao, intellectuals persistently fought for democracy during the 1980s. In the meantime, however, their understanding of democracy, as well as of China's problems in general, had been severely limited both by Marxist and populist thinking and practice and by their poor intellectual capacity in the wake of the state's long-time monopoly of information.

This chapter discusses three issues: First, in sharp contrast to its repeated political upheavals during the 1980s, China exhibited a prolonged period of political stability in the 1990s. Second, although China has experienced many positive changes in the 1990s, the state-society relations that led to the rise and shaped the development of the 1989 Beijing Student Movement have not been fundamentally altered. Therefore, another large-scale social movement is still possible in China in the future, and, once it begins, it may also follow a dynamic similar to that of the 1989 Movement. To avoid having such a movement happen again, the current Chinese leaders need to place political reform at the top of their agenda. This chapter also highlights some major theoretical goals as well as the basic characteristics of state-society relations theory. Finally, it examines how intellectual elites, rank-and-file intellectuals and students, and urban residents contributed to political stability in the 1990s.

This chapter examines how particular state-society relations contributed to the rise of the 1989 Beijing Student Movement and shaped its development. It first looks at the history of China's historical state-society relations before the rise of the 1989 Movement and provides an overview of Chinese society in the 1980s. For the purpose of understanding the origin of the 1989 Movement and mass participation during it, the chapter focuses on the social changes brought about by the largely state-led reform. The scale and impact of the social changes brought by the economic reform was revealed by waves of “social fevers” during the 1980s. Both the high culture fevers and the popular culture fevers resulted from a sudden influx of new information from the West and a simultaneous rediscovery of the Chinese past. This chapter also discusses China's transition to a market economy.