Decline of Political Control in Chinese Universities and the Rise of the 1989 Chinese Student Movement

Abstract

Political control in Chinese universities had depended mainly on the cooperation of students with nonprofessional political workers. In the process of economic reform in China, the ideological legitimation of the communist state greatly declined while other avenues of status attainment outside the realm of state control opened up. Participating actively in mutual supervision became neither moral nor necessarily profitable. As a result, a campus environment which had once facilitated political control over students became conducive to student mobilization. Some students and political workers even captured political control institutions to spread nonconforming and dissident ideas. This paper argues that this decline in political control over students made a significant contribution to the rise of the 1989 Chinese Student Movement.