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Chinese Society on the Eve of Tiananmen
The Impact of Reform
Deborah Davis
Harvard University Press

By the late 1970s, state communism was everywhere in retreat. First in Eastern Europe, then in China and the Soviet Union, party leaders were compelled to devise fundamental departures from the economic procedures and structures they had confidently installed at the outset of their revolutionary victories. Perhaps no country departed more rapidly from communist economic structures than China.

Within five years of Mao Zedong’s death, reformers led by Deng Xiaoping had dismantled the people’s communes and created a range of markets that established the institutional foundations for a new form of socialism. But, unlike the Soviets and Eastern Europeans, the Chinese reformers refused to consider parallel changes in political institutions. The demonstrations in Beijing in 1989 made it clear that post-Mao economic policies had created unavoidable political consequences for the society and its leaders. In individual case studies, the twelve contributors to this volume document the uneven decollectivization and decentralization of China’s economy in the post-Mao years and the great diversity of the social and political consequences. They deal with the effects of the more materialistic and individualistic reward system on both public and private life in the countryside and in urban settings and the new expectations that economic changes engendered.

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front cover of Memories of Tiananmen
Memories of Tiananmen
Politics and Processes of Collective Remembering in Hong Kong, 1989-2019
Francis Lee
Amsterdam University Press, 2021
This book analyzes how collective memory regarding the 1989 Beijing student movement and the Tiananmen crackdown was produced, contested, sustained, and transformed in Hong Kong between 1989 and 2019. Drawing on data gathered through multiple sources such as news reports, digital media content, vigil onsite surveys, population surveys, and in-depth interviews with activists, rally participants, and other stakeholders, it identifies six key processes in the dynamics of social remembering: memory formation, memory mobilization, memory institutionalization, intergenerational transfer, memory repair, and memory balkanization. Memories of Tiananmen demonstrates how a socially dominant collective memory, even one the state finds politically irritable, can be generated and maintained through constant negotiation and efforts by a wide range of actors. While the book mainly focuses on the interplay between political changes and Tiananmen commemoration in the historical period within which the society enjoyed a significant degree of civil liberties, it also discusses how the trajectory of the collective memory may take a drastic turn as Hong Kong's autonomy is abridged. The book promises to be a key reference for anyone interested in collective memory studies, social movement research, political communication, and China and Hong Kong studies.
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front cover of The Power of Tiananmen
The Power of Tiananmen
State-Society Relations and the 1989 Beijing Student Movement
Dingxin Zhao
University of Chicago Press, 2001
In the spring of 1989 over 100,000 students in Beijing initiated the largest student revolt in human history. Television screens across the world filled with searing images from Tiananmen Square of protesters thronging the streets, massive hunger strikes, tanks set ablaze, and survivors tending to the dead and wounded after a swift and brutal government crackdown.

Dingxin Zhao's award-winning The Power of Tiananmen is the definitive treatment of these historic events. Along with grassroots tales and interviews with the young men and women who launched the demonstrations, Zhao carries out a penetrating analysis of the many parallel changes in China's state-society relations during the 1980s. Such changes prepared an alienated academy, gave rise to ecology-based student mobilization, restricted government policy choices, and shaped student emotions and public opinion, all of which, Zhao argues, account for the tragic events in Tiananmen.
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