Word: protestation
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Each fall for the past several years, Chinese students have flexed their political muscle in scattered protests. In September 1985 several hundred Peking students marched to Tiananmen Square, ostensibly to protest Japan's growing role in the Chinese economy, but also to attack corruption and nepotism among China's ruling elite. This autumn, when student restiveness started up again, it was at first dismissed as the annual student itch. Not until the movement spread early last month to Shanghai (pop. 12 million), with its 200,000 university students and history as a hotbed of radical movements, did the government take...
Foreign intrusion has frequently spurred student reaction. When Japan presented the Chinese government with its "21 demands" in 1915, which included the ceding of the northeastern province of Shandong to Tokyo, thousands of Chinese students studying abroad returned home to protest what they saw as a humiliating affront to the country's sovereignty. Reports that Britain, France and Italy had agreed at Versailles to support Japanese claims to Shandong sparked a demonstration of some 5,000 students in Peking on May 4, 1919, and protests at more than a dozen universities across the country. Mao Tse-tung later labeled...
China's new generation of student leaders undoubtedly had their rebellious predecessors in mind when they chose to conduct the first protest in the latest round of outbreaks on Dec. 9. The date is a revered one: 51 years ago, during the "Dec. 9 movement" of 1935, thousands of students took to the wintry streets of Peking and other Chinese cities to protest the expansionist designs of Japan, which had established a puppet state in Manchuria. The ) demonstrations helped weaken the government of Chinese Leader Chiang Kai-shek and paved the way for the comeback of Communist forces after...
...Cultural Revolution, like the epoch itself, seems to have been a historical aberration. More typically, China's young demonstrators have called for a quickened pace of reform. On April 5, 1976, students swelled the ranks of the 100,000 demonstrators who massed in Peking's Tiananmen Square to protest the removal by Maoist radicals of thousands of wreaths that had been placed at the Monument to the People's Heroes in memory of Premier Chou En-lai, who had died the previous January. The protesters obliquely attacked Mao and waved banners declaring support for Deng Xiaoping, then senior Deputy Premier...
Then, suddenly, the implausible began to happen. Thousands of volunteer poll watchers, singing hymns and burning candles, formed a human barricade against the armed goons and carried their ballot boxes through the streets to counting stations. Thirty of the government's vote tabulators walked out in protest against the fraud. The country's Catholic bishops publicly condemned the election, and the U.S. Senate echoed the protest...