Tiananmen Square and Popular Protest in Modern China

6 units · Undergraduate

Intermittent: 6 units On June 4, 1989, the world watched as tanks rolled into Beijing's Tiananmen Square ending what had been six weeks of student-led protest calling for reform of the Chinese Communist Party and its policies. This was not the first time students had gathered at Tiananmen to demand political change. Exactly seventy earlier, student-led protests launched the May 4th Movement, a social and intellectual revolution that fundamentally changed China and helped birth both the Nationalist Party of Chiang Kaishek and Communist Party of Mao Zedong. This class examines the causes and consequences of popular protest in modern China. While the focus is on the protests of 1919 and 1989, we will also look at other popular protests, including the Cultural Revolution (1966-1969), Democracy Wall Movement (1979), post-Tiananmen protests among workers, farmers, and ethnic minorities (especially Tibetans and Uyghurs), and the current protests in Hong Kong.